Bath's building stock looks nothing like a typical city in the south of England: this is a low-rise Georgian city protected as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, where uniform stone terraces and crescents have been converted into hotels, university buildings, spas, and multi-let offices rather than replaced by modern high-rises. That conversion is exactly where the risk lives — retrofitting fire and smoke dampers into ductwork run through 200-year-old masonry rarely gets easier with age, and a building's Georgian facade tells you nothing about the condition of what's ducted behind it. Every converted building still depends on those dampers to stop fire and smoke moving through ventilation between compartments, regardless of how protected the shell around them is.

A damper that's corroded, obstructed, or fitted decades ago to a standard nobody tests against anymore won't close when it matters, and in a heritage building that's usually discovered only during a fire risk assessment, an insurance renewal, or a change of tenant.