Once again an historic Bradford building has gone up in flames.

The fire that gutted Victorian Thompson’s Mill in Tetley Street on Tuesday evening mirrors the even worse blaze in the area on the last day of August 2007, which led to the demolition of an entire block of buildings.

Fire seems to be Bradford’s seminal image – from the £1m blaze that unaccountably blitzed the empty Debenham’s building on Manningham Lane in August 1979, the fires that badly damaged Eastbrook Hall and the Bradford Playhouse, the Bradford City Fire Disaster in May, 1985, which killed 56, to the Arson of the 1995 and 2001 riots.

There was a time when schools were regular targets of arsonists. The frequency of those fires appears to have diminished, but, every so often, as today’s round-up in the T&A shows, a big mill burns.

Some of those fired have been attributed to rubbish being set alight. Four years ago, John Brownbridge, the-then head of the fire service’s Shipley-based Arson Task Force, said rubbish fires accounted for 44 per cent of calls attended by crews in the Bradford District between April 2006 and April 2007.

The past couple of years has seen spectacular and potentially ruinous mill fires: l In April this year, 80 firefighters were called to a blaze at Prospect Mill, off Thornton Road. Police later said the fire was being treated as arson.

l In January this year, fire crews from across West Yorkshire were needed to fight the inferno that destroyed a large part of Grade-II listed Dalton Mills in Keighley.

l In August last year, Skipton Properties managing director Brian Verity publicly denied his company was connected with the fire that destroyed the top three floors of Haworth’s Ebor Mill. He took this step after hearing that a YouTube video was making the allegation.

Mr Verity said: “I find these accusations appalling and that anyone could think that we would be involved in not only the destruction of a beautiful mill, but also in the potential loss of 40 jobs...”

Whether by accident or design, there have been a lot of bad blazes over the years. In 2008, for example, West Yorkshire Fire Service logged 3,065 deliberate fires across the Bradford Metropolitan District.

“But the number has fallen,” said Shivdev Singh, the force’s Arson Risk Reduction Co-ordinator. “Last year there were approximately 2,680.”

“I would put that down to the work of the Arson Task Force and the work we do with the West Yorkshire Police, Incommunities, Bradford Council, local schools and youth groups,” he adds.

The Arson Task Force has three officers. Their job is not to rush out with hose pipes and hatchets every time a fire occurs, but to follow up after fire-fighting colleagues have done their work.

Mr Singh, who has been in the service for six years, says: “We take all fires very seriously. Once we have identified an area of concern, we will do a community audit to identify properties at risk of anti-social behaviour.

“The majority of fires are started deliberately by young people. It could be from boredom, it could be from peer pressure.

“With mill fires, we try to get buildings secured. These empty properties are magnets for crime and anti-social behaviour and could be a strain on our partners and our resources.

“Once we have voiced our concerns with owners, they do try to put things in place as fires can have an environmental, economic and a community impact.

“We try to get local communities to take responsibility for their environment and report Fly-tipping and anti-social behaviour. Fly-tipping can be combustible material for the arsonist.”

Detective Chief Inspector Mark McManus, of West Yorkshire Police’s Bradford South Division, says there isn’t a serial arsonist at large.

“We had a few fires in Holme Wood last year. We managed to catch and convict those reposible. But other fires that have happened since are not linked,” he says.