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"Tinderbox" Britain: Why This Summer's Heatwave Is Turning Gardens and Outbuildings Into Fire Risks

Britain is in the grip of one of its driest, hottest summers in decades. With weeks stretching by in some areas without meaningful rainfall, and temperatures repeatedly climbing past 30°C, fire and rescue services across the country are issuing an unusually blunt warning: your back garden could be the next fire scene.

In recent days, fire crews in London have battled major blazes that tore through residential gardens, destroying sheds, fences, and outbuildings, and in at least one case gutting a house, after fire jumped from garden to garden in strong winds. Incident commanders have described the speed of the spread as extraordinary — flames moving through tinder-dry vegetation, timber sheds and garden waste far faster than crews could contain them, with gas cylinders in some gardens needing to be cooled for hours to prevent explosions.

It's a stark reminder that fire risk isn't confined to commercial premises, high-rise cladding, or industrial sites. This summer, it's arriving over the garden fence.

Why Gardens Are Burning So Easily

A combination of factors has turned ordinary back gardens into genuine fire hazards:

• Prolonged dry weather has left lawns, hedges, and shrubs dried out and highly combustible, while parched soil means plants offer little natural resistance to fire.
• Hosepipe bans in several regions mean gardens that would normally be kept damp are instead bone dry, removing one of the simplest natural firebreaks homeowners have.
• Strong winds have repeatedly been cited by fire services as the reason blazes have spread so rapidly from garden to garden, jumping fences and hedgerows within minutes.
• Outbuildings and sheds, often built from untreated timber and packed with paint, fuel, gas canisters, or gardening chemicals, act as ready fuel sources once fire reaches them.
• Compost heaps and garden waste piles, especially if left dry, can smoulder and ignite far more easily than most people realise.

None of these factors are exotic. They exist in ordinary gardens up and down the country — which is exactly why fire chiefs are urging households to take the threat seriously now, rather than after a fire has already taken hold.

What Fire Services Are Recommending

Following recent incidents, London Fire Brigade and other services have urged residents to create "firebreaks" around their homes and gardens. In practice, this means:

• Keeping grass cut short (ideally below around 7cm), since shorter, greener growth burns less readily than long, dry grass.
• Clearing dead leaves, especially from gutters and against fences or sheds, where they can act as kindling.
• Positioning sheds, wood piles, and garden furniture away from the house itself, so that if they do catch fire, they're not an immediate bridge to your property.
• Cutting back trees and shrubs that grow close to the house.
• Keeping compost heaps damp and away from buildings, and maintaining a sensible balance of "green" and "brown" material to reduce the risk of spontaneous combustion.
• Where hosepipe bans are in force, using water butts or greywater to keep vulnerable areas damp rather than letting them dry out completely.

Beyond the Garden: What This Means for Property Owners and Businesses

For homeowners, this is sound seasonal advice. But for landlords, property managers, and businesses with outdoor areas — gardens, yards, storage compounds, or outbuildings attached to commercial premises — this summer's conditions raise a more serious question: has your fire risk assessment actually considered external fire spread?

Many fire risk assessments focus heavily on the building itself: escape routes, alarm systems, compartmentation, fire doors. External fire risk — vegetation, waste storage, fuel and gas storage, the proximity of combustible outbuildings to occupied buildings — is sometimes treated as an afterthought, if it's considered at all. This summer is showing exactly why that gap matters. Fire doesn't need to start inside a building to threaten the people in it; it just needs a dry, combustible path to travel along.

If you're responsible for a property — whether that's a family home with a shed full of tools and paint tins, a rental property with an overgrown garden, or commercial premises with an outdoor storage yard — now is the time to walk the perimeter and ask some honest questions:

• Is there dry vegetation, waste, or combustible material close to the building?
• Are outbuildings positioned in a way that a fire in one could realistically spread to another, or to the main property?
• Are gas cylinders, fuel, or chemicals stored safely, away from potential ignition sources, and clear of anything that could burn readily around them?
• Would your escape routes and access for fire crews still work if the garden or yard itself were on fire?

