Fire risk assessment in City of London

The City is overwhelmingly commercial, with high-rise office towers, historic livery halls, retail and hospitality at ground floor, and a small but significant residential population in the Barbican and Golden Lane estates. Many buildings are listed or sit within conservation areas, which constrains fire door replacement, signage and structural alterations. Modern office buildings generally have sophisticated fire engineering strategies including phased evacuation and addressable alarm systems.

HMO licensing is largely irrelevant in the City because the residential population is small and concentrated in purpose-built estates. Commercial premises are regulated under the Fire Safety Order, and the City of London Corporation's fire safety team is the enforcing authority. Listed building consent may be needed for fire safety works in historic premises.

The City sits within the Congestion Charge and ULEZ zones, and on-street parking is extremely limited. We typically use nearby car parks or public transport and allow extra time for security and access procedures. Many City buildings have strict access protocols, so we coordinate with building managers well in advance. Reports are delivered within 24 hours, and we can schedule surveys outside normal trading hours to minimise disruption.

The Square Mile contains a concentration of historic livery halls, guild buildings and listed commercial premises unmatched anywhere else in London, many still in continuous daily use for offices, events and hospitality alongside their heritage function. These buildings routinely combine original stone or timber staircases, panelled rooms with restricted alteration options, and modern office fit-outs layered in over decades, so an assessment has to work out where original fabric genuinely limits what can be done and where a previous fit-out has simply never been reassessed since it was installed. Function and event use adds a further dimension, since occupant numbers and layout can change from one booking to the next, and the fire strategy needs to remain valid across all of them.

The cluster of tall commercial towers around Bishopsgate, Leadenhall Street and the eastern City — buildings let floor by floor to multiple tenants — brings a distinct set of considerations: fire strategy responsibility is often split between a building-wide landlord assessment and individual tenant fit-out assessments on each floor, and the interface between the two needs to be clearly understood before either report can be relied upon. Multi-tenanted floors also see frequent fit-out changes as tenants come and go, so a floor's fire compartmentation and escape route can shift meaningfully between one lease and the next without necessarily being reflected in the building-wide documentation.

The Barbican Estate and a handful of other residential pockets represent a genuinely unusual position within the City: a substantial concentration of tall, architecturally significant residential towers and terrace blocks sitting inside a local authority area otherwise dominated by commercial premises. Barbican's raised podium walkways, communal plant areas and Brutalist concrete construction bring their own compartmentation questions, and because the estate is managed as a single large complex, an assessment often needs to reference how the wider estate's fire strategy and any interim measures apply to the specific block being visited.

Working across the City means factoring in security arrangements that are more involved than in most residential boroughs: many commercial buildings require visitor registration, ID checks or an escort from reception, and access to plant rooms or risers in a multi-tenanted tower can require coordination between the landlord's facilities team and an individual tenant. We confirm these arrangements at booking so the visit itself is not held up on site, and we allow additional time where a building spans several tenanted floors that each need a separate point of contact.

Under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 and the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022, the freeholder, managing agent, landlord or employer must ensure a written fire risk assessment exists, is acted upon, and is reviewed at least annually. Buildings over 11 metres also require quarterly communal fire door checks, annual flat entrance door checks and wayfinding signage. We can deliver all of it in one visit.