Swindon, Wiltshire & Oxfordshire

Fire Safety Compliance & Maintenance in Highworth

Fire risk assessments, fire alarm servicing, fire door inspections and security maintenance for the shops, landlords, care providers and industrial occupiers of Highworth, Sevenhampton and Hannington.

Swindon Borough Council's conservation appraisal calls Highworth the highest town in Wiltshire, standing 133 metres above sea level. A listed High Street and Market Place sit at its centre, and the Blackworth Industrial Estate sits on the A361 Lechlade Road.

We travel from our Hayes head office along the M4 and the A361. IDS Global has traded since 2011 and is a member of the IFSM and the FPA.

Businesses and buildings in Highworth

Swindon's Local Plan designates Highworth town centre as a Primary Rural Centre. The August 2025 draft of the neighbourhood plan counts five pubs, two hotels, three supermarkets and two pharmacies, mostly along High Street, Market Place and Swindon Street, and places almost all commercial and service businesses inside the conservation area. Most High Street buildings began as dwellings and now have a shopfront on the ground floor.

Blackworth Industrial Estate is the main employment area. The plan's May 2022 list of occupiers includes heating engineers, steel fabricators, vehicle repairers, an electronic control equipment manufacturer, a furniture manufacturer, a food wholesaler and a Thames Water depot. Highworth has one infant, two primary and one secondary school. The Care Quality Commission lists Grove Hill Care Home, whose specialisms include dementia.

Fire Risk Assessments in Highworth

Behind the High Street, the appraisal describes narrow medieval burgage plots holding gabled stone extensions squeezed close to the buildings that front the street, reached through archways and alleys such as Gilbert's Alley and Blandford Alley. The rear of a shop, office or flat may be older than its frontage, and its escape route can run through one of these plots.

The appraisal names four three-storey buildings on the south side of the High Street, with the rest mostly two storeys. We assess a building like this as a whole, upper floors and rear routes included, and give the responsible person a ranked action plan.

Fire risk assessments

Fire Door Inspections in Highworth

The appraisal records that The Old Manor, dated 1656, was converted into a number of homes in 2004. The neighbourhood plan adds that commercial-to-residential changes of use yielded 18 units in permissions granted between 2017 and 2022.

Where flats share a stair with a shop or office, doors to the stair and to each dwelling protect the way out. We check leaves, frames, gaps, seals, closers and hinges and issue a photographic report. In older buildings we record each door and its condition, and leave decisions on repair or replacement to be agreed with the council.

Fire door inspections

Fire Alarm Servicing in Highworth and Blackworth

A steel fabricator, a vehicle workshop and an electronics manufacturer place different demands on detection, so a servicing visit should look at what each unit does, not only at the panel.

We test detectors, call points and sounders, check the panel and standby batteries, review whether devices suit the area they cover and update the log book. For Grove Hill and other premises where people sleep, we also record faults and false activations so that patterns show.

Fire alarm servicing

CCTV and Intruder Alarm Maintenance in Highworth

The neighbourhood plan lists vehicle recovery and storage, and car sales and servicing, among Blackworth's occupiers, so yards and forecourts matter as much as doors.

We service CCTV, intruder alarms, access control and gates: cleaning and re-aiming cameras, checking recording, testing detectors and batteries, and checking gate safety devices. Alarms can be linked to monitoring so that a call reaches a named keyholder.

CCTV, intruder alarm and access control maintenance

Highworth and Sevenhampton conservation areas

Highworth Conservation Area was designated on 8 October 1976 and re-designated in June 1990. The council's 2006 appraisal counts 84 listed buildings and says almost every building in the High Street, Market Place and Sheep Street area is listed. It describes a medieval planned town with a 13th century street pattern, and names the tower of St Michael's Church as a local landmark.

Sevenhampton Conservation Area, designated on 30 April 1990, covers almost 57 hectares, the largest in the borough. It has ten listed buildings and takes in the village, the grounds of Warneford Place and scheduled medieval remains.

Town centre policy and the neighbourhood plan

The first Highworth neighbourhood plan was made on 13 July 2017 for 2015 to 2026. A revised plan for 2021 to 2036 has followed. An examiner's report dated 6 July 2026 recommended that it go to referendum with modifications, including removing a proposed local green space on part of a former golf site.

The report notes that the adopted Swindon Local Plan dates from 2015 and that the council's review had completed a Regulation 18 consultation in September and October 2025. It also records that change of use from commercial premises to homes is permitted development, although the council must weigh the effect of a ground floor change on a conservation area.

The Blackworth employment area

The neighbourhood plan designates Blackworth Industrial Estate a Key Employment Area and supports Class E(g), B2, B8 and sui generis uses, with storage and distribution capped at 50% of permitted floorspace. Local Plan policy RA1 allocates land to the north for a 5 hectare extension.

MCR Property Group gives the estate as about 8.6 acres with 176,605 sq ft of industrial and warehouse space across four plots. The plan records that the TS Tech factory complex closed in August 2021, was sold in early 2022 to MCR and is occupied by Neptune Europe.

Recorded crime in the Highworth neighbourhood

We counted police.uk street-level crimes inside the published boundary of Wiltshire Police's Highworth neighbourhood for August 2025 to July 2026. The total was about 395: 163 violent crimes, 58 anti-social behaviour, 36 shoplifting, 34 criminal damage and arson, 15 vehicle crimes and 13 burglaries. Shoplifting ran at one to six records a month.

The boundary covers a wider area than the town centre, was simplified for the query, and police.uk anonymises locations, so the figures are approximate.

Services available in Highworth

Frequently asked questions

Which fire station covers Highworth?

Dorset & Wiltshire Fire and Rescue Service lists three wholetime stations in the area covered by Swindon Borough Council: Stratton, Swindon and Westlea. Its incident report for a kitchen fire on Vorda Road, Highworth, on 11 August 2021 records two crews from Stratton St Margaret attending.

Will the fire service attend an alarm at a Blackworth unit?

From 1 April 2024 the service attends homes, places where people sleep and identified higher-risk premises, plus any premises where a 999 call reports a fire. Low-risk commercial premises are not attended on an alarm signal alone, and the service says investigating the cause is the premises' responsibility. It recorded 1,946 unwanted signals from commercial premises in 2022/23. Agree who checks the panel and who dials 999.

Does a care home in Highworth need different alarm servicing?

The service still attends places where people sleep, so an activation at a care home is answered. The CQC lists dementia among the specialisms at Grove Hill Care Home. Servicing should cover every zone and the visual and audible devices, and record faults and false alarms so the manager can see patterns and respond before an inspection.

Can you service alarms and cameras in a listed building on the High Street?

Yes, we service existing systems. Almost every building in the High Street, Market Place and Sheep Street area is listed, according to the appraisal. We survey first, keep bell boxes and camera housings compact, route cable where it does least harm, and suggest you check with Swindon Borough Council before anything is fixed to a listed frontage.