Don't Wait for the Next Blaze

Extreme weather isn't going away, and this pattern — long dry spells followed by fast-moving, wind-driven fires — is one UK households and businesses are likely to see more of in years to come. A proper fire risk assessment doesn't just tick a compliance box; it identifies exactly these kinds of overlooked, seasonal risks before they turn into a call to the fire brigade.

If you're responsible for a property and you're not confident that external fire risks — gardens, outbuildings, storage areas — have been properly assessed, now is the time to get it checked, not after the next heatwave headline.

A large fire at James Allen Joinery on Lodge Road in Hollesley, Suffolk, has once again shown how quickly a workshop fire can escalate — and how much it can demand of the fire service, local businesses, and the surrounding community. As a Watch Commander with over 26 years in the Fire Service, incidents like this are exactly the kind of case study worth breaking down for anyone responsible for fire safety in a commercial premises.

What Happened

Suffolk Fire and Rescue Service was called to the scene shortly before 9am on Thursday 9 July, after multiple reports of a blaze at the joinery business. A dozen fire crews attended from stations across the county — Ipswich East, Ipswich Princes Street, Saxmundham, Felixstowe, Framlingham, Beccles, Needham Market, Haverhill, Newmarket, Stowmarket, Bury St Edmunds and Long Melford — alongside specialist appliances including an aerial ladder, rescue tender, water carrier and command support vehicle.

By the time crews arrived, the building — roughly 30 metres by 15 metres — was already around 90% involved in fire. The premises contained gas cylinders and had an asbestos roof, both significant complicating factors for any incident commander. Firefighters used three hose jets, two larger hose lines, and a hydrant, supported by a water relay system, and deployed an aerial ladder as a water tower to reach the fire in the middle of the workshop. The fire was reported under control by around 11:10am, though crews remained on scene for several hours afterwards, with relief units arriving to support the original teams. No casualties were reported, and The Salvation Army was requested to provide welfare support for firefighting crews — a detail that says a lot about the scale and duration of the operation.

Notably, the incident also drew in the local farming community: nearby farmer Thomas Buckle supplied fire crews with water via an irrigation pump, with an estimated 10,000 litres used to help control the flames, after station manager Alex Smith highlighted that water resources in the area were limited.

Why This Incident Matters for Fire Risk Assessments

Every large-scale commercial fire offers lessons for other businesses, and this one raises several points worth flagging for any premises with a similar risk profile.

1. Joinery and woodworking premises are high fuel-load environments

Timber, sawdust, finishes, and stored materials all add up to a significant fuel load. Once ignition takes hold in a workshop like this, fire can spread rapidly through stock, machinery, and structural timber before crews arrive — which is consistent with how quickly this building reportedly became fully involved.

2. Stored cylinders change the entire risk calculation

The presence of gas cylinders inside the building is a critical detail. Compressed or flammable gas cylinders can fail catastrophically when exposed to fire, and their presence directly shapes how incident commanders approach tactics, exclusion zones, and crew safety. If your business stores cylinders on site — for welding, heating, or process use — your fire risk assessment needs to address safe storage location, separation distances, signage, and what the fire service needs to know if called to your premises.

3. Asbestos roofing adds a layer of complexity

An asbestos roof significantly affects both firefighting tactics and the post-incident environment. Fire damage to asbestos materials can release fibres, creating an additional hazard for firefighters, investigators, and anyone returning to the site afterwards. If your building has legacy asbestos materials, your fire risk assessment and your asbestos management plan need to talk to each other — not sit in separate drawers.

4. Water supply is not guaranteed in rural locations

The reliance on farm irrigation equipment to supplement hydrant supply is a striking reminder that firefighting water availability varies significantly by location. Rural and semi-rural commercial premises should never assume mains water pressure and hydrant coverage will be sufficient — this is something a competent fire risk assessment should specifically consider, including whether additional water supply arrangements (static tanks, agreements with neighbouring landowners, etc.) are appropriate.

