The landlord of The Cellar House in Eaton has praised the actions of firefighters for swiftly containing a fire that broke out at the pub in the early hours of this morning.
The fire - thought to have been caused by a tumble dryer in an upstairs office - started shortly before 3am and was contained to the one room.
Two fire crews - from Earlham and Carrow - were at the scene for more than an hour and they used hose reel jets to put out the fire and a positive pressure fan to clear smoke from the property.
The Cellar House pub and restaurant is open as normal today, as is the Eaton Post Office, which is run from the pub.
'It is business as usual. We are open as normal because it [the fire] was contained upstairs,' said Grahame MacDonald, the landlord of The Cellar House.
'I would like to say a big thanks to the fire service. The firefighters were absolutely brilliant, and they were really helpful, calm and informative. They do a very good job, and a very dangerous job.'
Mr MacDonald said the alarm was initally raised thanks to an early morning delivery.
'We had a delivery from our bakers at 2.30am. They could smell burning and phoned 999,' he said.
'Because we are a post office, when the firefighters broke in to deal with the fire the security system was set off and my wife was contacted. I thought I was coming down to the pub because we had an intruder or it was a false alarm, and when I came here I was met with with something else.'
He said it looked 'like a scene from the film The Towering Inferno,' in terms of the amount of emergency services at the scene.
'There were firemen everywhere, hose pipes, ladders. I could not believe it,' he said.
Thankfully the fire was quickly contained.
'It could have been a lot worse, but I think there is a real message for people about the dangers of tumble dryers,' said Mr MacDonald, who also highlighted how actor Neil Morrissey had raised the issue of exploding tumble-dried tea towels following an incident at the Men Behaving Badly star's Staffordshire pub last year.
'There is this phenomena with exploding tea towels. It sounds like an April Fools but it's not,' he said.
'People need to be aware of the dangers of tumble dryers, whether it is exploding tea towels or overheating.'
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