It’s the 16th of may 1968 and emergency workers are attending
a strange event in Canning Town in Newham, East London.
The call for the London ambulance London fire
brigade and met police is to a brand new apartment block.
At only 3 months old the building is not yet fully occupied,
the residents here are housed by the local council and the type of building
they are in has been considered a golden bullet of social housing.
The call out is to Ronan point and it has partially collapsed.
The event would change the attitudes towards prefabricated concrete high rises in the UK,
a common sight along the city’s skyline during a period known as the post war baby boom.
My name is John and today we will be looking at the Ronan point disaster.
Background
Our story starts 20 years before and a problem for the post war British society, housing.
Most cities across the country had felt the wrath of German
bombing raids with thousands of houses damaged beyond repair.
Much of the inner city housing was Victorian 2 up 2 down terraces,
a hangover from the notorious slums which had filled Dickens stories.
They were at the time considered undesirable and an ineffective use of space housing, but
now just piles of bomb damaged rubble, many local authorities
saw this as an opportunity to carve out a new and futuristic urban utopia.
Many councils thought about a possible remedy, How about moving people away from
the cramped Victorian slums and into new spacious estates, well where does one find space to build,
instead of long rows of terrace houses, architects looked to go up rather than out.
If planned correctly high rise blocks could have similar square footage to a small terrace,
and once all the garden space is taken away to be replaced with communal areas,
the overall space available to residents would be greater.
The new towers were to be easy and quick to make due to prefabricated building methods,
and thus able to transform social housing stock to a community and socially focused ideal.
Things like streets in the sky were envisioned as
a modern take on the old fashioned neighbourhood community feeling.
This was the era that fostered a greater societal safety net such as
the NHS and nationalised British Rail, after all.
I suppose the optimistic feeling must have blinded architects to the nightmare this
type of social housing would turn into, when it was discovered that tower blocks enclosed
walkways and open space that separated them would become a breeding ground for crime.
Any ways this utilitarian design style was called britalisim, and would become a hall
Mark of British design in the 1950s/1960s.
The Essex town of Harlow would welcome the uk's first residential tower block in 1951.
And many more throughout the country for the next 10-15 years would be thrown up.
The cheapness and ease of construction found its way
to a new residential estate in newham east London.
Ronan point
Newham council was birthed in 1965, it was the result of a montage et
tiour of 3 previously independent county boroughs, East Ham West Ham and woolwich,
the new local authority completely enveloped east and West Ham but
only a part of Woolwich in the form of the borough north of the river thames.
Which is around here on a map.
This brand spanking new borough although still in its packaging box had old problems, housing,
it had 9,000 people on the waiting list for social housing.
As such it sought out to try and solve this new problem with new housing projects.
Many, roughly a ¼ of the boroughs housing stock had been bomb damaged with the
remaining not meeting modern standards, many had no running water and electricity,
rather than retrofit, demolition and re construction was the plan.
Up to the 1960s much of the councils construction projects were of 2 story
houses and 3 story flat blocks, well built and utilitarian they were good
but the required skill to build them was lacking in the country.
The skill drain can be traced back to the war where many of the
previous generation of bricklayers, carpenters and builders were lost.
Just look at post war houses to pre war houses,
gone were bay windows and ornate woodwork my house is a pre war construction.
A new radical and easy to build method was required, the problem wasn’t unique and as
we saw earlier had been apparently solved with implementation of high rise buildings.
The council’s architects looked at two prefabricated concrete building systems, one
by French engineer Raymond Camus, and another by Danish civil engineering company Larsen & Nielsen.
Both systems made use of off site prefabricated concrete panels to be slotted in together much
like a store bought garden storage cabinet this was called Large Panel System building.
Out of the 2 methods the Larsen and Nielsen system made use of the least amount of skilled labour.
To use the system for the new development the council had to
work with The uk licence holder Taylor Woodrow-Anglian ltd.
Now there was a financial benefit to building as tall blocks as possible,
this came about from the Housing Act 1956,
this introduced subsidies to local councils for every floor that was built over five storeys.
Taylor Woodrow Anglian insisted on using a structural engineer called
Phillips consultants ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of Taylor Woodrow Anglian.
To add further conflict of interest, Phillips were
hired for the design and construction of the foundations solely by Newham council,
but were employed by Taylor Woodrow and Anglian directly for the actual building construction.
The contract for 9 blocks was set at £5 million roughly 500k per tower.
Ronan Point was to be the second building in this contract and construction started in 1956.
The tower was to be 200 ft tall,
and contain 110 flats over 22 floors and was built upon parking areas below.
Each flat had a number of mod cons including underfloor heating, gas,
running water and electricity.
The structure relies on load bearing concrete panels, these consist of spine walls that make
the main corridor, in addition to these, a number of ‘cross’ walls at
right angles to them and the ‘flank’ walls that form the end faces of the tower block.
The jointing between walls and floor panels is fundamental to the integrity of the structure,
each load bearing wall is eight feet high (one storey height), nine feet wide,
and six to seven inches thick, and are factory made of solid strong concrete.
The floors are built of precast concrete slabs, each, except for the corridor floors,
about thirteen or fifteen feet long, nine feet wide, and seven inches thick,
unlike the walls these are reinforced and lighted by a number of circular cores.
To keep the whole structure together a couple of types of joints are employed:
vertical joints between the adjoining wall panels use overlapping U-shaped steel rods
which a vertical steel rod is threaded. The whole joint is then concreted iu-situ.
The horizontal joints between floor slabs the space between adjoining slabs is filled
with in-situ concrete into which a short steel rod is placed over the supports.
