The Roberts Bakery Northwich Fire: Fire in a Temporary Roof Structure
We drive past Gadbrook Park fairly regularly, and it is one of those industrial estates that you stop really seeing after a while — a cluster of distribution sheds and manufacturing units just off the A556 between Northwich and Knutsford, not far from the turn for Jodrell Bank. It was a visit to the observatory earlier this year, looking back across that stretch of mid-Cheshire on the drive home, that brought it back: what happened at the Roberts Bakery site just a few miles away in June 2023, and what it ultimately cost a family business that had been trading in that part of Cheshire for a hundred and thirty-eight years.
The fire at Frank Roberts & Sons' Northwich plant on 5 June 2023 is one of those incidents that lodges in the memory precisely because it was so local, so visible — the smoke column was reported across a wide area of Cheshire — and because the consequences that followed were so starkly disproportionate to what initially sounds like a fairly contained construction site incident. Twelve fire crews from Cheshire Fire & Rescue Service attended, two aerial ladder platforms were deployed, and firefighters remained on site through the night before the fire was formally closed the following afternoon. The service described it as a well-developed blaze in a temporary roof structure, and that description, understated as it is, contains the seeds of everything that followed over the next two years.
This article looks at what happened, what the available reporting tells us about how the fire started, and what the fire risk management lessons are for any industrial or warehouse operator with construction activity taking place on or near an occupied building.
What happened on 5 June 2023
The fire broke out at around 11am at the Roberts Bakery site on the Gadbrook Park industrial estate in Northwich, with Cheshire Fire & Rescue Service describing the incident as a well-developed fire in a temporary roof structure covering a flat roof of approximately 250 metres by 200 metres, which had spread into the production area below. According to the service's incident updates, the fire involved a ceiling joist and scaffolding boards within one of the site buildings, and the working description of the incident was consistent with a fire originating in the construction materials associated with roof works being carried out while the building remained in active production use.
All staff and contractors were evacuated promptly and accounted for, with no casualties reported, which in a building of that size and operational complexity during a normal working day was a significant achievement in its own right. Twelve crews attended, with high-volume main water jets and aerial platforms deployed to fight the fire from height, and firefighters used thermal imaging cameras through the night to locate and extinguish the remaining pockets of heat before the incident was formally closed at 1:20pm on 6 June. Residents in the surrounding area were advised to keep windows and doors shut because of the volume of smoke in the air, which was visible from a considerable distance across the Cheshire plain.
The fire affected two manufacturing plants that between them produced Roberts' branded lines, including bread under the Roberts Bakery name and biscuits under the Little Treats brand, as well as a range of own-label products for retail, food-to-go, and foodservice customers. The investigation into the precise ignition source was ongoing at the time of initial reporting, but the picture that emerged from the service's incident descriptions pointed to a fire originating in scaffolding boards and ceiling joists within a temporary roof structure, in conditions consistent with construction work being carried out on the roof of an occupied production building.
Footage from the scene — Roberts Bakery fire, Northwich, 5 June 2023
The cause: fire in a temporary roof structure
The description given by Cheshire Fire & Rescue — a well-developed fire in a temporary roof structure, involving ceiling joists and scaffolding boards — points to a category of incident that the fire safety industry recognises well and that insurers treat with considerable wariness: fire originating in or around construction work on an occupied building, in an area where temporary materials have introduced combustible loading that the building's normal fire safety systems were not designed to manage.
Temporary roof structures and scaffolding assemblies bring timber boards, polythene sheeting, dust, and construction debris into parts of a building where none of those materials would ordinarily be present, and where the detection and suppression systems installed for normal building operation may not provide adequate coverage of the void or temporary space created by the works. When those works are taking place above an active production area, the risks compound considerably, because the combination of any ignition sources associated with the construction activity, the combustible loading of the temporary materials, the potential for concealed voids to allow a fire to develop unseen, and the presence of production-related fire loads in the building below creates conditions in which a small fire in the wrong place can become a large and well-developed one before the alarm has been raised. In a bakery environment, the additional fire load from flour dust, high-temperature cooking equipment, and large volumes of packaging materials amplifies that risk further.
Construction work on occupied industrial premises is a recognised high-risk scenario. Fire involving scaffolding, temporary roofing materials, and construction activity in or adjacent to an operational building is a category that features consistently in industrial fire statistics and insurance loss records. The combination of elevated ignition risk from construction activity, increased combustible loading from temporary materials, and the potential disruption to the building's normal detection and suppression coverage creates conditions in which a small fire can become a catastrophic one with very little warning, particularly where the fire originates in a concealed roof space or construction void rather than in the open production area below.
