A church and a warehouse up in flames. So what's with all the fires?

The Herald Scotland

2 days ago

It's the same in Glasgow. Just a couple of days before the fire at St Mungo's Church, firefighters were tackling a blaze at a warehouse in the Kinning Park area of the city, and as the drivers on the M8 nearby watched the smoke billowing out over the motorway, no doubt some of them, me included, mentally added it to the list of the other buildings in the city that have ended in fire. With one in particular right at the top of the list, the most famous: the Mack.
So what's going on, and can we detect some kind of trend? You may have seen the pictures, rather creepy ones, of a man, apparently in some kind of helmet and mask, walking up the lane near the Kinning Park warehouse. The pictures show him climbing over a wall and a few minutes later, the flames have started and the man runs away. The police have confirmed the fire was started deliberately and in Glasgow it feels like a pattern. I saw it myself a couple of weeks ago when I spotted a fire in the woods in Bellahouston Park and reported it to the police. Fortunately, it was put out quickly and only a few of the trees were damaged.
It's also important to mention what's happening to the men and women who fight the fires. I was speaking to a newly recruited fireman the other day who was telling me he's volunteered to be shifted round different stations in Glasgow to plug the gaps in the staff. Some 1,200 firefighter posts in Scotland have been lost to cuts in the last 13 years and the fire service is also planning to close down 13 stations and scrap 10 appliances. The Fire Brigade Union makes the point that this affects response times and when response times get longer, fires do more damage and, potentially, not to put too fine a point on it, more people die.
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But the wider context here is interesting if we're thinking about what's with all the fires and what's causing them, because house fires have actually fallen to an all-time low in the last 20 years or so; the number of deaths and casualties has also fallen and we know why: there's a wider use of smoke detectors and the detectors have got better. The stats on house fires are actually a conspicuous example of success in policy on public safety.
But it's with apparently deliberate fires that things get a bit murkier. On the whole, the trend has been downwards in the last five years or so, but the most recent statistics from the Scottish Government demonstrate it may not last. There were 226 deliberate building fires in the last quarter of 2024-25, up from 197 in the same period of 2023-24. There were also 185 deliberate road vehicle fires in the last quarter or 2024-25, up from 153 in 2023-24. In other words, the number of deliberate fires looks like it's increasing again.
The motivations for arson are complicated and can be linked to other criminality – who knows what was going on with that creepy masked man in Kinning Park. But we also know that visible signs of decay and disorder in a community – graffiti, broken windows, gaping roofs – attract even more decay and disorder; a community that's in a state or a building that's been left to rot eventually becomes an invitation to people who want to make it worse, often by fire. They may also think an abandoned or empty building means they can get whatever the buzz it is they get from arson with less risk to life. Whatever's going on, decaying, neglected communities and buildings increase the risk of fire.
Fiirefighters at the sight of the Kinning Park incident (Image: Newsquest)
Obviously, this does not apply to every incident – St Mungo's was a working church and we don't yet know the specific cause of the blaze. But the Cottage [[Theatre]] in [[Cumbernauld]] had not been properly maintained and was in a poor state, with the local MSP Jamie Hepburn calling the fire a demonstration of what happens when a building is left to go to rack and ruin. I suspect the building will eventually be lost for good sadly, and it wouldn't be the first to fall victim to the old formula: neglect = fire = demolition. For another example, look at the sorry state of Ayr Station Hotel. Same formula.
We know some of the background to this: council budgets are in a terrible state and buildings, particularly older buildings, can be expensive to maintain. Personal economic hardship also makes it harder for people to spend money on the places where they live which is why more often than not it's in areas of deprivation that the worst fires happen. Basically, it's about properly maintaining communities and the buildings in which people live and work (and sometimes pray) because if we don't properly maintain them, sooner or later some of them will end in flames.
I suppose all we can do now is wait to see if the man who started the Kinning Park fire can be found and wait to see what the investigation into St Mungo's discovers. But whenever another building burns, those of us who care about our built heritage become more impatient with the lack of care shown towards it. Not only are we losing architecture that could have a future – and in some cases is rather beautiful – we're also paying the environmental cost of destroying buildings (by fire or bulldozer or dynamite) and putting up new ones in their place (most recent example: the Wynford high-rises). Better, I would have thought, to try and renovate the old ones. Better to protect them. Better to prevent them from turning intoto ashes.