francisbyng

OK, many thanks for your advice Your point is now being taken up with the building inspector so I expect all will be determined one way or the other soon Cheers

Thanks for your advice. I have now looked up the "escape routes through other occupancies" paragraph the Building Regs. I am not sure anyone involved here is aware of this. We have not been in contact with Building Control ourselves but I think our landlord has so it's surprising this hasn't come up already. Is the "no escape route through other occupancies" and absolute prohibition in your experience? It would be good to know before suggesting to our landlord that he needs to clarify the position.

Hi there Would be grateful for some advice. We have a small shop selling gifts and home accessories which occupies the front (street facing) quarter of a 250 sq m ground floor property. The premises used to be a garage and has old, heavy folding garage doors across the front giving on to the street. The building is Grade 2 listed and we are further restricted by being in a conservation area and in a National Park. At the moment our customers enter and exit the our shop via one "leaf" of the folding doors - approx 700mm wide but this is inward opening. The shop is not deep (6m) so we regard this single exit as sufficient Fire Exit for our small space at present. However there is a proposal by our landlord to develop the rear of our premises into another shop and/or cafe. It will have its own street entrance and exit to the rear but due to the size of the premises it will also require a separate Fire Exit through the rear of our shop and out through our final exit door to the street. The design of the current garage doors means it is impractical to make our exit door outward opening without major work.. Is it inevitable that we (and/or our landlord) will be obliged to find some way to remodel the current garage doors to make our final exit door outward opening and of sufficient size?