Experts in fire engineering consultancy

To fully address life safety, property protection and design aspirations, your scheme needs a unique, holistic, creative approach to developing a simple, yet robust, fire safety solution.

From inception to completion… and beyond

Your needs for fire safety advice may be wide ranging. Our involvement includes the full scope of each project, from concept to completion, and further, to occupation and continued operational management. Our clients find this level of continued engagement reassuring, as time passes people change and the risk of knowledge being lost is high.

For multiple building portfolio clients such as The National Museums of Scotland, Bruntwood and The London Clinic, we provide a complete consultancy service. This includes design of new build and refurbishment projects, interfacing with multiple design teams and helping the client with their ongoing building management.

We listen and consult to fully understand the design aspirations for your development, and we will facilitate these through imaginative and innovative fire engineering techniques, often working beyond the boundaries of prescriptive code guidance. Our pioneering work at the Louvre Abu Dhabi has enabled the display galleries to remain ‘un-sprinklered’, enabling the vision of the client in retaining the aesthetic purity, but requiring extensive risk analysis and negotiations with the approval authorities.

Image: Battersea Power Station. Our fire engineering team conducted detailed analysis to develop key fire engineering solutions, such as the bespoke design of the smoke control system for the three-storey Turbine Hall retail malls.

Our fire engineering consultancy services:


  • Fire strategy design, from feasibility through to completion
  • Fire safety analysis, including smoke control, radiation analysis and dynamic evacuation modelling
  • Structural fire engineering to optimise efficiency of applied structural fire protection
  • Development of fire safety management strategies to assist client operation of buildings
  • Specialist fire safety system design advice
  • Fire risk assessments
  • Diagnostics, Inspection & Remediation

Working with other specialists – the sum is greater than the parts

Collaboration with other Buro Happold specialist engineers brings additional dimensions to our work. Our feasibility study for the installation of new firefighting facilities into the Grade 1 listed Natural History Museum in London has required a careful integration of fire strategy, building services and heritage architecture. In leading this process we enabled our client to achieve a practical and sympathetic solution for this unique building and its irreplaceable contents.