5. Dry weather conditions increase external fire spread risk

Reports from the scene noted that dry conditions contributed to the fire spreading to nearby vegetation. As UK summers trend hotter and drier, businesses with adjacent hedgerows, grassland, or vegetation need to factor wildfire-style spread into their site risk picture, not just internal fire spread.

The Takeaway for Business Owners

Incidents like Hollesley don't happen because someone was careless — they happen because risk factors stack up: combustible materials, stored gases, legacy building materials, and site-specific challenges like water supply. A proper fire risk assessment doesn't just tick a compliance box; it identifies exactly these kinds of compounding risks before they combine into a 12-crew, day-long incident.

If your business handles timber, stores cylinders, occupies an older building with legacy materials like asbestos, or sits somewhere firefighting water supply might be a challenge, now is a good time to review your fire risk assessment — not after an incident like this one.

London Fire Brigade figures for 2025 make sobering reading. Firefighters attended 206 e-bike and e-scooter fires across the capital last year — an average of one every other day. Two people died. Since 2023, that fatality figure now stands at five. In every one of those five deaths, the person killed did not own the e-bike involved.

That last point matters enormously for anyone managing residential property. These are not accidents that only affect the rider. They're happening in shared hallways, communal stairwells and residential blocks, and the people paying the price are often neighbours, family members and other residents who had no involvement with the device at all.

Where the risk is concentrated

Lewisham and Southwark recorded the highest number of incidents in 2025, with 16 each, followed by Tower Hamlets, Lambeth and Westminster. But this isn't a problem confined to a handful of boroughs — it's a London-wide trend, and the underlying causes apply just as much to a converted HMO in Surrey as they do to a tower block in east London. London Fire Brigade data shows these fires occur disproportionately in high-rise residential premises and social housing, which should be of particular concern to anyone managing blocks of flats, HMOs or supported housing.

Around 83% of the fires involved e-bikes rather than e-scooters. Investigations consistently point to the same root causes: lithium-ion battery failure, unregulated conversion kits, and incompatible or faulty chargers. Batteries bought online — whether new or second-hand — that don't meet UK safety standards are especially prone to failure. A significant proportion of e-bike fires involve conversion kits, which typically have no product safety standard applied to them at all, and often leave the end user guessing which battery and charger combination is safe to use.

Why this is now a landlord's problem, not just a rider's

Under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, the Responsible Person for a building — typically the landlord, freeholder or managing agent — has a legal duty to identify fire hazards affecting the common parts and the building as a whole, and to take reasonable steps to reduce the risk to occupants. Lithium-ion battery fires from e-bikes and e-scooters are now firmly within scope of that duty.

In practical terms, that means your fire risk assessment should explicitly consider:

• Whether e-bikes or e-scooters are being stored or charged in communal areas, hallways, or escape routes
• Whether current storage arrangements could obstruct a means of escape in the event of fire
• What information tenants have been given about safe charging and storage
• Whether the building's fire strategy and evacuation procedures account for a fast-developing battery fire, which can produce intense heat and toxic smoke within seconds of thermal runaway beginning

A number of the fatal and serious incidents recorded by London Fire Brigade have involved bikes or batteries stored in communal hallways, precisely because that's often the only practical charging point available to residents in flats without private storage. If your building has this issue, it needs addressing directly rather than left as an informal arrangement between tenants.

Practical steps for landlords and managing agents

Recognising the risk is the easy part. Managing it effectively means:

• Reviewing and updating fire risk assessments specifically to address lithium-ion battery storage and charging, rather than treating it as a generic electrical risk
• Making clear in tenancy agreements or building rules where e-bikes and e-scooters may and may not be stored or charged
• Providing, where practical, a dedicated and appropriately ventilated charging area away from escape routes
• Communicating clearly with residents about the dangers of counterfeit batteries, incompatible chargers and unregulated conversion kits
• Ensuring escape routes and communal areas are never used for storage or charging under any circumstances

The Government has been under sustained pressure from London Fire Brigade to introduce stronger product safety regulation for e-bikes, e-scooters and conversion kits, and further legislation is expected. But regulation of the products themselves won't reduce a landlord's own legal duties in the meantime, and enforcement action following a serious fire will look closely at what the Responsible Person knew and what they did about it.

