At 3:46pm on Sunday 8 March 2026, a fire broke out in a small vape shop at 105 Union Street, Glasgow — a unit on the ground floor of Union Corner, a four-storey Victorian commercial building constructed in 1851. What started as a containable retail fire became, within hours, one of the most damaging urban building fires in Scotland in recent memory. By the time the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service brought the blaze under control — a four-day operation involving nearly 300 firefighters — Union Corner had collapsed, its distinctive domed roof gone, its structure so compromised that full demolition was the only safe option. The Scottish Government has committed at least £1 million towards demolition costs alone. A £10 million recovery package for affected businesses followed.
Glasgow Central Station, directly adjacent, was closed entirely for nearly two weeks. Thirty businesses inside Union Corner — studios, retailers, service operators — lost their premises. Many lost everything in them. The public response has been generous; crowdfunding raised over £150,000. But crowdfunding is not business interruption insurance, and public sympathy does not reinstate a building.
What makes this fire significant for property managers, landlords and retail operators across the UK is not simply its scale. It is the combination of failures that produced it — none of which were extraordinary, and all of which are replicated in commercial properties on almost every high street in England and Wales.
What Happened: The Timeline
Fire breaks out in the vape shop at 105 Union Street. An eyewitness who attempts to intervene is driven back by an explosion from within the premises, consistent with lithium battery thermal runaway.
The fire spreads from the ground floor vape unit through the full four-storey Victorian building. Over 60 firefighters deployed. Glasgow Central Station evacuated. The dome of Union Corner collapses. Further partial collapse overnight.
Glasgow Central remains closed. Nearly 300 firefighters involved in bringing the fire fully under control over a four-day operation. The building's facade — the only section still standing — is assessed as structurally dangerous.
Glasgow City Council takes control of the site from the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service. Building Standards declare the remaining structure "fatally compromised" and order full demolition.
Scottish Government announces a £10 million recovery and business support package. Demolition contractor Burnfield Demolition appointed. Demolition begins.
Glasgow Central's high-level platforms partially reopen after stringent safety checks. The final demolition of the corner facade is completed. The site is cleared.
Footage of the fire in its early stages at 105 Union Street. Crucially, the video shows bystanders attempting to fight the blaze with portable extinguishers before being driven back — illustrating how quickly a lithium battery fire overwhelms conventional first-response suppression. Within hours of this footage, the full four-storey Victorian building was engulfed.
The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service has confirmed that a multi-agency investigation into the cause of the fire is ongoing. The findings set out in this article reflect what is already in the public domain — and what is already enough to draw clear lessons.
The Factors Behind the Fire
Investigations into the tenancy, the building and the fire itself have already revealed a convergence of failures that will be immediately recognisable to anyone who manages commercial property in the UK.
Lithium battery thermal runaway
The fire is widely believed to have originated in a bank of chargers under the counter of the vape shop. An eyewitness reported being driven back by an explosion consistent with lithium battery thermal runaway — the process by which a lithium-ion cell overheats, becomes self-sustaining, and generates its own oxygen and heat, making conventional suppression impossible in the early stages. A vape shop typically holds hundreds of lithium-ion batteries in devices, in stock and on charge simultaneously. Fire safety expert Jonathan Bartle, Director of Source Fire Risk Management, told LBC that vape shops "don't have a clue" about the fire risks inherent in the products they sell, describing a lithium fire as one that is "very difficult to put out" because it creates "its own source of oxygen and heat." Waste management company Biffa recorded 180 fires across its UK estate between June and October 2025 linked to lithium-ion batteries, many believed to originate from vapes — a figure that underlines just how routine this risk has become.
A non-compliant, unregistered occupier
Investigation by The Ferret found that the vape shop at 105 Union Street was not registered on the Scottish Government's register for retailers selling tobacco and nicotine products — a legal requirement that also covers vapes. The business had not paid business rates since occupying the premises in August 2024. A rates demand was returned to Glasgow City Council marked as the owners having "gone away." The business had changed hands two weeks before the fire, with no apparent due diligence on the new occupier's compliance. The previous operator admitted to The Ferret he was unaware that vapes needed to be registered at all. The new owner, identified in press reports as Arslan, told The Sun he was "in grief" at what had happened.
This is the risk profile of a significant number of short-term retail occupiers across UK high streets — and it has direct implications for the landlords who let to them.
Highly combustible Victorian building fabric
Union Corner was built in 1851. Its construction included highly combustible timber floor infrastructure — a characteristic of Victorian commercial buildings throughout UK city centres. Insurance Times noted that this type of historic masonry construction with combustible structural timber creates a fire development profile entirely different from modern concrete and steel-framed buildings. Once fire enters the floor voids and structural timbers of a building of this age, suppression becomes extremely difficult. The fire did not simply spread through the building. It consumed it from within.
