Kingston Market Fire: What Happened, and What It Means for the Town Centre

The Kingston Market fire in the early hours of Tuesday 6 October destroyed stalls that have traded in Market Place for generations. We run offices a few minutes away on London Road, so this is our town centre too, and like everyone else here we have spent the last two days watching the cordon and reading the same fragments. This is what has actually been confirmed, what the market is, and how the traders can be helped.

What is confirmed

London Fire Brigade took the first of six calls at 4.33am. Four fire engines and around 25 firefighters were sent, with crews from Kingston, Surbiton, New Malden and surrounding stations, and the fire was out by 6.08am. A range of market stalls were destroyed. The fire also damaged the fascia of a number of properties and a small part of the roof of a neighbouring property. Eight people were evacuated from the area by the Metropolitan Police and there are no reports of any injuries.

The brigade's own incident report says the fire is believed to have been accidental and remains under investigation, and the Metropolitan Police have said it is not being treated as suspicious. Since then, London Fire Brigade has told the press that it believes the fire was started by a fridge with an electrical fault. It has not said where the fridge was, and the appliance still has to be checked by an electrical testing firm, so treat that as the likely cause rather than a confirmed one. One correction worth making: the fire started before dawn, not in the late afternoon, and some early coverage had that wrong.

A market that has been there for more than 800 years

It is difficult to overstate how old this is. Kingston's Ancient Market is generally dated to around 1170, and Market Place has been the trading centre of the town since the Middle Ages, long before the borough had a shopping centre or a station.

The building the stalls sit under is the Market House, built between 1838 and 1840 to an Italianate design by Charles Henman Senior and now Grade II* listed. It was the town hall until the Guildhall opened in 1935, which is when it took its present name. The gilded statue of Queen Anne on the front is older than the building itself: it was carved in 1706 by Francis Bird, who was working on St Paul's Cathedral at the time, and it was carried over from the earlier town hall that had stood on the site since 1505. The borough owns the market, and Between the Bridges has managed it since April 2025.

There are 28 permanent stalls. That is the scale of what is at risk here, and it is a small enough number that the loss of several of them is felt immediately.

The traders

The trader most widely quoted has been Tim Meads of Webster's Fishmongers, who is 62 and started on the market at 18, so more than four decades in the same square. He told South West Londoner that his whole business had gone up in flames and that traders were not being allowed back to salvage stock. Namu, a Japanese street food stall, was reported destroyed, and neighbouring shopfronts including Greggs and Lush were badly scorched.

Kingston Council leader Andreas Kirsch said he was shocked and saddened, described the Ancient Market as central to the community, and said the council is prioritising the safety of the area and the recovery of the market. The council has published a statement with its updates, and the cordon has since been reduced so that fewer businesses are cut off.

How to support the traders

The practical answer is the dull one: keep spending money in Market Place. Several stalls are still trading, including Chilli Cha Cha and Rooster Run, and a number of the traders sell online, among them Olivier's Bakery, Thee Olive Tree, Exotic Tagine, PhoReal and Zoe's Flowers. A market recovers when people keep turning up to it, not when they wait for it to be finished.

What the Kingston Market fire means for the town centre

Kingston has had a good year as a place to do business. Unilever opened its UK and Ireland headquarters a few minutes from Market Place in July, which we wrote about in what a 1,200 person headquarters means for the borough, and that kind of move tends to be read as the measure of a town centre's health.

It is not, though, the whole measure. The reason people want to work in Kingston rather than commute through it is the ordinary texture of the place: the market, the river, the independents, somewhere to go at lunchtime that is not a chain. Offices follow that, not the other way round. Anyone deciding where to put a team looks at the town as much as the building, and a fire that takes out a third of a medieval market square is not a small thing for the centre, even for businesses with no connection to it.

That is the honest trade-off in a week like this. The commercial story in Kingston is genuinely strong. The thing that makes the commercial story work is more fragile than it looks.

Conclusion: the Kingston Market fire

Nobody was hurt, the cause looks like an electrical fault rather than anything deliberate, and the market has survived a great deal worse across eight centuries. What is not yet settled is how quickly the traders who lost everything get back into the square, and that part will depend on the council, the site's managers and how many of us keep buying from the stalls still standing. If you work in Kingston, what does your lunchtime look like this month?

We are on London Road and we have offices and serviced offices and co-working here. If you want to talk about workspace in the town, we have a cup of coffee waiting for you.

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