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Available 24/7 | 0800 088 4170
The fire broke out on the top floor of The Law Society’s headquarters in February 2020 and was thought to have been caused by an electrical fault. It destroyed the roof and an entire staircase between the third and fifth floors. Around 150 firefighters and 25 fire engines were involved, with the incident taking approximately 12 hours to bring under control.
Although there were no reported injuries, the building was left with a complex mix of direct fire damage, smoke and soot contamination, damaged fixtures and finishes, and extensive water saturation from the firefighting operation.
The loss of the roof, the amount of water introduced during firefighting and the winter conditions then created a further problem: serious mould growth developed throughout affected parts of the building. What began as a fire restoration project therefore evolved into a combined fire, water, mould and drying programme.
Ideal Response carried out multiple site visits to understand the scale of the recovery work before developing a phased programme. In a Grade II listed building, that assessment was particularly important. The aim was not to strip out indiscriminately, but to remove materials that were beyond recovery while cleaning and retaining salvageable fabric wherever practicable.
The first phase was a soft strip-out. An 18 - 19-person team worked around the clock to remove burnt furniture, computers and office equipment, damaged floor coverings, loose fixtures, hanging plasterboard and other debris that either could not be retained or presented an immediate risk. This initial phase was completed within two weeks.
Hard strip-out followed, including irreparably damaged plasterboard, skirting boards, door frames, walls and stud walls. At the same time, technicians carried out specialist fire cleaning on surfaces that could be retained, removing soot, ash and fire residues rather than replacing material unnecessarily. This combined strip-out and cleaning phase took around six weeks.
Once the damaged material had been removed and salvageable surfaces cleaned, the recovery programme moved into a different technical phase. Firefighting water had saturated the building and, combined with the missing roof and winter conditions, had allowed mould to establish across affected areas.
Mould remediation was carried out as a four-stage process. Technicians first used industrial vacuums fitted with HEPA filtration to remove loose surface contamination. Affected surfaces were then washed down using formulated cleaning solutions before a fungicidal barrier treatment was manually brushed onto the treated areas. The final stage used ULV fogging to disperse a fine treatment mist through the affected rooms and address residual airborne contamination. This mould-remediation phase took approximately two weeks.
With contamination controlled, the focus shifted to the moisture held within the building. Drying had to operate across multiple floors and required a targeted, building-wide setup rather than a small number of machines concentrated in one area. Around 200 pieces of drying equipment were deployed throughout the property, with technicians monitoring the installation around the clock to keep the programme operating continuously.
The sequence was important. Cleaning alone would not have dealt with the moisture left behind by the firefighting response, while drying a building without first addressing established mould would have left a separate contamination problem unresolved. The programme therefore progressed from removal and fire cleaning, through mould remediation, into controlled structural drying.
Drying was not treated as the end of the job. Once the affected structure had been cleaned and dried, Ideal Response manually applied a Hyalophane bonding agent to more than 500m² of timber joists as a preventative treatment against future mould growth.
The restoration work was also being delivered alongside contractors carrying out structural repairs, so the programme had to be phased around other activity in the building. Ideal Response continued working through the Christmas period, including attendance on Christmas Day, to maintain progress and minimise avoidable delay.
Ideal Response completed the fire cleaning, mould remediation and drying programme in around six months. By the end of the specialist recovery works, the building had been cleaned, dried and left as a shell ready for reinstatement.
For a project of this scale, the outcome was not the result of one cleaning technique or one piece of equipment. It came from managing the loss as a sequence of connected problems: removing what could not be saved, restoring what could be retained, dealing with secondary mould contamination, controlling moisture across the building and protecting vulnerable timber before reconstruction moved forward.