Hot works and temporary structures: the specific risks
Where construction work on a roof involves hot works — welding, cutting, grinding, or the application of torch-applied roofing membrane — the ignition risk is direct, well-documented, and the subject of decades of insurance loss data. Fires originating in roof structures during or shortly after roofing work have featured in industrial fire records for as long as torch-applied roofing has been in common use, and the specific mechanism is well understood: sparks or conducted heat penetrate into concealed voids or pass through metal elements, where they may smoulder for an extended period before breaking out as a developed fire some time after the contractor has finished work and left the building. The standard requirement to maintain a fire watch for a minimum period after hot works completion — typically at least one hour, and often considerably longer where roof structures or concealed spaces are involved — exists precisely because this type of fire frequently does not manifest at the time of the work but some hours later, by which point the building may be unattended or operating with reduced staffing.
Even where the construction works do not themselves involve a direct heat source, the presence of timber scaffolding boards, temporary hoarding, polythene sheeting, and insulation materials in a roof space or temporary structure creates a combustible configuration that can be ignited by electrical faults in the vicinity, discarded smoking materials, or heat transfer from processes in the building below. In a large industrial building with a flat roof, the effective void between the roof covering and the ceiling of the production space can function as a concealed channel through which fire and smoke travel unseen and largely unimpeded — a dynamic that is closely related to the concept we explored in our article on Swiss Cheese theory and fire safety, in which several individually manageable failures align to produce an outcome that none of them would have produced in isolation.
What a hot works permit system is designed to prevent
The standard control measure for any construction work that introduces a meaningful ignition risk is a hot works permit, which is a formal authorisation process that requires the person responsible for the building to confirm, before the work begins, that the area has been properly assessed, that combustibles have been cleared from the vicinity or protected against ignition, that the building's fire detection and suppression systems are in service or that compensatory measures are in place for any impairment, and that a designated fire watch will be maintained during the work and for an appropriate period after it is finished. A hot works permit is not a piece of administrative paperwork that exists to demonstrate compliance; it is the mechanism by which the responsible person for an occupied building ensures that a contractor carrying out potentially ignition-generating work has systematically thought through the risks, put the necessary precautions in place, and accepted explicit accountability for doing so before the work starts.
On industrial and warehouse premises where construction activity is routine, a hot works permit system is a standard expectation under the fire risk assessment framework, and a responsible person who allows contractors to carry out torch work or welding on their building without one is taking a risk that no insurer would regard as acceptable and that no fire risk assessor should be willing to leave unreported. A fire risk assessment for an industrial building should address contractor management explicitly, covering how the risk from construction activity is assessed and controlled, how the permit system operates in practice, who has the authority to issue and refuse permits, what compensatory arrangements are in place when fire safety systems are impaired by works, and how the assessment itself is reviewed when significant works are planned or underway. As we set out in our article on how often a fire risk assessment should be reviewed, a major construction project on an occupied building is precisely the kind of change in circumstances that should trigger a review of the assessment before the work begins, not after it has finished.
The contractor management dimension of this is worth dwelling on, because it is an area where the responsible person's obligation is sometimes misunderstood. A contractor working on your building is working within your fire risk environment, and the responsibility for ensuring that the construction activity is managed safely in the context of that environment rests with the responsible person, not with the contractor independently. Specifying hot works requirements in a contract is a useful starting point, but it does not discharge the duty to verify that those requirements are actually being followed on the day, and it does not substitute for the induction that should ensure every contractor on site knows where the alarm call points are, what the evacuation procedure is, and what they are expected to do if they discover or cause a fire.
What the fire cost Roberts Bakery
The immediate operational impact was severe in a way that the initial reporting, focused understandably on the drama of the incident itself, did not fully convey at the time. The fire affected two manufacturing plants at the Northwich site and, by the company's own subsequent account, wiped out a large proportion of the site's infrastructure and services, with former managing director Julia Banton later describing the location of the fire as probably the worst place it could have been for the business given how much of its core infrastructure it destroyed. A full clean-up and rebuild began in the weeks that followed, and production at the unaffected plants continued while the damaged facilities were out of action, with Roberts working proactively with its retail and foodservice customers to manage the supply disruption and minimise the commercial impact as far as possible.
