Colby Court Community Fire Station

Built in 2005, Colby Court Community Fire Station is located on the junction of Elswick Road and Rye Hill, on the western boundary of the city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The council wards encompassed within its boundary are Westgate, Benwell and Scotswood, Fenham, Wingrove and Elswick. It also covers two parliamentary constituencies, Newcastle Central and Tyne Bridge.

 

The station has two fire appliances and one specialist Emergency Tender, staffed by 64 full time fire-fighters and a large number of support staff. The personnel are our main asset and, in addition to responding to a wide range of emergencies, they undertake a substantial amount of Community Safety activities that are primarily aimed at preventing fires, deaths and injuries at incidents.

 

The station includes a Community Safety centre, housing the Community Safety Team, the Young Fire-fighters Association and the Arson Task Force. The former is a scheme to provide training and development opportunities to young people of Tyne and Wear principally through Fire Service related activities. The latter a partnership between the Fire and Rescue Service and the Police force with specific aims to drive down crimes such as arson and make the West End and the city of Newcastle a safer place to live and visit.

 

The Community Safety centre boasts a 200 capacity auditorium with state of the art IT presentation capabilities, a number of meeting rooms and a computer suite, including access to the Internet, to assist with further educational. This entire facility which has been designed to be fully accessible and hence, enable usage by all of our visitors, is within a fully functional community fire station.

 

The geographical area covered by this station is the most diverse in the fire service area. It consists of a large amount of residential property, ranging from the more socially deprived neighbourhoods located within isolated pockets to substantial commercial and industrial premises. We have two major hospitals, two universities, a large indoor retail shopping complex and a huge variety of entertainment establishments, a football stadium with a 55,000 capacity, a variety of metro and rail stations and track, plus other large typical city centre risks.

 

The population residing in the area, based on the 2001 Census, is 40,925 persons who are from various ethnic backgrounds. These include Anglo-Saxon’s (68.2%), non-UK origin (14.15%) and non-white (17.3%). There are 18,693 dwellings within the station area with approximately:

 

 

Single parent families occupy 8.6 % of dwellings, with 14.8% single pensioner households and 25.6% households with dependant children numbers

 

Levels of unemployment across this area vary from 10.6% for males to 5.0% for females. These figures reflect the socio-economic groups residing within individual neighbourhoods, which can be linked to the risk of dwelling fires occurring within the area. This is illustrated in the above map (the red indicates areas where the risk of having a dwelling fire is well above average, orange is above average, yellow is average, blue is below average and green is well below average).

 

With the station covering a major city complex as well as a highly populated residential area the population varies from night to day and depending on the day of the week as people enter and leave the city. The ‘west end’ of this area has historically been one of the busiest in the Tyne and Wear area for incidents and many initiatives have been set up in the preceding years to reduce the numbers. These initiatives have met with some success, however the amalgamation of two busy fire stations, which led to the opening of this new fire station, means that incident totals are much higher than those for the other Tyne and Wear fire stations.

 

If you wish to know more about the specific fire service issues in your area and how we intend to address these, details have been included in our Station Plan.