Historic Building Conference 1: Fire Safety and Resilience in Historic Buildings
This is a collection of notes from the Historic Building Conference organised by CPD Essentials and held at the 16th century Shaw House in Newbury, Oxfordshire on 3rd June 2026. I am collecting them here to build a record of my learning, creating a treasure trove of notes that I can refer back to in the future, but also make them available to others.
Henry Landis, Fire Safety Advisor at Historic England, brought 33 years in the fire and rescue service, twenty of them in fire safety, plus a Master's in building conservation. He ran two sessions, one on emergency and resilience planning and one on fire protection in the fabric. The connecting theme was balance, weighing safety, property protection and the continuity of what makes an historic building special, and recognising that one well-meaning intervention can damage the building in another way.
Emergency and resilience planning
Historic buildings face a growing range of threats, many from more frequent and severe weather, intense rainfall, storms, wind, overheating and moisture, alongside fire risk that spikes during maintenance, refurbishment and change of occupancy. They are especially vulnerable because they contain combustible materials, often lack compartmentation, can be hard to access, and hold irreplaceable fabric. Once that fabric is lost you are left with a pastiche. The surveyor's role, in Henry's view, is increasingly in resilience planning and risk reduction, not just routine maintenance, and clients increasingly expect continuity-planning advice.
Anemergency response and salvage plan is a practical, living document. It should identify risks, set out roles and responsibilities, list emergency contacts, hold key building information, identify priority areas and assets, and support decision making under stress. The vital point he kept returning to is that it must be practised and trained on, not left on a shelf. For a historic building it should also record significance, vulnerable fabric, salvage priorities and any specialist recovery needs. This is where a surveyor adds real value, by putting utility locations, structural vulnerabilities, roof access, confined spaces and known defects onto the plans. His example was that there is no point parking an aerial appliance to drop water through a roof if there are vaulted cellars beneath where crews are working.
Before an incident, preparedness beats reaction. Look for the vulnerabilities, poor maintenance, moisture, overloaded services, unsafe hot works, weak compartmentation and access constraints. The simple wins are familiar, clearing gutters, improving drainage, maintaining fire-stopping, documenting roof voids and keeping accurate records. Keep the plans on site and in a premises information box for the fire brigade, and use familiarisation visits so the local crews know the building before anything happens.
After an incident, those same records earn their keep for insurance, reconstruction, assessing significance and setting a repair strategy, and condition photographs, surveys, measured drawings and maintenance records can become essential evidence. He extended this to digital security, noting that national heritage records face constant cyber-attack and that in conflict zones heritage is being deliberately targeted, so good images may end up being the only record that survives.
Salvage planning comes down to grab sheets, one per priority item, each with a location plan, a photograph, the number of people needed to move it, and any special instructions. His lessons from real salvage operations were sobering. People grab one item and miss five identical ones beside it. One person saved a single object and lost both a priceless item and all of their own belongings, which is why he suggested occupants keep a personal grab pack by the exit with cards and key documents. Give firefighters big tags on keys, because they are working in gloves and breathing apparatus, and plan for night-time, locked-down access and where the appliance will draw up.
Working with the emergency services. Their priorities are life saving and search and rescue before firefighting, and they want to meet someone who knows the building whenever possible. Good two-way communication and building intelligence, loads, vulnerable areas, access routes, construction type and marked-up plans, let them choose a strategy. In a heritage building you might want crews to go in and push the fire out through the windows rather than drive it in deeper from outside. Make sure they know the building is listed and its grade so the right level of attendance is sent.
Entering a damaged building afterwards is hazardous, with structural instability, contaminated and flood water, smoke residues, asbestos exposed by fire and water, unsupported debris and hidden voids. Never assume it is safe while the brigade is still in attendance, and use PPE, supervision and professional caution.
Recovery starts with stabilisation, temporary roofs, weather protection, drainage, shoring and securing the site. Do not just push over a leaning wall or chimney, because a structural engineer can often save it. A simple, memorable tip was to record angles before any demolition, knocking pegs in or setting a pole to the gable angle, so a rebuild is accurate. Recovery should aim to retain as much historic fabric and significance as possible rather than simply repairing, and early consultation with Historic England and the conservation officer is key.
Training and testing. None of this works unless it is practised. He referenced the multi-agency JESIP framework and its app, and the roles around an incident, a site coordinator, the service commanders and a scribe recording decisions. Test through tabletop scenarios, evacuation drills and salvage exercises. Treat the whole thing as a live process, because buildings, occupancy and risk change, and organisational memory is short, with plans often forgotten within eighteen months of a personnel change. His three takeaways were:
that preparedness matters enormously;
that the surveyor has a genuinely important role both before and after an incident, and;
that plans must be practical, realistic and regularly tested, because the decisions made in the first hours and days shape a building's long-term survival.
Fire protection in the fabric
This session got into the detail of doors, compartmentation and suppression, and the key theme was again proportionality.
Know what is behind the surface. Heritage builds may include lath-and-plaster, wattle-and-daub, and sometimes earth or clay daub, which traditionally contained animal hair and dung, the easiest way to mix it being to tread it in the paddock with the cattle. Wattle-and-daub can be upgraded for both fire and thermal performance, with methods set out in the literature. Lath-and-plaster ceilings are only as fire-resisting as the rusty nails and plaster keys holding them, so a ceiling that moves when pushed is a warning sign.
