Steel Fire Escapes

Fire escapes that pass, first time

A fire escape is the one piece of steelwork on a building that has to be right. It carries people in the worst circumstances, it gets inspected, and if it is wrong it stops a building being signed off. We have been designing, making and fitting them for over thirty years, and the ones we install pass.

We work for landlords, managing agents, main contractors, schools, mills converted into flats, pubs, factories and private owners. Some jobs are a single straight flight off a first-floor fire door. Others are multi-storey structures with intermediate landings, turns and walkways feeding several exits.

What we design to

Escape stairs are governed principally by Approved Document B for means of escape and Approved Document K for the geometry of the stair itself — rise, going, headroom, handrail heights and guarding. In practice that means:

• Consistent rise and going through the whole flight, with no odd step at top or bottom
• Guarding height and infill spacing that will not allow a 100mm sphere to pass, where the building requires it
• Handrails at the correct height, continuous through turns, and graspable
• Landings sized so a door can swing without reducing the escape width
• Adequate escape width for the occupancy the building is signed off for
• Open-mesh or perforated treads so ice and standing water are not a hazard

If your building control officer or fire risk assessor has issued a specific requirement, send it to us with your enquiry. We would far rather design to their wording from the start than argue about it at inspection.

Finishes that survive a Yorkshire winter

An external staircase lives outside for decades. We finish ours accordingly.

• Hot dip galvanising — the default for external escape stairs. The whole fabrication is dipped after welding, so the coating gets inside the sections as well as outside. Effectively maintenance-free for decades.
• Galvanised then powder coated — where the stair is visible from the front of a building or has to match a colour scheme. You get the corrosion protection of galvanising with a finish in any RAL colour.
• Anti-slip nosings — yellow or black grit nosings on the tread edge, which most fire risk assessors now expect and which make a real difference in frost.

How a fire escape job runs

We survey every escape stair ourselves before we price it. There is no charge for this and it is not optional — the difference between a drawing dimension and the actual face of a mill wall built in 1890 is exactly where escape stairs go wrong.

After the survey you get a drawing and a fixed price. Once approved, fabrication typically takes two to three weeks depending on galvanising turnaround, and installation is usually a day or two on site. We fit with our own team, and we clear up after ourselves.

Repairs and replacement

Not every job is a new stair. We are regularly called out to escape stairs that have failed an inspection — corroded stringers, missing guarding, treads worn through, handrails that have been cut out at some point and never replaced. In many cases the structure is sound and the fix is a fraction of a replacement. We will tell you honestly which situation you are in. You can see fire escapes we have installed in our project archive.

Where we work

Our workshop is in Bradford and we install fire escapes throughout West Yorkshire — Bradford, Leeds, Halifax, Huddersfield, Bingley, Shipley, Ilkley, Skipton and Harrogate — as well as across Lancashire and North Yorkshire. For larger commercial contracts we travel nationally, and have installed escape staircases from Aberdeen to London.