No effective compartmentation or suppression
A building of this era, subdivided into multiple small commercial units, is unlikely to have been retrospectively fitted with automatic suppression or modern fire compartmentation — and the evidence from Union Corner supports this. The fire travelled from a single ground-floor retail unit to the full extent of a four-storey building containing approximately 30 businesses. In a building with effective compartmentation and an active suppression system, the fire's spread would have been substantially limited. In its absence, the speed of development was catastrophic.
The core problem: A high-risk occupier — unregistered, unmonitored, storing and charging hundreds of lithium batteries — was placed in an elderly building with combustible structure, no suppression, and inadequate fire compartmentation. The building did not have a chance once the fire took hold. The landlord, Afton Estates Limited, now faces a site worth nothing and a demolished building from which it derived rental income.
The Insurance and Liability Picture
The commercial consequences of the Union Street fire extend well beyond the building itself — and they illustrate, with unusual clarity, what happens when insurance, occupier management and risk assessment are not properly aligned.
Multi-tenancy buildings and building insurance gaps
Insurance Times reported on the particular complexity of the Union Corner situation: a building in multiple occupancy, with multiple ownerships, historic construction, and a location directly above critical transport infrastructure. Broking professionals responding to the fire immediately raised the issue of whether adequate building insurance was in place across the full structure. In a multi-tenanted commercial building, where different units may be owned or leased by different parties, there is a well-documented risk of gaps in building insurance coverage. Where no single policy covers the entire structure, reinstatement can be delayed — or in the worst case, not fully funded at all.
Underinsurance in historic buildings
Lorna Harrington, managing director of Kroll's fixed asset advisory service, used the Glasgow fire to highlight the persistent problem of underinsurance in historic and listed buildings — where the gap between insured value and true reinstatement cost is often widest. A reinstatement cost assessment (RCA) for a Victorian listed building takes into account not just the volume of materials required, but the specialist skills, conservation obligations, and extended programme that listed building status imposes. Many landlords carrying out a desktop insurance renewal do not update their RCA regularly — and discover the gap only when a claim is made. Craig Donnelly of Holmes Mackillop Solicitors noted that the recovery of Union Corner, if it proceeds, is likely to be "a complex, multi-year project." The Glasgow School of Art, he observed, took years to navigate after its fires — and that had the full support of a major institution behind it.
Business interruption: the hidden exposure
The businesses inside Union Corner did not cause the fire. They were its victims. Many will have had their own contents and equipment insurance. But business interruption cover — which compensates for lost revenue during the period a business cannot trade — is precisely the cover that many small retail and studio operators either do not hold, or hold at an insufficient level. These businesses lost not just their stock and equipment but their trading premises entirely. For a business that has been trading from a particular location for years, the period of disruption from a fire of this scale — not weeks, but months or years — is existential. Crowdfunding raised £150,000. Business interruption insurance, properly structured, would have done significantly more.
What This Means for Landlords and Property Managers
The Union Street fire is not primarily a story about vaping. It is a story about what happens when a landlord lets a unit to an occupier without properly understanding what that occupier does, how it does it, and what that means for the risk profile of the building.
Know what your tenants actually do
The landlord at 105 Union Street apparently had a vape shop as a tenant — a use that carries a materially different fire risk to a clothes retailer, a café, or an office occupier. Vape retail involves the storage and charging of large volumes of lithium-ion batteries, the storage of flammable liquids (e-liquids), and the operation of charging equipment, often without any meaningful fire safety management in place. Before any retail tenancy commences, the landlord or managing agent should understand the use class, the specific hazards it introduces, and whether those hazards are adequately managed. If they are not, that failure will affect the entire building — not just the unit in question.
Occupier compliance is a landlord concern
The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 places obligations on the "responsible person" for a premises — which in a multi-occupancy commercial building may be the landlord, the managing agent, or the occupier, depending on how control of the common parts and shared structure is divided. Where a tenant is non-compliant — unregistered, operating without a fire risk assessment, failing to manage their specific hazards — that non-compliance creates risk that the landlord cannot disclaim simply because the unit is let. Landlords with retail units should be asking, at lease commencement and periodically thereafter, whether the occupier has a current fire risk assessment, whether they understand the specific hazards of their use, and whether those hazards are being managed. A tenant who has not registered their business and is not paying their rates is a tenant who is unlikely to have given any thought to fire safety compliance.
Review your fire risk assessment for the common parts
In a multi-occupancy commercial building, the landlord or managing agent is the responsible person for the common parts — staircases, corridors, plant rooms, the roof structure, any shared services. The fire risk assessment for those common parts must reflect the full range of uses in the building. If a new tenant with a higher-risk use moves in — a vape shop, a nail bar, a food preparation business — and the fire risk assessment for the common parts has not been reviewed, that assessment is already out of date. It cannot reflect the hazards that now exist. A fire risk assessment is not a document that is written once at the point of purchase and filed. It is a live document that must be reviewed when anything material changes — including who is occupying your building and what they are doing there.
