Things we learnt from the fire: two years on from the Somerset House blaze

Mick Figg FCIOB remembers exactly where he was on the day Somerset House caught fire, Saturday 17 August 2024.

“I was actually on holiday,” recalls the head of projects and estate at the Grade I-listed London building, which dates from the 18^th Century. “I had family visiting from abroad, and that morning we were heading to Borough Market and the Shard.”

“At first, you think it’ll be nothing, but then someone sent me a video,” Figg says. “I said to my family, ‘I think I’d better go into work’.

“I headed to Waterloo and began walking across the bridge. Then I saw the smoke coming out of the roof and I started running.”

Then his work phone started ringing.

When he got to Somerset House, Figg went straight to the London Fire Brigade command unit.

“They immediately started asking me questions about the building and I was able to feed them information back about the construction, services and layout,” he explains.

“I could see smoke spreading beneath the slates. I knew the roof construction and realised that the softwood sarking board continued across the tops of the compartment walls, which was allowing the fire to travel above the compartmentation.”

He told the fire service: “You need to smash through the roof and create firebreaks on each side of the fire.”

They followed his instructions, cutting into the slate roof, and creating two firebreaks a metre wide. That had the intended effect.

“Once the sarking board had been interrupted, I knew the internal compartment walls would do their job and stop the fire travelling any further,” Figg says.

The fire had started at around 10am and wasn’t finally extinguished until 3am the following morning. Firefighters pumped water into the building for 15 hours to make certain there was no risk of reignition, then maintained a fire watch for another two days.

Figg barely saw his family throughout that time, grabbing just a few hours’ sleep each night. On Monday he took his visiting relatives to the airport. And then it was back to work – on the rebuild at Somerset House.

Speaking to CM two years on, Figg, who has worked at Somerset House since 2008, shares his recollections and reflections on the blaze and the aftermath, and what lessons he takes away from the experience. 

“I’d never had to deal with a fire before,” he says. “I’ve worked in this industry for 40 years and it was always the phone call I dreaded getting.

“The Somerset House Trust will always be indebted to the skill and dedication of the London Fire Brigade in getting the fire put out.

“I wouldn’t want to go through it again. But what I’ve experienced, we’re keen to pass on to other heritage clients and construction managers so they can learn from what we’ve been through.”

While media images of Somerset House burning were being beamed around the globe, Figg’s phone was already buzzing with offers of help.

“The heritage community always comes together, and I was getting heartfelt messages from all over the world from people reaching out and wanting to come to our aid,” says Figg.

Once the fire was under control, he started putting in calls.

“I called Westminster City Council who said, ‘do what you need to make the building safe’. We had a follow up meeting with the council and Historic England a week later to establish next steps and both were very supportive throughout the rebuild.

“I’ve worked with Coniston Construction for nearly 30 years, and I rung them on the Saturday, and we met at 7.30am on the Sunday. On Monday scaffolding started going up for an over-roof to protect the building.

“Our heritage consultant Edward Hart created a photographic record of all the damage, and we did timber tests to see what could be saved of the historic building.

“I was also speaking with our insurer and their loss adjuster, who brought in a disaster recovery specialist, Richford.”

Initially, Figg hoped that the rebuild would take six months, but he hadn’t anticipated the impact of the water.

“The fire accounted for a quarter of the damage; the remaining three quarters was water damage,” he says.

“Because so much of the structure is timber, we had to strip out another five floors beyond the fire-damaged area and expose the timber right back to the shell so it could dry naturally.”

The water damage meant Figg had to rethink the rebuild plan.

“Phase one was to strip the building and make it safe,” he says. “At that point, if we’d stopped, gone through all the RIBA stages, the planning process, and then started construction, we’d have lost months.”

What Figg ended up with was a hybrid of a traditional contract and construction management.

“It remained a traditional JCT contract, but the main contractor went to the market on individual packages as the planning and technical design progressed,” he explains.

“For example, early procurement of replacement Westmorland slates for the roof, which comes from one quarry, was essential due to their 16-week lead-in time.

“We estimate that approach saved about eight months, and the whole rebuild took 18 months. We were still designing some packages right up to the end.

“The insurers said they wouldn’t have entertained this model before,” he adds, “but now they want to look at it as a test case. Where a client has these close relationships with the supply chain, as we did, they see it can save time and money.”

Figg is convinced that his “tried and trusted supply chain” was a key factor in delivering the Somerset House rebuild so quickly [see box].

“Because we had those relationships, we could begin putting up scaffolding on the Monday, just two days after the fire,” he says.

