The answer to which was this:

So I took the photos/video home and showed them to Julie (along with bread/chocolate), and then headed to my brother's for dinner.
And was then joined, forty* minutes later, by Nick, who lives rather closer to the blaze than I do, and had been told that going home was not an option. So came over and ate Meredith's delicious Japanese Quorn Stew Thing. And then hung out and chatted until eight o'clock, before we walked back together, to discover that things were largely under control, and the chances of him burning to death in his bed was acceptably low.
Incidentally, all of the news sites are saying that the building that burned down was a church. Which would seem reasonable when it looked like this:

But less likely when you see it from the other end and it looks like this:

I'm now not sure whether it was or not...
(Incidentally, isn't it awesome that I can take video on a phone, including zooming in on the interesting bits one-handed? I know I'm late to the party on that front, but still!)
*I just had to check whether it was "forty" or "fourty". Both of them now look wrong to me.
Original post on Dreamwidth - there are
2013-02-11 10:21 pm (UTC)
2013-02-11 10:45 pm (UTC)
2013-02-11 10:48 pm (UTC)
2013-02-12 02:51 am (UTC)
2013-02-12 04:36 am (UTC)
Edited at 2013-02-12 04:41 am (UTC)
2013-02-12 10:14 am (UTC)
2013-02-12 07:29 am (UTC)
2013-02-12 09:54 am (UTC)
By the shape of it and its off-the-main-road location I'd guess this one used to be a Nonconformist church of some kind -- no steeple, built of brick instead of stone, no Gothic appurtenances. I'm kind of surprised the building wasn't demolished and the site reused for flats during the housing boom of ten years back.
Edited at 2013-02-12 10:08 am (UTC)
2013-02-12 10:10 am (UTC)
Oddly, the site also seems to have been used as a meat packing plant.
2013-02-12 02:09 pm (UTC)