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The flames were bursting out of the front door by the time firefighter Steve Ladley arrived at the scene. Every one of the house’s three storeys was already alight, and the heat was so intense that the plastic on the balcony had begun to liquify and cascade onto the concrete below. Occasionally, small explosions would burst from the first floor. In almost 20 years of service in the London Fire Brigade, he had never seen a house fire like it.
It was just days before Christmas 2024. Seven minutes earlier, Ladley had been sitting at Greenwich fire station, coffee in hand, fantasising about the imminent end of his shift. Then, the last-minute call came in: a fire at a house in Catford. On the ride over, more calls came in about the growing inferno, and the team scrambled to put on their breathing apparatus. “All the warning signs were there,” he recalls. “My first thought when we arrived was, ‘How the bloody hell has this fire got to this point before we're even here?’”
Footage of the fire in Catford shared with The Londoner (Video: London Fire Brigade)
When Ladley scouted the back of the building, it became apparent that this was quite literally a matter of life and death. Two of the home’s residents, trapped in the attic as the stairs collapsed, had been forced to flee through the skylight onto its almost vertical slanted roof. One had slipped and fallen to the ground, and was now unresponsive. The other was still trapped on the roof in the midst of a plume of toxic smoke billowing from the skylight. “That was when the situation went from a seven to a ten,” he recalls.
As Ladley’s team rushed to fetch a ladder, he tried to convince her to move away from the flames, despite the risk of her slipping. Scrambling up the ladder as it arrived, he managed to grab her just as she lost her footing and fell. “I was hanging off a ladder with this lady hanging off of me on the top of a third floor townhouse that was on fire,” he recalls. “It was an unimaginable amount of luck.”
Footage of the fire in Catford shared with The Londoner (Video: London Fire Brigade)
What Ladley didn’t know at the time was that the reason this fire was so fierce and fast-spreading was that it was an e-bike fire — and that soon, he’d be seeing a lot more of them. Just a few weeks later, in fact, the firefighters at Greenwich station would be called out to another e-bike fire where someone died.
The issue is now an epidemic, driven by the huge boom in the popularity of e-bikes and e-scooters within the capital. The Londoner has discovered that the vehicles have been linked to a staggering 556 infernos in just the last three years, with 206 seen in 2025 alone (the highest rate on record). Just five years prior, the figure was 31. And they now account for a fire brigade call-out every other day.
The fires caused by their lithium-ion batteries can burn as high as 700 degrees Celsius, spread within seconds and are almost impossible to put out. There are no warning signs before they ignite. As the infernos rage, they release toxic gases that can cause explosions and even heart failure to those exposed. To date, e-bikes and scooters in the capital have killed six Londoners (none of whom owned the vehicle in question) and left hundreds more with life-changing injuries.
To understand more about what’s behind the fires, we spent the last week speaking to firefighters, NHS staff, and the friends and families of those who have died. We were left with a worrying question: is the city’s love affair with cheap electric vehicles putting it at risk?
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