Fire safety for London restaurants and takeaways

Almost always the detector type, not the detector. An optical smoke detector works by reading scattered light, and steam and airborne grease scatter light in very much the same way smoke does, so from the detector’s point of view a busy service and a fire look similar. The normal answer in a cooking area is heat detection, which ignores both, with the surrounding areas kept on smoke detection as usual. That is a design decision under BS 5839-1 rather than a relaxation of it. What is not an answer is isolating the kitchen zone, which is what we find on the panel log more often than anything else, and which leaves the room with the highest fire load in the building undetected.

A wet chemical extinguisher, and it is worth knowing why rather than just where. Burning cooking oil is a Class F fire, and wet chemical works by reacting with the hot oil to form a soapy crust that seals the surface and cools it. Water and foam do not do that: they sink into oil that is far above the boiling point of water, flash to steam and throw burning oil out of the pan. A CO2 extinguisher, which people reach for because it is the electrical one, blasts the surface and can spread it. Selection and siting come from BS 5306-8 and the annual service from BS 5306-3.

There is no statute that names a cleaning interval, but the duct is a real fire spread path and it will feature in your fire risk assessment, so leaving it is not a neutral choice. The industry specification is TR/19 Grease, published by BESA, which sets out how the work is done and how the result is verified and recorded. Most insurers now attach a condition requiring documented cleaning at a stated frequency, and that is a policy term rather than a legal one, which matters because breaching it affects a claim rather than triggering enforcement. Either way, keep the certificates.

It changes the emergency lighting and it changes the drill. A restaurant that empties at eleven has customers on unfamiliar stairs in the dark if the power goes, so the escape lighting has to cover the route including any external steps or yard the exit discharges into, and the annual full-duration test matters more here than almost anywhere. Late trading also usually means alcohol, a public who are less alert, and a skeleton team, so the number of staff who can actually run an evacuation at midnight is the number that counts, not the number on the lunchtime shift.

Yes, and cellars are a recurring problem in London restaurants because so many of them are single-stair basements under a Victorian building. A fire below the only way out is the worst geometry there is, the space is unoccupied for hours at a time so nobody smells anything, and cellars accumulate exactly the wrong things: cardboard, spirits, a chest freezer and an extension lead. Detection down there is usually not the expensive part of the job and it is close to the most useful.