FIRE AND BUILDING

Fire and building

(TOTAL WORD COUNT: 4050)

Fire and Building

PART 1: ANALYZING FIRE CASE STUDIES

Case Study 1

Introduction

British urban historiography overwhelmingly associates fire with medieval and early modern times. Constructed of wooden houses with thatched roofs, closely packed into a small area, fire was a permanent fear facing cities, most notably London (1666), and towns, like Shipston-on-Stour (1478), Stratford-upon-Avon (1594 and 1595) and Warwick (1694), alike. In their database of fire disasters in English provincial towns, Jones, Porter and Turner identified more than 500 “major fires”, that is those where ten or more houses were destroyed by a single outbreak, between 1500 and 1800. In the nineteenth century they recorded a further 99 fires, 82.8 per cent of which were concentrated during the first-half of the century (Jones, Porter and Turner 1984).

The database suggested a dramatic reduction in the number of multiple-house fires after 1760, a view since corroborated by Borsay (1989) and, with important qualifications, Pearson (2004). This decline has been ascribed to the building of “fireproof” cities through the substitution of brick and tile for timber and thatch as the main building materials and an increase in house lot size to prevent fire spread (Frost and Jones 1989). Of secondary importance was the role played by fire brigades, which were increasingly municipally owned enterprises that protected the entire urban population rather than insured property owners, improvements to water supplies, the diffusion of new power sources like steam traction, and the threat of discriminatory fire insurance premiums (Anderson 1979, Greenberg 2003).

Pearson (p. 33), however, is critical of the database, noting that it is incomplete, does not include the many destructive village fires, and ignores single building fires. The latter is of considerable significance when studying late eighteenth and nineteenth century fires as, while the number of multiple-house fires declined, the numbers of single property fires substantially increased, alongside rising rates of human casualties. Moreover, with higher values of stock and fixed capital within commercial and manufacturing buildings located in the growing cities of the industrial revolution, the definition of a “major fire” requires significant amendment.

Notwithstanding their methodological weaknesses, Jones, Porter and Turner (p. 59) conclude that a yawning “fire gap” emerged in nineteenth century England between the growing size of towns and the declining number of fire disasters. The limitations of this prevailing methodology are rooted in the authors' failure to recognise that the meaning of fire changed over time. The social and economic changes experienced by industrialising cities - including the continued growth of fire insurance, the piecemeal introduction of building regulations, the spread of non-combustible materials and new petrochemical and electrical hazards, the emergence of zoning within town planning, and the municipalisation of natural monopolies - created a new “urban fire regime” emphasised by the prevalence of single-unit property fires and the threat posed by fire to human life, rather than the traditional conflagration defined by fire spread and the multiple destruction of ...