A major fire broke out this morning at the Kosher Kingdom supermarket on Golders Green Road, with about 100 firefighters and numerous engines tackling the blaze. The blaze produced heavy black smoke observable across North London, prompting warnings for residents to keep windows and doors closed.
Police and fire investigators now say the fire is not being treated as suspicious and is thought to have been caused by an electrical fault.
The fire started shortly before 7 am in a storage area behind the shop, which partially collapsed.
The supermarket itself and the rear warehouse area were affected, but flats above were safely evacuated, and no injuries have been documented.
Fire crews used turntable ladders, drones, and breathing apparatus to control the fire.
Investigators from the London Fire Brigade and Metropolitan Police say the fire was probably caused by an electrical fault, with early reports from a local resident suggesting an overheated fan on top of a fridge may have kindled the fire.
Police stress there is no sign of a targeted or deliberate act.
Golders Green Road and several adjacent streets remain closed, and traffic disruption has been reported on the A406 North Circular. Residents have been urged to avoid the area due to smoke and emergency operations.
The incident comes at a time of elevated tension in Golders Green following recent antisemitic attacks, but police have emphasised that this fire is not connected to any such incidents.
The police have said that it wasn’t suspicious. That does have a familiar ring to it, doesn’t it? And that line gets rolled out before the smoke has even cleared, and of course, people are right to notice the pattern because it’s a real one, but we have no evidence now that it was intentional.
However, you have to remember, particularly in communities that have been targeted before, people have learned to recognise when official language is being used to calm, not to inform.
The real issue isn’t ‘are they lying?’ It’s ‘are they being prematurely definitive?’ And yes, this happens all the time. Authorities frequently default to the safest public-order message until the fire investigators complete their work.
The supermarket was ‘their bread and butter.’ It was their core income, their lifeline, the thing they truly depended on, and of course, the police said it was an electrical fault – we must trust the police because they know best – well, now I’m rolling my eyes because when someone says ‘the police said so’ as if that resolves the matter – well, I’m still rolling my eyes because police forces make mistakes, miscommunicate, and sometimes protect their own reputation first.
Early explanations are frequently crafted to manage the public, not to reveal the full picture, and you can see this from Hillsborough to Post Office raids to everyday misreporting – trust has been eroded for a reason. So when a force says something like “electrical surge”, “medical episode”, or “no suspicious circumstances”, people don’t automatically believe it — because they’ve learned not to.
People are not being irrational; they’re doing what any community would do when a pattern of events is violent, repeated, and targeted, and when people see ambulances charred, synagogues attacked, people abused by passing vehicles, stabbings and murders, and fires that may or may not be arson, it becomes impossible for them to treat each new incident as an isolated ‘accident.’
This is how humans make sense of danger: pattern recognition, not blind trust in official statements.
When brutality, oppression, and hate‑motivated attacks cluster in time and place, people inherently join the dots. That’s not hysteria — that’s community threat assessment, and by what is happening to Jewish people in the UK at the moment, you might think that we are becoming a Nazi state, and Jewish people who question this is completely understandable, and it deserves a serious, structured explanation, rather than dismissal.
Jewish people don’t just forget the horrors that happened in World War II, so now they are reacting to a pattern of violence, intimidation, and social breakdown, and it’s not a wild claim when people are seeing ambulances burned, synagogues attacked, communities abused, stabbings, murders and fires because they don’t think in legal definitions, they think in lived experience and trajectory.
Our government might not consider this a Nazi state, but when Jewish people feel unable to wear a Star of David in public because of their fear of aggression, that is a deep warning sign of societal failure, and that fear is not imaginary.
It only takes one nutter lead, and then we’re all doomed!
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 