BUTLERS FARMHOUSE CHEESES STILL FEELING THE HEAT NEARLY THREE YEARS AFTER DEVASTATING FIRE
The devastating fire at Butlers Farmhouse Cheeses in November 2023 is back in the news again, this time for the royal opening of the Lancashire cheesemaker’s gleaming new cheesemaking campus, complete with a visit from King Charles III. But behind the ribbon-cutting lies a much longer, harder story of recovery from the devastating fire that tore through Butler’s Shay Lane site in Longridge, and it is one that is far from over.
It has been reported in newly filed accounts for the business that, nearly three years on, Butlers is still trading at only around 60 per cent of pre-fire levels. Turnover for the year to September 2025 came in at £18.2m, only a modest rise on the £16.9m recorded the previous year, and the company posted a pre-tax loss of £608,000. Fourth-generation owner Matthew Hall has been candid about the scale of the challenge, describing the past year as one of resilience rather than resolution, and warning that the effects of the fire are expected to continue for several years yet.
This is the reality that rarely makes the headlines. The fire destroyed the cutting, packing, warehousing and office facilities at Shay Lane, and while the company's separate dairy site kept production alive, rebuilding capacity has taken years rather than months. Securing planning permission for the new £15m cheesemaking campus was not achieved until February 2025, over a year after the blaze, and the acquisition of Hampshire Cheese Company in February 2024 was needed just to shore up soft cheese capacity in the interim. The new facility on the farm may look like a phoenix moment, but it was built on the back of a prolonged financial and operational struggle.
Butlers is far from alone in discovering that the road back from a major fire is measured in years, not weeks. A fire at the Baldock Industrial Estate in Hertfordshire in July 2023 destroyed more than 40 business units, and more than a year on, affected business owners were still waiting for the site to be cleared, let alone rebuilt. With 17 different owners across the estate, agreeing a way forward proved as difficult as recovering from the fire itself, leaving traders in limbo and unable to return.
These cases illustrate a wider truth about fire recovery in unsprinklered buildings: the damage does not end when the fire is extinguished. Rebuilding, replanning and refinancing can drag on for years, hitting turnover, cash flow and jobs long after the story has left the news pages. The number of primary fires in industrial premises recorded as food and drink processing facilities has averaged 100 per year in England over recent years1
Sprinklers change that equation. Where fitted, they have been shown to contain, control or extinguish a fire in 99 per cent of cases in which they operate2, protecting stock, structure and, crucially, business continuity. Businesses with sprinkler systems typically find themselves back up and running within hours. Butlers' experience shows what the alternative can look like: years of reduced trading, financial losses, and a "next chapter" that has taken the best part of three years to write.
1 Primary fires in industrial premises, 2017-18 to 2021-22 – Home Office November 2022
2Efficiency and Effectiveness of Sprinkler Systems in the United Kingdom: An Analysis from Fire Service Data – Optimal Economics May 2017