Alida Baxter

Renowned London journalist and author

 

View from Soho,

Latest Great Fires

of London

The latest versions of the Great Fire of London have made people so scared of pavements they’re walking in the road, and this is particularly true after the last one, which struck on the 1st April, 2015.

This little event resulted in five thousand people being evacuated from their homes and offices in and around Holborn with only what they stood up in, and their phones, money, Oyster, bank and credit cards all left behind.

The latest fire, like its predecessors this century, didn’t start in as ordinary a way as the one which began in a bakery in Pudding Lane and roared through the capital for four days in September, 1666, causing Samuel Pepys to bury his wine and a Parmesan cheese in his garden in case the flames reached his home.

In fact burying anything would have been the very worst thing to do in the recent cases, because all these fires erupted from underground.  As though a giant dragon is roaming the sewers, in the past few years the news bulletins have repeatedly carried footage of huge torches raging upwards from paving, the fiery blasts scattering manhole covers like tiddlywinks.

These sudden, terrifying incidents occur all over the capital – just a few examples give us the Edgware Road in 2012, Pimlico in May, 2013, Islington in February, 2014, and Piccadilly in July of the same year – but it’s the increase in them which is the most alarming aspect.  Back in 2010 there were thirtyfour fires like this, which seemed more than enough at the time, but by 2013 the number had climbed to fiftyone, and in 2014 sixtyfour such explosions were reported to the Health and Safety Executive:  all of them fearful, all of them erupting savagely with no warning.

When the Holborn nightmare was at its height and the whole area closed, I telephoned someone in the Highways Department to ask if he knew what was happening and why, and was told that oil was burning beneath the streets and was incredibly hard to bring under control.  Eventually we were told that, just as in all the previous incidents, an electrical fault was to blame:  it had ruptured a gas main;   though what other factors were involved in the conflagration remained, for months, subject to investigation.

But the BBC’s reliable website explains that there are approximately 36,000 kilometres of electrical cable under London’s pavements, and 100,000 link boxes, and that blasts and fires can occur anywhere in this vast maze if a faulty or exposed cable is penetrated by water, or a gas leak ignites a spark.

What we gain from this information is that London is sitting on a kind of snake pit of cable and, moreover, a pit into which ever more is being packed.  I know this from personal experience, because all the Soho streets around me are constantly being dug up in order to lay fat coils of the latest connections to the massive, multi-storey developments which are being built on every yard of our once-quaint little quarter.  And the same thing’s going on all over the West End.

The potential for disaster doesn’t just exist – it is growing by the day, along with the numbers of building sites and Lego-like blocks.  And when a truly appalling explosion and fire of this type happens, as it did in Holborn, how is it dealt with?

Yes, the emergency services respond immediately and magnificently and, as stated, on that occasion five thousand people were evacuated from their homes and offices with commendable speed.  But it took thirtysix hours to put the fire out, and days more before normal services were restored.

Not that “normal” was the word that could be applied to access for traffic.  The Strand Underpass wasn’t reopened till June, and even then other road tunnels remained shut.     Meanwhile, back in April, West End shows were cancelled, cafes and businesses lost all income, and all this was widely reported, but behind some quiet, anonymous doors there were dramas of which the general public knew nothing.  The caretaker of my block of flats is also, on occasion, responsible for another block near the Holborn crisis.  Taking a colleague, he set out to see how people were getting on there;   not being in immediate danger, they hadn’t been moved, but neither did they have any power.   Without electricity, the lifts didn’t work;   nor did much else.  He found a ninetytwo-year-old woman, marooned in her flat, who had no light, no heating, and no means of making herself a hot drink or anything to eat.

The marvellous man wrapped her in as much warm clothing and bedding as he could find, went home and filled a thermos while his wife cut stacks of sandwiches, and returned to give her the first hot drink and food she’d had in days.  He also gave her a torch.

The ninety two year old was without electricity from Wednesday the 1st April, when the explosion occurred, until Saturday the 4th.  And during that time nobody from any authority checked on her or any of her neighbours.  She could have died of hypothermia, she could have tripped in her pitch dark flat as she fumbled her way to the bathroom, and fallen and broken a limb.  What would have happened if no caretaker had, of his own initiative, come to help her?  Few would have been as responsible or caring, and resident caretakers are an all but extinct breed.

And what of the blocks where all maintenance, cleaning and other such services are farmed out to companies, whose ever-changing employees have firmly proscribed duties, and who aren’t expected to build up personal relationships with residents, let alone care for them?

I had imagined that in such an event, just as there must have been some plan for dealing with the immediate danger – you can’t get thousands of people out of buildings in central London that quickly unless you know exactly what you’re doing – there would also be a subsequent plan for checking on those left behind, whose health and safety could be threatened by such a lasting and total loss of power.  But I was wrong:  there isn’t.

We’re not only told about these fires, we’re constantly reminded that in London, as elsewhere, we live with terrorist threat.  Yet whilst the police are on high alert and the fire brigade work their hearts out, no department seems to have been charged with the significant task of ensuring that people survive the aftermath of emergencies, which may (as in the case of Holborn) affect them for far longer than the explosion or fire itself.

Extraordinary to think that we watch documentaries about the Second World War and commemorate VE Day, but in the twentyfirst century we have, apparently, nothing to equal the voluntary organisation of the WVS, which handed out cups of tea and looked after people following bombing.  Learn from history?  Seventy years on, and it seems we’ve completely forgotten the essential, life-saving role of compassion in the wake of an emergency.

The latest Great Fires of London show that we’re as vulnerable as we ever have been, for entirely new reasons, and we need to be taught all over again how to care for those left with the after-effects, if a bolt of flame sends another manhole cover reeling.

© Alida Baxter

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