The horizontal joints in the load-bearing cross walls at floor level have ‘nibs’
projecting from their ends that rest upon a shelf near the top of the wall panels,
and the space between the ends of the opposing floor slabs is filled with in-situ concrete.
Metal tie plates are at intervals along these joints to help to tie
the floor slabs to the lower wall panels. When done correctly all these joints should
ensure a strong and stable building. There were garbage chutes that connected
each floor and staircases and lifts were provided as well, it would take Taylor
Woodrow Anglian roughly 2 years from start to final handover of Ronan point.
The council took control of the tower on the 25th March 1968,
and immediately started welcoming residents into their new high rise slice of living.
Even though we consider them ugly now, the novelty of living up in the sky drew a lot of people to
tower blocks, but this dream couldn't stay up in the clouds for too long, quite literally.
The disaster
It is 0545 16 May 1968 ronan point has only been open to residents for roughly 2 months, and the
occupant of corner flat 90 on the 18th floor has got up put on her slippers and dressing gown
and went into the kitchen to started filIng her kettle looking to make a cup of tea.
The resident of the flat Ivy Hodge lit a match to light her stove, the spark ignited a gas
explosion, hodge was blown across the room, in a later statement Hodge would recall ‘I
do not remember any more until I was on the floor’, looking at ‘flames on the ceiling’.
The explosion blew out flat 90’s flanking walls, which was supporting the weight of the
floors above it, this resulted in a progrsssive collapse of the south east wing of ronan point.
4 were killed in the collapse, luckily due to the time of day that the explosion happened,
most residents were in their bedrooms, and as the south east corner consisted
of mainly living rooms most were safely asleep away from the danger zone.
Also in a stroke of luck three of the four flats immediately above Hodge's were unoccupied,
further reducing casualties, on the night of the explosion there were
260 inside the building, on top of the 4 deaths 17 were injured.
Residents were evacuated and the block was closed to the public,
many of the inhabitants were rehomed in another towerlock half a mile away.
But how did this new block of flats fail so catastrophically,
especially from a gas explosion, which could always be a possibility.
Due to the numbers of other buildings constructed in a similar way the
UK government understandably wanted to discover how ronan point could have failed,
they commissioned an inquiry, led by Hugh Griffiths, QC.
Well they would find some very worrying short cuts made during Ronan points construction.
The cause
The investigation initially looked at naturally what caused the explosion.
It was discovered that Hodge had, upon moving in, brought a new stove with her.
This gas appliance was installed by a friend as a favour,
the investigation found the installation to be acceptable although eventually a
nut used to connect the gas line to the oven failed and thus caused the explosion.
But the main issue we need to look at was how did ronan point not survive the explosion.
Even the investigation stated this:
“The explosion was not of exceptional violence; the pressures produced were
of the order of 3-12 Ib./in.^; this is within the ‘normal’ range of domestic gas explosions.”
The root cause had to be in Ronan points construction.
Well it wouldn’t take long for investigators to find out that
the tower design was less than satisfactory.
It was discovered that the building had not been designed to withstand a progressive
collapse but it wasn’t required to in the regulations at the time:
“The Building Regulations and Codes of Practice do not take into account
the possibility of progressive collapse; neither did the designers of the building”
The inquiry however didn't say that there were any issues with the workmanship of ronan
point and as such thought the tower could be rebuilt, re strengthened and put back into use.
The inquiry put the blame squarely at the outdated building regulations,
which seemed to have not considered progressive collapses a thing.
This thinking was based on earlier tall buildings being made out of reinforced concrete and steel
frames which are much less susceptible to a house of cards like effect that ronan
point experienced, due to having multiple redundancies for the load to spread out.
The southeast corner of Ronan Point was rebuilt as a new section of apartments
then joined to the existing building by walkways.
Interestingly Ivy Hodge actually survived and moved into a new block, along with her oven which
also survived the explosion.
Many would refuse to move back into Ronan Point and instead be rehoused throughout the borough,
the event definitely worried the wider public to the risks of high rise flats.
Enter architect Sam Webb, someone who I think might pop up again on the channel in the future.
He became interested in ronan point and started investigations of his own, residents allowed
him into their flats to inspect the overall quality of the building and it was not good.
He found that ronan point swayed up to 150mm from the centre line in high winds, excessively
loading the building, which could eventually cause one of the vital panel bolts to fail.
Webb gave the reinforced Ronan point at best 15 more years before a total collapse would occur.
After years of convincing the council, evacuated the building in 1986,
Webb somehow managed to get ronan point dismantled carefully rather than by the
traditional blowing up demolition method, in order to forensically inspect the tower.
It was found that several joints were missing the concrete required to seal
connections, in some cases rubbish and newspaper was all that was found.
Lower load bearing concrete panels were found to
be cracked and multiple bolts were bent beyond comprehension.
The results made Webb’s predictions of 15 years seem way too optimistic,
it’s a miracle that ronan point was demolished when it did as just under a year later in October
1987 the great storm would hit, an event that would have most likely finished off ronan point.
The disaster ruined the public’s confidence in tower blocks, but hundreds still exist
across the country just look at many boughs of London, a 60s or 70s tower
block is certainly going to be in view. All videos on the channel are creative
commons Attribution-ShareAlike. Plainly difficult videos are
produced by me John, in a wet and windy suburban Southeast corner of London, uk.
Help the channel grow by liking commenting and subscribing! Check out my twitter
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thank you for watching!
https://ia800205.us.archive.org/29/items/op1268013-1001/op1268013-1001.pdf
https://www.towerblock.eca.ed.ac.uk/development/lodge-lane-new-addington