Having spent 26 years in the fire service, I've attended incidents where a fire that started with a single battery in a hallway spread with a speed that caught everyone by surprise. Lithium-ion fires behave differently to conventional fires — they can escalate from nothing to fully involved in under a minute, and they're notoriously difficult to extinguish once thermal runaway sets in. Prevention, not response, is where the real protection lies.

London is one of the busiest fire and rescue environments in the country. The London Fire Brigade (LFB) attended 137,412 incidents in 2025 alone — an average of 376 every single day. Of these, 19,542 were fire incidents, concentrated most heavily in Inner London boroughs such as Westminster, Newham and Tower Hamlets, though outer boroughs including Bromley, Brent and Havering also have notable hotspots.

For anyone responsible for a building in the capital — whether that's a shop, an office, a block of flats or a family home — understanding the current risk landscape isn't just useful background. It shapes what a proper fire risk assessment needs to cover.

The Changing Face of Fire Risk

Lithium-ion batteries are now the fastest-growing fire risk in London. LFB recorded 521 fire incidents involving lithium-ion batteries in 2025, a 28% increase on the previous year. These fires caused 109 injuries and three deaths. E-bikes and e-scooters, along with the batteries that power them, are a particular concern — LFB has even partnered with Uber Eats to raise battery safety awareness among delivery couriers. For premises where staff or residents charge these devices, this is now a risk that needs explicit consideration, not an afterthought.

Cooking and electrical faults remain the two biggest causes of fire, especially during the early evening. LFB data shows that between 5pm and 8pm, fires occur at more than three times the rate seen during the quietest overnight hours, with cooking (4,430 fires) and electrical faults (2,100 fires) the leading causes during that peak window.

Hoarding-related fires are rising too. Crews attended 1,028 hoarding-related fires in 2025 — the highest figure since 2022, and an 8% increase on 2024. Cluttered properties fuel fires, block escape routes and make firefighting far more difficult. This is a factor increasingly relevant to landlords, housing providers and anyone managing vulnerable tenants.

Vulnerable occupants face disproportionate risk. LFB figures show that over a third of people who die in dwelling fires in London were receiving some form of care, formal or informal. This has clear implications for care homes, supported housing, and any premises where residents may have reduced mobility or cognitive impairment.

London Fire Brigade's Prevention Work

Fire safety in London isn't left to chance. In 2025, LFB carried out 11,730 fire safety inspections and audits under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 — the piece of legislation that places legal responsibility for fire safety on the "responsible person" for non-domestic premises. Inspection activity is weighted towards central, east and south London boroughs, reflecting the density of commercial and residential occupancy in those areas.

Response performance also varies across the capital. In 2025, LFB's average first-pump attendance time was around five minutes 30 seconds, comfortably within its six-minute target — but this masks real variation between boroughs. Kensington and Chelsea saw average response times of 4 minutes 36 seconds, compared with 6 minutes 24 seconds in Hillingdon. Six boroughs, including Hillingdon, Bromley, Havering, Enfield, Redbridge and Richmond upon Thames, consistently sit above the six-minute average. If your premises falls in one of the slower-response areas, that's a factor worth building into your fire safety planning — particularly around compartmentation, alarm systems and evacuation procedures that reduce reliance on a fast brigade response.

What This Means for the "Responsible Person"

Under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, anyone who has control of non-domestic premises in London — employers, landlords, building owners, occupiers — is legally required to carry out and regularly review a fire risk assessment. This isn't a box-ticking exercise. It needs to reflect the real risks present in your specific building: how it's used, who occupies it, what's stored there, and how people would escape in an emergency.

