The City and Volunteer fire brigades attended a huge fire at English’s timber yards. They could do little to stop a blaze that destroyed three saw mills, the engine and boiler house, three timber sheds; four cranes; eleven railway trucks and a multitude of other machinery and stock pieces across the near 2-acre site. The cost of the damage was estimated to be around £20,000 - a significant sum in 1886. (Mellows, W.T., ‘Peterborough Municipal Jubilee’, Peterborough Standard, 1924)

Taken from The Peterborough Book of Days by Brian Jones, The History Press, 2014.