Understand your building's structural fire behaviour
Victorian and Edwardian commercial buildings — precisely the stock that forms the backbone of UK town and city centres — have fire behaviour characteristics that modern buildings do not. Combustible timber floors and roof structures, the absence of fire stopping in floor voids, inadequate compartmentation between vertical and horizontal elements: these are not unusual features in older stock. They are routine. A fire risk assessment that does not address the specific construction type and its implications for fire spread is not adequate for a building of this age. Where landlords own or manage Victorian commercial stock, they should understand what is in the floor voids, what materials the structure is built from, and how fire would behave in those elements. That understanding should inform decisions about suppression, compartmentation and detection.
Revisit your insurance — especially if you have a listed or historic building
If your building has not had a reinstatement cost assessment in the last three years, and particularly if it is listed, of historic construction, or in a location that introduces complexity — proximity to infrastructure, multiple adjacent buildings, restricted access for demolition — it is worth commissioning one. The gap between a building's market value and its full reinstatement cost is consistently largest in historic stock. The consequences of discovering that gap mid-claim, when the building no longer exists, are severe.
What This Means for Retail Operators and Tenants
The occupiers of Union Corner did not choose to be in a building with a vape shop. They had no control over who else the landlord let to. But there are things that tenants in multi-occupancy commercial buildings can and should do.
Business interruption insurance is not optional
The businesses that lost their premises at Union Corner needed business interruption cover. Not as an aspirational extra — as a baseline. A business operating from leased premises in a multi-occupancy building is exposed to fire risk from every other occupier in that building. The question is not whether the risk exists, but whether the business can survive it if it materialises. Business interruption cover, properly scoped with an adequate indemnity period, is the mechanism for that survival.
Understand who is responsible for what
In a multi-tenancy commercial building, the division of responsibility between landlord and tenant — for fire safety, for building insurance, for reinstatement — is set out in the lease. Many tenants do not read their leases carefully, and many have not had them reviewed by a solicitor with commercial property expertise. The question of whether the landlord's building insurance covers the tenant's fit-out, whether the tenant is required to contribute to reinstatement, and what happens to the lease if the building is destroyed — these are not abstract legal niceties. They are the questions that determine what happens to a business after a fire like Glasgow's.
If you run a vape shop, take your fire safety obligations seriously
A vape retail premises is a high-risk environment. The combination of lithium-ion batteries in large volumes — in stock, in use and on charge — with flammable e-liquid and combustible display and packaging materials creates a fire load that demands active, informed management. That means a current, specific fire risk assessment that addresses lithium battery risks explicitly. It means staff who understand what thermal runaway is and what to do in the early stages of a battery fire. It means charging protocols that do not leave banks of batteries unattended on charge overnight. And it means being registered with the relevant authority — not just because it is a legal requirement, but because unregistered operation is the clearest possible signal of a business that is not taking its obligations seriously.
The Regulatory Landscape Is About to Change
The Glasgow fire has accelerated political pressure for a formal crackdown on vape retail. First Minister John Swinney said the Scottish Government would "be open-minded about looking at all those questions" arising from the fire. Glasgow MSP Paul Sweeney raised "serious questions about the suitability to have these types of businesses share space with our landmark buildings." In Westminster, calls for a national review of vape shop fire safety have grown louder. Trading standards enforcement — already severely under-resourced after a halving of officer numbers in recent years — is under renewed scrutiny.
What this means practically for landlords and managing agents is that the regulatory bar for vape retail tenancies is likely to rise. Properties that currently host vape shops without adequate fire safety arrangements may find themselves subject to enforcement action, insurer scrutiny, or both. Getting ahead of that — by reviewing existing tenancies now — is considerably less painful than responding to an enforcement notice or a claim.
The Broader Pattern
Glasgow is not an isolated incident. It is the most visible recent example of a pattern. Lithium battery fires in retail and storage premises are increasing year on year. The proliferation of vape shops across UK high streets has placed high-density lithium battery storage into building stock that was designed for nothing of the sort. And the combination of informal, short-term tenancies — often with rapid changes of ownership and limited compliance culture — with elderly building fabric and inadequate fire safety management creates exactly the conditions that Glasgow illustrated.
The factors that made Union Street catastrophic were individually addressable. A landlord who understood what was being stored in the unit. A tenant who had a fire risk assessment and understood battery charging risks. A building with adequate compartmentation to prevent a ground-floor fire reaching a full four-storey collapse. Any one of those would have changed the outcome. As we explored in our piece on Swiss Cheese Theory and fire safety, catastrophic fires are almost never the result of a single failure. They are the result of multiple smaller ones that were individually manageable — and were not managed.
We carry out fire risk assessments for commercial premises, multi-occupancy buildings and retail operators across Chester, the North West and North Wales. If you manage commercial property, own a listed or historic building, or operate a retail business with a significant lithium battery risk — and you are not confident that your fire risk assessment reflects the actual hazards in your building — get in touch.
Is your commercial property properly assessed for fire risk?
We carry out thorough, professionally qualified fire risk assessments for multi-occupancy commercial buildings, retail premises and historic properties across Chester, the North West and North Wales — covering occupier hazards, building fabric, compartmentation and suppression.