Given the data above, a fire risk assessment for a London premises today should specifically address:

• Charging and storage arrangements for lithium-ion batteries and e-mobility devices
• Electrical safety and cooking risk management, particularly in premises with high footfall during peak evening hours
• Escape route management in premises where clutter or storage could obstruct exits
• Provisions for vulnerable occupants, including those with mobility or cognitive impairment
• Realistic evacuation timings that account for local response times rather than assuming a fast brigade arrival

Getting a Proper Assessment

A fire risk assessment carried out by someone with genuine operational fire service experience looks different from a generic checklist exercise. It considers how a fire would actually behave in your building, how people would actually respond, and where the real gaps are — not just what the regulations technically require.

On the evening of Thursday 25 June 2026, a major fire broke out at a commercial property on Rye Lane in Peckham, south London, close to Copeland Park. London Fire Brigade control officers took the first of more than 40 emergency calls at 20:54, and the Brigade mobilised crews from Peckham, Old Kent Road, Brixton and surrounding stations. At the height of the incident, fifteen fire engines and around 100 firefighters were in attendance, with two of the Brigade's 32-metre turntable ladders deployed as water towers to fight the fire from above.

Station Commander Craig Abbott, who attended the scene, confirmed that a department store was alight at the height of the fire, alongside an adjoining shop and storage unit. A significant volume of smoke was produced, prompting advice for local residents to keep windows and doors closed, and for the public to avoid the area while roads were cordoned off and bus routes diverted. The fire was brought under control by 23:50, although crews remained on scene overnight to fully extinguish it and dampen down hotspots. At the time of writing there are no confirmed reports of injuries.

It's a striking reminder of how quickly a fire in a busy retail environment can escalate, and how much resource is needed to bring it under control once it takes hold. A response of fifteen pumps and around 100 firefighters is a significant commitment, and it underlines a point we make constantly to commercial clients: by the time a fire is visible from the street, the building has already lost the battle to contain it internally. The real fight against fire loss happens long before the Brigade arrives, in the design, maintenance and management of the building itself.

Why Compartmentation Matters

Compartmentation is one of the most important, and most frequently overlooked, elements of passive fire protection in any commercial building. The principle is simple: a building is divided into fire-resisting compartments, using fire-rated walls, floors, doors and sealed service penetrations, so that if a fire starts in one area it is held there for a defined period rather than spreading freely through the structure.

In a large retail premises such as a department store, effective compartmentation does several critical jobs at once. It protects escape routes long enough for staff and customers to get out safely. It limits fire spread between sales floors, storage areas and back-of-house spaces, which is particularly important where stockrooms hold significant fuel loads of packaging, textiles and combustible stock. And it buys firefighters time to mount an effective attack on the fire before it takes hold of the whole structure, which is exactly the kind of advantage that can be the difference between a contained incident and the scale of response we saw in Peckham.

Compartmentation fails in fairly predictable ways: fire doors wedged open or fitted with the wrong rating, gaps around pipework and cabling left unsealed after maintenance work, suspended ceilings and voids that allow fire to travel above compartment walls, and storage stacked against or blocking fire-resisting partitions. None of these are dramatic failures on their own, but together they can turn a contained shop fire into a building-wide incident.

The Importance of a Suitable and Sufficient Fire Risk Assessment

This is precisely why the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 places a legal duty on the Responsible Person in any commercial premises to ensure a suitable and sufficient fire risk assessment is carried out, kept up to date, and acted upon. For a retail unit, and particularly a large multi-floor store with mixed sales and storage areas, that assessment needs to look specifically at compartmentation: are fire doors fitted, rated correctly and self-closing where required, are walls and floors that should be fire-resisting actually intact, and have any alterations or fit-out works compromised the structure's fire strategy since it was last assessed.

A fire risk assessment isn't a paperwork exercise to be filed and forgotten. It should identify the specific weaknesses that allow a fire to spread beyond its point of origin, and it should be reviewed whenever the building, its use, or its occupancy changes, not just on a fixed annual cycle. Storage layouts change, units get subdivided, tenants come and go, and each of those changes can quietly undermine compartmentation that was sound when the building was last surveyed.

