Five people escaped unharmed after fire broke out at a flat in North Cheam in the early hours of Tuesday morning, with four fire engines and around 25 firefighters called to the scene.
Firefighters were called to Gander Green Lane at 3.21am on Tuesday 27 October. Crews found half of the ground floor of a two-storey end-of-terrace house, converted into flats, damaged by fire, along with part of a vehicle parked in the driveway.
All five occupants had already left the property before the brigade arrived, and no injuries were reported.
The cause of the fire is now under investigation by both the London Fire Brigade and the Metropolitan Police Service. No conclusion has been reached, and neither service has said what started the blaze.
Joint investigations of this kind are routine when a fire causes significant damage to a home, even when nobody is hurt. Fire investigators examine the scene for the origin and cause of the fire, while police involvement allows officers to rule out anything suspicious and to support residents in the aftermath. Until that work is complete, the cause remains officially unexplained.
Fires in the early hours carry an obvious added risk: occupants are usually asleep when a fire starts, and the time available to discover it and get out is short. In this case, all five people were out of the property before firefighters arrived, and the outcome was five people safe and no injuries — a result crews will welcome, given the hour and the extent of the damage to the ground floor.
Nothing further has been confirmed about the condition of the property, whether residents have been able to return, or how long the investigation will take.
Elsewhere in London, a child was rescued from a burning building in Ilford earlier on Tuesday, after firefighters used a smoke hood to bring the child down from the second floor — read more in our report on the Green Lane fire in Ilford. Fire also closed a road in Islington on Monday morning, when crews tackled a blaze on Barnsbury Street — see our earlier coverage of the Barnsbury Street fire.
Image: Gander Green Lane, North Cheam (library photo). Credit: Barry Hunter, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
