Feeling the Heat: Recovery in the Wake of a Major Fire

Behind the ribbon-cutting, though, resides a story of recovery from the devastating fire that tore through Butlers Farmhouse Cheeses’ Shay Lane site in Longridge. It’s a story that’s far from over.

It has been reported in newly filed accounts for the business that, nearly three years on, Butlers is still trading at only around 60% of pre-fire levels. Turnover for the year to September 2025 came in at £18.2 million, standing as only a modest rise on the £16.9 million recorded the previous year, while the company posted a pre-tax loss of £608,000.

Fourth-generation owner Matthew Hall has been candid about the scale of the challenge, describing the past year as one of resilience rather than resolution, in tandem warning that the effects of the fire are expected to continue for several years to come.

This is the reality that rarely makes the headlines. The fire destroyed the cutting, packing, warehousing and office facilities at Shay Lane. While the company’s separate dairy site kept production alive, rebuilding capacity has taken years rather than months.

Securing planning permission for the new £15 million cheesemaking campus wasn’t achieved until February last year, over 12 months after the blaze. The acquisition of the Hampshire Cheese Company in February 2024 was needed just to shore up soft cheese capacity in the interim. The new facility on the farm may look like a phoenix moment, but it was built on the back of a prolonged financial and operational struggle.

Not alone

Butlers is far from being alone in discovering that the road back from a major fire is measured in years, not weeks. A fire at the Baldock Industrial Estate in Hertfordshire in July 2023 destroyed upwards of 40 business units. More than 12 months on, affected business owners were still waiting for the site to be cleared, let alone rebuilt.

With 17 different owners across the estate, agreeing on a way forward proved as difficult a task as recovering from the fire itself, leaving traders in limbo and unable to return to their premises.

These cases illustrate a wider truth about fire recovery in unsprinklered buildings: the damage doesn’t end when the fire’s extinguished. Rebuilding, replanning and refinancing can drag on for years, hitting turnover, cash flow and jobs long after the story has left the news pages.

The number of primary fires in industrial premises recorded as food and drink processing facilities has averaged 100 per year in England over recent years.

Sprinklers change that equation. Where fitted, they’ve been shown to contain, control or extinguish a fire in 99% of cases in which they operate, protecting stock, structure and, crucially, business continuity.

Businesses with sprinkler systems installed typically find themselves back up-and-running within hours. Butlers’ experience shows what the alternative can look like: years of reduced trading, financial losses and a ‘next chapter’ that has taken the best part of three years to write.

Tom Roche is Secretary of the Business Sprinkler Alliance (www.business-sprinkler-alliance.org)