Roberts received an insurance payout of approximately £20 million in connection with the fire, a figure that gives some sense of the scale of the damage and the rebuild cost even before the wider business disruption is factored in. By the financial year ending August 2024, the company had returned to reported profitability on the strength of those insurance recoveries, with EBITDA reaching £24.3 million, but turnover had fallen by more than 20 per cent from its peak of over £90 million to £76.1 million as customers who had been forced to find alternative suppliers during the recovery period did not all return when production resumed. Roberts had previously held fourth position among Britain's biggest bread brands by volume, and the ground it lost to faster-growing competitors during the period of reduced capacity proved very difficult to recover once supply was restored.
The company spent more than £40 million in capital expenditure over the two years following the fire, primarily on the rebuild at Northwich, at a time when the bread category was also facing rising ingredient and energy costs, intensifying supermarket price pressure, and a structural shift in consumer demand away from standard wrapped loaves towards premium, artisan, and alternative formats. The combination of the rebuild cost, the permanent loss of market share, and those wider trading headwinds proved too much to absorb, and in October 2025, two years and four months after the fire at Gadbrook Park, Frank Roberts & Sons filed a notice of intention to appoint administrators. PwC were appointed as administrators on 14 October 2025, and the business was sold in a pre-pack deal to investment firm Boparan Private Office for £21.6 million, with the new entity trading as Roberts Bakery 1887 Ltd. Around 433 jobs were preserved at the Northwich and Winsford sites, while the Ilkeston plant, which Roberts had already announced it was closing, was sold separately to Warburtons for £2.1 million. Creditors were owed close to £40 million at the point of administration.
A 138-year-old fourth-generation family business, founded in Northwich in 1887, no longer exists in the form in which it had traded for most of that history. Whether the fire alone would have been fatal to the business in a more benign trading environment is a reasonable question, since the headwinds facing the traditional wrapped bread category were real and pre-dated June 2023 by some years, but the fire destroyed the better part of two-thirds of production capacity at the company's main site at precisely the moment when it had recently secured an £18 million facility from Wells Fargo to fund investment and growth, and Roberts themselves were explicit in acknowledging the fire's central role in the difficulties that led to the administration filing.
The business continuity dimension: Roberts Bakery had meaningful insurance coverage, multiple production sites, and the scale and supplier relationships to attempt a serious recovery, and even with all of those advantages the consequences of the fire were ultimately fatal to the original business. For smaller industrial and warehouse operators managing single sites, operating on tighter margins, or carrying less comprehensive insurance, a fire of comparable severity would in most cases be a simpler and faster end. The question of whether a fire of this kind can be prevented is always the first and most important question, but the question of whether the business would survive one deserves to be asked with equal honesty as part of any serious conversation about industrial fire risk, and it is one that a good fire risk assessment should prompt the responsible person to consider.
What this incident means for industrial operators with construction work on site
The Roberts Bakery fire is not an obscure case study from a remote part of the industry. It happened on an industrial estate that most people working in Cheshire have driven past, it involved a large and professionally managed business with the financial resources and operational depth to mount a serious recovery attempt, and it illustrated with unusual completeness the way in which a fire originating in a temporary structure during what sounds like routine building maintenance can cascade, over time, into an existential threat to the business housed in the building below it. The practical lessons for industrial operators are specific enough to be worth setting out directly.
- Review your fire risk assessment before construction work begins Any significant works on or adjacent to an occupied industrial building should trigger a review of the fire risk assessment before the contractors arrive, not afterwards, with the review specifically addressing the risks introduced by the planned works, the control measures required to manage them, and any changes to the building's detection or suppression coverage that the works will create. As we set out in our article on how often a fire risk assessment should be reviewed, the duty to keep the assessment current attaches to material changes in the activities taking place on the premises, and a programme of roof works on an occupied production building is exactly the kind of change that warrants a formal review before it begins.
- Implement a hot works permit system and apply it consistently Any work on the building that generates heat, sparks, or flame should be subject to a formal hot works permit issued by an authorised and competent person, checked against the specific conditions on the day before work begins, and backed by a fire watch that continues for a meaningful period after the work has finished and the contractor has left the area. The permit should be specific to the location and the nature of the work rather than a generic form signed without proper assessment, and the person issuing it should have both the authority and the technical knowledge to refuse authorisation if the conditions in the work area are not satisfactory.