A caution on intumescent paint. It is irreversible, and Henry described a case where it had only been tested at small scale on a perfect modern board, which is not a true full-scale test, so he would not rely on it lightly. In that case a sprinkler system was the better answer because it protected the structure without ruining the ceiling.
Fire test curves. Products are tested to the standard ISO time-temperature curve, which rises very steeply from an assumed flashover point and is more severe than a real fire's early growth. Real fires grow slowly at first, which is exactly why early detection, a comprehensive alarm system in a heritage property, matters so much, because it buys time to intervene or escape. He distinguished a fuel-controlled fire, ventilated through broken windows and growing until the fuel runs out, from a ventilation-controlled fire in a sealed, double-glazed modern room, which grows until the oxygen runs out and then damps down, producing the breathing door effect and the backdraught risk crews are trained to read.
Heritage fire risks include large open volumes, cloth wall hangings and tapestries, paper, decorative timber panelling with its surface spread of flame, hidden voids behind panelling, and large roof voids that let fire spread, the classic pattern being a basement fire that runs up the voids and drops back down through the attic. Compartmenting roof voids helps, but watch the junctions and any timbers that breach the compartment wall. Fire-stopping is only as good as its installation, and he contrasted a proper, labelled, correctly-fixed system with the all-too-common can of expanding foam, and a cavity barrier fixed with staples instead of the specified fixings, which is effectively worthless. Trades routinely cut holes through compartmentation for cables.
Fire doors, and a cautionary tale. The key questions for any heritage door are how important it is, whether it is on an escape route, protecting a stair, in a compartment wall, or covering a sleeping risk, and whether there are alternative exits. A door that is not required to perform as a fire door, because you have other ways out, does not need to, so its gaps are immaterial. A required fire door is normally marked up on the fire strategy. The cautionary tale was a property where assessors and fire-door checkers, sometimes linked to companies selling replacements, condemned doors for lacking certificates, and seventeenth-century doors were removed and destroyed without listed building consent, ending in criminal damage cautions and a professional facing being struck off. The lessons are to always check whether the building and door are listed, using the Historic England map, and to advise that listed building consent may be needed, remembering that everything within a building and its curtilage at the time of listing is listed even where the list entry is a brief legacy description. On door closers, a simple overhead self-closing arm needing four screw holes is far more reversible than a concealed closer that requires cutting into the original door. The best closer of all is a person who closes the door behind them.
On performance, a closed historic panel door performed remarkably well in a real fire, with heavy damage on the fire side and very little on the far side. In a furnace test, an unmodified heritage door with copper-light glazing failed at around 13 minutes, while an upgraded one, with intumescent beading around the glazing, fire-rated glass over the panel and the letterplate closed with hardwood, lasted just over 30 minutes. Doors fail on integrity, distorting and gapping at the top corners, which is why three hinges are used, the top two resisting distortion.
Routes to compliance. Approved Document B is one method of meeting the Building Regulations for fire protection, not the only one, and BS 9999, BS 9991 and full fire engineering are alternatives. For a complex historic building, a fire engineer can produce a holistic fire strategy weighing required against available escape times, and an old Fire Precautions Act certificate is effectively a ready-made strategy worth using as a starting point. Maintenance points include gaps no larger than about four millimetres or the width of the cold-smoke seal, and remembering that a fire door is a door-and-frame system, so swapping in a fire door usually means replacing the frame too, which is more damage.
Sprinklers and mist, the recurring recommendation. Suppression can protect structure and fabric with far less intervention than heavy compartmentation or door replacement, and it matters more as fire service attendance times lengthen. He busted one myth firmly: Each sprinkler head operates individually on its own heat-sensitive bulb at around 57 to 68 degrees, so the whole building does not flood, only the heads over the fire operate, and sprinklers wet the walls so it becomes very hard for fire to spread. Water damage is far easier and cheaper to recover from than a six-month fire rebuild. Misting systems are a maturing technology that use far less water, with fine droplets drawn into convection currents so they can even reach a shielded fire.
On real attendance times, the seven-minute arrival in promotional videos is unrealistic across most of England. Rural areas can wait twenty, thirty or even forty-five minutes, and his own service's target of a first appliance within eleven minutes was met only around two thirds of the time, with on call crewing shortfalls meaning some stations cannot respond at all. So a room rated for thirty minutes may be well alight before crews arrive, which is precisely the argument for suppression as compensation.
The case studies made the point well. A grade 1 building in Lavenham, Suffolk, wanting a ground-floor wine bar avoided heavy floor compartmentation by installing a domestic sprinkler system run in copper, which was reversible, kept the conservation officer happy and saved a fortune. Internationally, he noted that Japan and Austria install visible sprinkler and mist units openly, even as feature totems in state rooms, so the public can see heritage being actively protected, in contrast to the English instinct to hide everything. The closing balance was that you are always weighing safety of life, property protection and continuity of significance, and that one intervention can quietly damage another quality, the example being compartmentation that blocks the air gap a Georgian building relied on to prevent dry rot. Products now exist to square that circle, such as an intumescent gauze that lets air pass but blocks flame.
Historic England offers a round of free pre-application advice, which is well worth using early. A practical kit note to finish: Keep an extinguisher near a room guardian's chair, ideally a service-free type usable on most fires including live electrical, stay about a metre back, and remember that even if you only knock the fire back you have bought time for escape and for the brigade to arrive.
