“I thought to myself: I’m completely blagging this”

He eventually got his first taste of the industry he would come to love by way of an unpaid internship in fire safety. After a few more years and careers – including winning a scholarship to study evacuation modelling for large passenger ships, and a move to Turkey that was cut short by a failed military coup in 2016 – he landed the role that would determine his trajectory. 

He started with OFR Consultants as a fire engineer, which involves working with designers, architects, structural engineers and other teams to help design buildings that are safe from fire, Charlie explains. 

“I fell in love with the work, but the real spark came when I met my colleague, Mike Spearpoint. He had been a top fire engineering academic in New Zealand and he got me to look at fire safety in a very different way – as something you can quantify and model.” 

Charlie’s technical curiosity snowballed and Mike became Charlie’s industry supervisor for his PhD, which looked (in simple terms) at how to model fires in order to enhance fire safety design in residential buildings.

“I didn’t have a clue – I had to change that”

When Ashton Fire hired Charlie five years later, it was for his specialism in computer modelling the movement of smoke and heat around buildings, and of people as they evacuate spaces. 

“Originally, it was going to be me and maybe one or two others, just doing that,” says Charlie. “But fire engineers were so in demand that I ended up building a team and an office in Manchester and becoming a director.”