The Development of a Fire Safety Evaluation Procedure for the Property Protection of Parish Churches

Incidences of fires in churches are currently exceeding those in all other historic building types. This trend is destroying irreplaceable national treasures as England and Wales contains one of the greatest collections, in terms of number and antiquity, of ancient parish churches in the world. This paper describes the development of a decision making tool to aid the custodians of parish churches in evaluating the existing fire safety provision and in gauging the cost of upgrading fire safety for property protection exclusively. The principles behind the evaluation procedure are detailed and the mechanics of assessment demonstrated. The tool, referred to as Fire(SEPC) Fire Safety Evaluation Procedure for the Property Protection of Parish Churches] is unique in its evaluation configuration in that an acceptable level of fire safety is dependent on the vulnerability of the fabric and contents of individual churches.