“We had a big hole in the roof after the fire, and we were worried about rain because we couldn’t allow more water into the building. But whenever rain was forecast, Coniston had operatives on site 24/7 with pumps.

“These were people we’d worked with for years. When you have those relationships, you have people you can rely on when something happens,” he adds.

Quality of work is also key, he adds.

“I’ve been a member of the CIOB for 20 years and a Fellow for the last 10. I sat on the heritage panel for nearly 10 years, and we’ve always talked about quality and making sure things are done properly, particularly when the focus is on traditional building skills.”

“But we already had our main contractor Coniston on the project. And I thought, why can’t they get on with the rebuild programme right away?”

The fire began on the third floor of Somerset House at the junction of the south and west wings – but its cause remains officially undetermined.

“It started between two rafters in a roof void where there were no cables, no services and nothing obvious that could have caused ignition,” Figg says.

“Both the fire brigade and the insurers investigated it. There are theories that certain metals and timber could interact and ignite under certain temperatures, and it was a very hot August day, but they’re only theories.

“We’d all rather have found a clear electrical fault because then you know exactly what to fix. If you don’t know what caused a fire. it’s very difficult to prevent it happening again. What we could do was make sure that, if it ever did happen again, it couldn’t spread in the same way.

“Now, wherever the compartment walls meet the roof, we’ve installed fire stopping so that fire cannot travel across the sarking board. Structural timbers were treated with an Envirograf fireproof coating.

“That’s the biggest technical lesson we’ve taken away: I can’t eliminate an unknown ignition source, but I can make absolutely sure that if something starts it is contained.

“As we refurbish other parts of the estate, we’ll roll those improvements out across Somerset House.”

Other than the issue with the sarking board, Figg says the “building behaved exactly as we’d hoped”.

“The fire remained confined to that corner apart from the issue with the sarking board. The fire alarms, compartment walls, fire doors and smoke seals worked. Our team evacuated everyone safely and there were no injuries.

“Although the water damage meant we lost every building service and had to power down the whole of Somerset House, we were able to reopen the complex after two weeks, with only the fire-damaged section closed.”

He believes the trust’s investment over many years meant the Georgian-era Somerset House performed much like a modern building would in a fire.

“I think the private trust model works very well, and this is a great example of that,” Figg says. “Their investment is what saved Somerset House and ensured that nothing of major heritage significance was lost.

“Our approach – particularly in the context of Grenfell and the Notre Dame fire – was to go as far beyond the Building Regulations as was reasonably practical.

“For example, we have an L1 fire alarm system. Nobody sleeps here, so we don’t actually need an L1 system, but we installed it because we wanted the highest level of protection.

“We have annual fire risk assessments carried out by an independent health and safety consultant. Our maintenance team carries out annual photographic inspections of every fire door. They check the smoke seals are working. This is all updated on the asset register which our FM contractor OCS maintains.”

That said, one of the biggest lessons for Figg from the fire isn’t so much about the information in management systems – it’s what inside people’s heads.

“It’s all very well having fire documentation, but during a major incident your IT systems may be unavailable,” he says. “Our control room was directly beneath the fire and because of the water damage, we lost the fire alarm systems, CCTV, building controls and life safety systems.

“The fire service were asking me questions and I couldn’t look at drawings or open files because nothing worked. Everything came down to what was in my head.

“That’s made me realise the knowledge can’t sit with one person. We’re making sure it is shared more widely across the team, so everyone understands the building well enough to support the emergency services.”

The rebuild of the fire-damaged area completed in June 2026. When CM visits in August, the room next to the roof void where the fire started looks pristine, with clean white walls, and the only smell is fresh paint.

As Figg puts it, “if you walk around the south-west corner of Somerset House today, you’d never know there had been a fire.

“Externally, we’ve tried to make the repairs disappear,” he adds. “We used reclaimed slate on the riverside roof, which is the more significant view. There are a couple of lighter patches where we had to cut through to create the firebreaks.

“We did as much as we could to save heritage elements and preserved some of the big timbers. Where we had to repair the damage, the overriding objective was to reinstate the building properly.

“Everything had to achieve building control sign-off and meet current Building Regulations.”

Figg hopes other heritage clients and construction managers can learn from the Somerset House fire.

“Part of what I’m trying to promote now is making sure custodians of historic buildings are given the investment they need to protect them for the future,” he says.

“I always say I’m only the custodian of this building for a small part of its life. My responsibility is to leave it safe for future generations.”