Charity appeal
The year our national heritage went up in flames
It was shortly before 4pm on June 6 when plumes of smoke began rising over Knightsbridge. The Mandarin Oriental, a five-star London hotel that has overlooked Hyde Park for 115 years, was on fire. Some 250 members of staff and 36 guests were evacuated, the singer Robbie Williams among them. The blaze, which was caused by welding work, spread across several floors and took 120 firefighters six hours to put out.
Nine days later, a second devastating fire took hold of another of Britain’s historic piles, the Mackintosh building at the Glasgow School of Art. Flames tore through the world-renowned institution, causing what the fire service described as “exceptionally significant” damage. Again, 120 firefighters were brought in to tackle the blaze at its peak. So intense was the heat it could be felt by residents several streets away, where chunks of burning wood and debris landed.
Two landmark buildings in flames within days would be cause enough for concern. But within the next three months, two more massive fires were to tear through other monuments to our country’s architectural heritage.
In August, a major blaze engulfed Belfast’s five-storey Bank Buildings, a landmark in the city dating from 1787, which was housing a branch of Primark at the time. The flames could be seen across the skyline and took firefighters three and a half days to extinguish. Left behind was just the badly charred sandstone façade; the rest of the structure was gutted. Yet it could have been even worse, had firefighters not managed to prevent the fire spreading to the extension at the rear of the buildings.
In September, it was Liverpool’s turn, when a fire destroyed the city’s famous Littlewoods building. The inferno took five and a half hours to bring under control, reaching temperatures of around 1,830F (1,000C) at its height. Formerly the headquarters of Littlewoods Pools, the art deco building dated from 1938 and had lain empty since 2003. Some 50 firefighters battled the blaze, with crews having to smash wooden panelling that had been used to board up windows to access the upper floors.
Miraculously, no injuries or deaths were reported in any of these four major fires, but the loss to our cultural heritage was huge. And these were just the particularly high-profile fires of the 200-plus recorded in historic buildings in 2018 alone. Less wellpublicised was the blaze on Dec 17 at a Clarks store in Ledbury High Street in Herefordshire, an 18th-century Grade II listed building, where a fault with an electric heater caused a fire that badly damaged the shop.
Likewise, the blaze at the disused, 118-year-old Annan hotel in southern Scotland in November; and that which tore through the 18th-century Wheaton Aston Old Hall building in South Staffordshire in October, which was tackled by six different crews.
Even this list represents just a very small fraction of the lengthy roll call of fires in historic buildings that have occurred, either accidentally or due to arson, in the past year.
Yet at a time when the Grenfell Tower fire in west London, and its terrible loss of life, rightly dominates the public consciousness, the impact of fire on Britain’s historic architecture risks going under the radar.
Protecting heritage buildings from fire goes in and out of fashion, suggests Steve Emery, fire safety adviser at the University of Oxford and chairman of the special interest group for heritage buildings at the Institute of Fire Engineers.
In some cases, fires can occur during building work. Indeed, restoration work had been ongoing at the time of the Glasgow School of Art fire, following a blaze four years earlier. And the Bank Buildings in Belfast were undergoing a major refurbishment at the time of the fire.
For other old buildings, lack of occupation, and also dereliction, can expose them to an increased danger of fire. “Then, you’ve got the issue of water damage, vandalism and potentially arson,” says Emery. And if there’s no electrical supply to the building, there won’t be a functioning fire alarm either. In such cases, the fire will only be discovered after it’s gone through the roof – by which point the damage may well be irreparable.
The full scale of fire damage to Britain’s historic buildings remains unknown, adds Mr Emery. “We have fire statistics for domestic buildings but there’s no tick-box on the fire report [about whether the building is historic] and without these statistics it’s really difficult.”
He would like to see such statistics collected as a first step towards outlining the scale of the problem. “Then we can start making provisions to protect them,” he says.
Although he estimates that more fires occur in modern than historic buildings overall, fires in the latter can be of greater consequence. “If a modern warehouse burns down, they can just build another one,” he says.
The same cannot be said of a Victorian-era warehouse. And as much as we may celebrate the aesthetics and historical significance of such places, Mr Emery believes it is “very worrying” that we are losing so much archaic architecture to fire.
Firefighters, therefore, have a unique role in helping the owners of historic buildings prevent fires from occurring, as well as helping to minimise the damage when they do. But although they can find themselves at the front line of saving our heritage from the ashes, it’s a relatively unsung part of their job.
The Telegraph is raising money for The Fire Fighters Charity, which has in-house mental health teams that help thousands of retired firefighters each year. As the charity puts it, they are “everyday heroes”, support for whose mental wellbeing is vital.
“It can be really challenging for firefighters,” says Charlie Pugsley, Dept Asst Commissioner at London Fire Brigade. “You can have complex and convoluted layouts in [historic] buildings that have been altered a lot over the years. You might have stairs around corners, basements… Once the fire’s started, it can be really difficult if it’s within voids or behind panelling. You’ve got to keep cutting away to ensure the fire hasn’t spread, but you’re also trying to do as little damage as possible.”
As well as working to save what they can of a building, firefighters also try to salvage contents. In some historic buildings, these can be of great value, but extracting items like paintings from a burning building while prioritising human safety is far from straightforward.
Firefighters play a critical part, then, in helping save old buildings and their contents for future generations. “It’s a role we do take very seriously,” says Pugsley. “Because once [something’s] lost in a fire, it’s never coming back.”
‘It can be challenging for firefighters, as you try to do as little damage as possible’