- Manage the combustible loading introduced by temporary structures Timber scaffolding boards, polythene sheeting, insulation materials, and accumulated construction debris in a roof space or temporary enclosure represent a significant combustible load in an area that the building's fixed detection system may not cover adequately, and their presence should be treated as a material change to the fire risk rather than an unavoidable background condition of the works. Where non-combustible alternatives can be specified, they should be. Where combustible temporary materials are genuinely unavoidable, they should be actively managed throughout the works, cleared when not in use, protected from the ignition sources associated with the construction activity, and covered by additional detection or patrol arrangements for as long as they remain in place.
- Do not allow construction works to impair detection or suppression systems without compensatory measures Works that require the isolation of detection zones, the disconnection of sprinkler circuits, or the temporary removal of detection heads create a window of vulnerability during which a fire that would normally have been detected quickly could develop to a serious size before anyone is aware of it. Any impairment of this kind should be formally authorised, logged with a clear time limit, and covered by compensatory measures, such as additional patrols, temporary detection equipment, or extended fire watches, that meaningfully reduce the risk during the period of reduced coverage. Our article on what to do about a long-term fault on a fire alarm system covers the underlying principle, and the same logic applies with equal force to planned impairment during building works.
- Ensure every contractor on site is properly inducted into the building's fire safety arrangements Every contractor working on your premises should understand, before they start work, where the nearest alarm call points are, what the evacuation procedure is, where the assembly point is, and what they are expected to do if they discover or inadvertently cause a fire. Contractors who are unfamiliar with the building and its layout, who may be working in areas outside the normal occupied space, and who are often under commercial pressure to complete work quickly represent a materially different risk profile from your own trained staff, and the responsible person cannot discharge that risk simply by specifying fire safety requirements in the contract without verifying that those requirements are understood and being followed on the ground.
- Think honestly about what a serious fire would cost your business Roberts Bakery had insurance coverage that yielded approximately £20 million, other production facilities that continued to operate during the rebuild, and more than a century of customer relationships to draw on during the recovery period, and even with all of those advantages the fire proved impossible to recover from fully within a commercially viable timeframe. For businesses operating without equivalent insurance depth, concentrated on a single site, or in sectors where customers who switch supplier during a period of disruption are unlikely to switch back, the arithmetic of a serious industrial fire is considerably less forgiving, and a realistic assessment of that risk is a legitimate part of what a fire risk assessment should help a responsible person understand.
A fire we pass every time we're in that part of Cheshire
We are based in Chester, and Gadbrook Park is well within our patch — close enough that we know the road and the industrial estate and the stretch of Cheshire between there and Jodrell Bank well enough to picture it without having to look it up. The Roberts Bakery fire is the kind of incident that people who work in fire safety in this region have not forgotten, partly because of its scale and partly because of what followed, and it is one we return to regularly in conversation with clients who are managing construction works on occupied industrial sites across Cheshire, the Wirral, and Greater Manchester.
We return to it not because the outcome is typical — most fires originating in construction work on industrial premises do not bring down a 138-year-old business, and most responsible persons managing roof works with proper controls in place will never experience anything remotely approaching what happened at Gadbrook Park — but because the case illustrates with unusual completeness the full chain of consequence that a preventable fire can set in motion, from the initial incident through the operational disruption and the recovery attempt to the eventual loss of the business itself. A temporary roof structure, some scaffolding boards, a well-developed fire that took more than twenty-six hours to fully extinguish, and a business that no longer exists in the form it had held since 1887.
If you operate an industrial or warehouse premises across Cheshire, the Wirral, or the wider North West and you have construction work taking place on or adjacent to an occupied building, we would be glad to discuss your fire risk arrangements with you. We carry out fire risk assessments for industrial premises of all sizes, including reviews commissioned specifically in advance of planned building works, and we provide fire safety training that covers contractor management and hot works procedures in the kind of practical detail that actually changes what happens on the day. If something about your current arrangements does not feel right, please get in touch.
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We carry out fire risk assessments for industrial and warehouse premises across Cheshire, the Wirral, and the North West, including pre-works reviews and contractor fire safety management. If you have building works planned or underway, please get in touch.
Get in touch Fire Risk Assessments Warehouse & Industrial Fire Safety TrainingThis article draws on publicly reported information about the Roberts Bakery fire of June 2023 and subsequent events. The cause of the fire was described by Cheshire Fire & Rescue Service as a well-developed fire in a temporary roof structure involving ceiling joists and scaffolding boards; the precise ignition source was subject to investigation and has not been confirmed in detail in public reporting. The fire risk management commentary in this article is general guidance and does not constitute legal advice. Fletcher Risk Management Ltd is based in Chester and provides fire risk assessments, fire door inspections, and fire safety training across the North West and North Wales.