What is an escape route?
An escape route is the protected path people follow to leave a building in a fire — from the room they are in, through corridors and stairways, to a final exit.
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<img src="https://fireoptix.co.uk/glossary/escape-route/diagram.svg" alt="escape route — diagram from FireOptix" width="880" height="620" loading="lazy">
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<a href="https://fireoptix.co.uk/glossary/escape-route">What is an escape route?</a> — diagram by
<a href="https://fireoptix.co.uk">FireOptix</a>
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</figure>What makes it an escape route rather than a corridor is protection: fire-resisting construction and doors that keep fire and smoke out of it for long enough to be walked down.
Routes are signed and lit so they can be followed by someone who does not know the building and cannot see well through smoke. Signage that has been moved, removed during decoration or obscured by new fittings quietly undoes that.
Routes are also the first place a building's day-to-day life encroaches. Deliveries, furniture, bicycles and waste accumulate in corridors because they are convenient, and each one narrows the route it sits in.
In practice
A corridor that is clear at nine in the morning.
By three in the afternoon there is a pallet of stock in it, delivered at lunchtime, to be put away tomorrow.
Escape routes do not fail by design, they fail by accumulation, and the time of the inspection determines what it finds.
An inspection regime that always walks at the same hour is surveying the same building every time.
What goes wrong in practice
- Storage in a protected corridor, added gradually so no single item looks like the problem.
- Signage removed or painted over during refurbishment and never reinstated.
- A route that depends on a door held open by a wedge to be usable at the speed people expect.