Garden centre reopens after 'dreadful' fire

A garden centre has reopened after a "dreadful" fire caused £350,000 of damage to stock and forced it to shut for six weeks.

Aylsham Garden Centre in Norfolk has welcomed customers again after an extensive clean-up operation following the blaze in February.

Store manager Brenda Groucott said: "The smoke and soot damage was just everywhere. [It was] absolutely dreadful."

Norfolk Fire Service said an investigation had not confirmed the exact cause, but that it did not believe it was arson.

Fire crews from Aylsham and Sprowston were sent to the edge-of-town site shortly before 07:00 GMT on Sunday, 15 February.

Groucott said the fire could have been much worse and she has praised a colleague for closing doors behind him, which helped keep the fire to a minimum.

She said: "Thankfully, the fire wasn't huge and it put itself out, but the smoke and soot damage was absolutely just everywhere.

"We had to throw all of our indoor stock away.

"It could have been much worse because one of the doors in our staff room, where the fire began, is not a fire door.

"There's some wooden stairs that goes up into our attic and had the fire gone through that door and up the stairs, well, we probably wouldn't have a building left."

Groucott said the team at the Norwich Road site did a lot of the clean-up themselves, but professional cleaners also helped to get the premises open again.

However, some parts of the garden centre, such as the farm shop, remain closed as work continues to repair the site.

"It is cleaner now than it probably has ever been," said Groucott.

"We've had fantastic support from all our local customers and our team here have been fantastic, doing things that they never dreamed they would be doing - cleaning, polishing, moving stock."

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