FOCUS
Groundhog Day Fifty years on from the report into Ronan Point,
high rise fires are continuing and show how little has been
learned.Sam Webb strikes a warning note for the future
fi re has generated. We have been here before, not just with the Lakanal House fire in 2009, but well before that in 1968 with Ronan Point. The fault lies with politicians and law
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makers. The enormous pressure put on them by industry to deregulate and their willingness to let industry get on with the job has led to ‘Better Regulation’, a benign sounding term which nevertheless is misleading, and which affects us all. Fault also lies in the way those in authority seize on solving one problem when there are so many others that remain ignored.
Ronan Point: background
In the case of Ronan Point, it was the effects of fi re on the structure as a whole that got lost. The report was published the day Nixon was elected. That was a very good day to publish bad news.
In the midst of the historic events of 1968, a small gas explosion in flat 90, on the 18th
16 JULY/AUGUST 2018
www.frmjournal.com
OT SINCE the Titanic or Aberfan has a British disaster brought the worldwide media coverage that Grenfell Tower
fl oor of Ronan Point, a 22 storey block of system built fl ats in Canning Town, West Ham, brought down the south east corner. The MP for West Ham South, Attorney General Elwyn Jones QC MP, set up a public inquiry and immediately clamped down on all news, declaring the matter sub judice. The British government bided its time over publishing the Ronan Point Report, having seen the impact of the banning of gas in all large panel system buildings in August. It waited for the election of Nixon as US President in November 1968, in the hope the bad news would become buried. Ronan Point was originally designed as
one of four identical blocks of 110 fl ats, over an underground car park with a fl at concrete roof housing a children’s play space, made out of unforgiving bits of concrete with two raised grass beds and ‘keep off’ signs. The scheme was taken to the Ministry of Housing to see if it would receive loan sanction. The Ministry officials told West Ham that if they increased the number of fl ats to 1,000 instead of the planned 440 and considered using the newly created Taylor Woodrow Anglian system
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