Villagers devastated by fire on UK’s hottest day call for more action on climate change
Residents have told of the moment a devastating fire ripped through their homes in an east London village – and how they believe it could have been avoided.
Landlord Walter Martin was inside the pub Lennards in Wennington on Tuesday afternoon when he received a phone call from a neighbour asking whether the building was on fire.
“He said ‘There’s smoke coming out the back of your pub, have you got a fire’ and I said ‘No’,” the 61-year-old told The Independent.
“I walked the 400 metres down to the fire station and the first house I saw, the smoke was coming out.
“The fire jumped all over the place. A beautiful house, about 200 years old, it literally just went up.”
Mr Martin described how the tight-knit community desperately tried to fight the blaze as it rapidly spread.
“We are stubborn,” he said. “We were going try and put it out. There’s an old boy down there who saved his home – he refused to leave. He used a hose.
“The farmers were trying to hose down the grass and trees to stop it from reaching here and B&P metals had big tankers of water and they wet all the fields down and that stopped a lot of it.
“Everyone helped pitch in; all the young fellas got the hoses out and helped the firefighters roll them down the road when they arrived.”
Mr Martin, who was at Lennards with his wife and two daughters on Wednesday, said the pub’s cleaner Lynn was forced to evacuate her home with her husband, who has a lung condition.
“She just collapsed,” he said. “Everything is in her house. Her house is her castle.
“It’s devastating; you hear about it happening in places like Australia and California but you never expect it to be on your own doorstep. Fire is terrible. Fire is a wipe out.”
His daughter Tara Martin, 24, immediately flew back to London from Galway with her mother and younger sister when they learned of the fire. She believes the government should be doing more to tackle the climate crisis.
She told The Independent: “When I saw Lynn’s house on TV I came back for her and my Dad.
“Me and my sister just automatically locked eyes and said ‘It’s global warming, it’s the climate crisis’.
Sumi Begum, 24, said she was ‘shaking’ when she found out the house she shares with 11 relatives had gone up in flames
“This could’ve been avoided. This is a tiny town on the outskirts of London; this could’ve been avoided.”
One woman, who described the “apocalyptic” scene as she raced to rescue horses from her farm, said she only learned her house had managed to escape the fire almost 24 hours later.
“I’ve got a lot of animals so I managed to get them out but I didn’t know until two hours ago that my house was actually OK,” she said.
“We thought it was all gone, the farm. It got to the corner of our field and then the wind changed. It’s a miracle.
London experienced its worst day for fires since the Second World War as the UK was hit by record 40.3C heat
Residents evacuated during a devastating fire in Wennington, east London, prepared to return to the scene to assess the damage on Wednesday evening