Incidents like the Peckham fire don't yet tell us what role, if any, compartmentation played, and the cause has not been confirmed. But they're a useful prompt for any business operating from a commercial premises to ask a straightforward question: if a fire started in our building tonight, would it stay contained, and is our fire risk assessment recent enough, and detailed enough, to know the answer?

If you manage a commercial property and aren't confident your fire risk assessment reflects the building as it actually is today, that's exactly the gap we help close. Get in touch with Whale Fire to arrange a fire risk assessment.

On Saturday evening, three men lost their lives following a fire at a single-storey pavilion on New Zealand Way in White City, west London, close to Queens Park Rangers' Loftus Road stadium. London Fire Brigade received the first of 19 emergency calls at 6.52pm, and mobilised crews from North Kensington, Acton, Chiswick and surrounding stations. Despite the efforts of firefighters, who rescued three men from the building, two were pronounced dead at the scene and a third died later in hospital. Over half of the structure was damaged by the fire, which was brought under control by 9.25pm.

The cause remains under investigation by the Brigade's specialist fire investigation officers and the Metropolitan Police, so it would be wrong to speculate on what went wrong. But as a fire risk assessor with over 26 years in the UK Fire Service, incidents like this are a sobering reminder of how quickly a fire in a relatively small, single-storey building can turn fatal, and why proper fire safety management in non-domestic premises is never something to put off.

Pavilions, Clubhouses and Community Buildings Are Often Overlooked

Sports pavilions, clubhouses and similar community buildings often fall into a grey area when it comes to fire safety. They're not large enough to feel like a "serious" fire risk in the way an office block or hotel might, they're frequently used by volunteers rather than professional facilities staff, and they can go years without anyone formally reviewing how a fire would be detected, contained or escaped from.

That's exactly the kind of building where a fire risk assessment earns its keep. A single-storey structure with limited compartmentation can allow fire to spread through more than half the building before crews even arrive, as happened in White City. The questions a proper assessment forces you to confront are straightforward but easily neglected:

• Are smoke alarms and detection systems fitted, tested, and adequate for the size and use of the building?
• Are escape routes kept clear, well-signed, and wide enough for the number of people who might be inside?
• Is there a means of raising the alarm quickly, and do the people using the building know what to do if it sounds?
• Are electrical installations, heating sources, and any stored materials properly managed and inspected?
• Has the risk to anyone with mobility issues or disabilities been specifically considered?

Fire Risk Assessments Are a Legal Duty, Not an Optional Extra

Under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, anyone responsible for non-domestic premises in England and Wales has a legal duty to carry out a suitable and sufficient fire risk assessment, and to keep it under regular review. This applies whether you run an office, a hotel, a block of flats, a sports club, or a small community pavilion. Following the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, scrutiny of fire safety compliance — particularly around shared and communal buildings — has only increased, and enforcement action against those who fail to meet their obligations has become more rigorous.

A fire risk assessment isn't a box-ticking exercise. Done properly, it identifies the specific hazards present in your building, the people most at risk, and the practical steps needed to reduce that risk to an acceptable level — backed up by an action plan with realistic timescales. It should be revisited whenever the building's use changes, after any significant incident, or at sensible regular intervals regardless.

Don't Wait for an Incident to Find Out What You've Missed

Incidents like White City are rare, but they happen often enough to demonstrate exactly what's at stake when fire safety isn't given the attention it deserves. Whether you manage a sports club, a block of flats, a hotel, or a commercial premises anywhere in the capital, a professional fire risk assessment is the clearest way to understand your current position and close any gaps before they become a real emergency.

At Whale Fire, we carry out London Fire Risk Assessments for landlords, businesses, sports clubs and community organisations across the capital, drawing on direct operational fire service experience rather than a generic checklist approach. If it's been a while since your premises were properly assessed — or you've never had one carried out at all — now is a sensible time to put that right.