Swalwell Community Fire Station

Built in 2004/05, Swalwell Community Fire Station is located on Miller Lane, Swalwell on the western extreme of the Gateshead Metropolitan Borough Council area. It covers several Council Wards; Crawcrook, Greenside, Ryton, Rowlands Gill, Winlaton, Blaydon, Dunston, Swalwell and Whickham.

The station has two fire appliances and is staffed by 48 full time fire-fighters and 8 support staff. The staff are the main asset and, in addition to responding to emergencies, undertake a range of Community Safety (CS) activities that are primarily aimed at preventing fires and deaths and injuries in fires.

 

The station includes a Community Safety Centre which houses the Community Team, Centre Administrator, Young Fire-fighters Association (YFA), the Arson Task Force (ATF- a collaboration between Fire Brigade and Police personnel) and Gateshead Council Community Team. A further police presence in a local beat office is also contained within the Community Safety Centre making the station a ‘one stop shop’ for all the community’s safety and security needs.

 

The Community Safety Centre also boasts a 200 seat auditorium which has modern IT presentation capabilities, a meeting room and a computer suite, including access to the Internet, for further educational learning. This entire facility, which has been designed to be fully accessible and hence, enable usage by all of our visitors, is integrated within a fully functional fire station.

The geographical area served by Swalwell Fire Station, varies greatly from relatively affluent residential to light and heavy industrial. It also includes one of Britain’s largest out-of-town shopping complexes, the Metro Centre in addition to relatively large tracts of rural land.

 

The population, based on the 2001 Census, is 66,573 persons who are predominantly from Anglo-Saxon background with a relatively small ethnic group (0.59%). There are 27,693 dwellings within the Station area with approximately: -

 

 

Single parent families occupy 3.5% of dwelling, with 16.1% single pensioner households.

 

Levels of unemployment across this area vary from 18.8% to 7.1% for males and 7.6% to 3.7% 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 where 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.

 

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.