Welcome to The Fire House, a restaurant and bar located 300 meters down the road from Ringwood train station in Victoria, Australia.

The Fire House was once, a fire house, which was decommissioned in 1992 due to the size of the fire engines being produced and acquired by the Metropolitan Fire Brigade (MFB). It laid empty for 15 years without anyone knowing what to do with it before someone decided to turn it into a restaurant.

The bay doors area are unmistakable as the front of a fire house and are main feature of the main dining area, providing much natural light.  A lot of the natural features of a fire station seem to have been kept, such as the pole drop area for those fire calls late into the night on the top deck, along with what I can only assume was the old mess deck where fire crews would eat and chew the gristle of whatever incidents they had attend during recent tours, a vital coping mechanism for firery’s across the world.

The on duty manager, Andy, age 48, has worked there for 18 months and told me that the building is now registered as a historic building in Victoria, having been built in 1929. The Fire House now boasts a new bar area named St Florian after the patron saint of firefighters and is well worth a stop.