SOCIAL MEDIA ZEITGEIST

 

Without a doubt, the fire on the night of 14 June 2017 at Grenfell Tower in North Kensington is one of the saddest and destructive moments in the history of urban development; the poignant loss of life – 72 people of all ages were killed and a further 74 hospitalised. The thought of those poor people trapped on the upper levels of the building unable to find a path to safety in time to save themselves and their families still haunts – pensioners and children among them.

And with the publication of the enquiry findings, the truth that we already knew is now fully evident. It is the design and construction industry that caused this, our industry – its decision makers, suppliers and practitioners. It is shameful.

We have already seen some significant and painful repercussions as the politicians and the markets made their own kneejerk responses in the form of increased Public Indemnity insurance premiums, blanket bans on combustibles in construction for tall buildings, apartments that have become unsellable – financial chains around the necks of first-time buyers. And now that we have a fuller picture of the events and protagonists that led to the fire – the political and commercial interests, the overworked bureaucrats, and undertrained design professionals – rest assured, there are going to be a whole lot more repercussions to come.

 

Grenfell Tower is part of the Lancaster West Estate in an area of the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea that was traditionally known as Notting Dale. Like many poor working class neighbourhoods of post-war London, the area was run down, overcrowded, and still riddled with unrepaired bomb damage – and so plans were put in motion to redevelop the blocks of old Victorian terraces between Blechenden Street, Brandon Street, Hurstway Street, Testerton Street, and Lancaster Road. The private architectural firm of Clifford Wearden was appointed in 1963 to draw up a masterplan for the redevelopment of the site as council housing.

 

Wearden brought in young architect Peter Deakins to help with the project, who was fresh from working with Chamberlin, Powell and Bon on the plans for the Barbican and the Golden Lane Estate in the City. The first drawings submitted to the Borough were ambitious – a mixed use extravaganza of utopian municipalism featuring high walkways, shopping malls, leisure centres, swimming pools, gardens, schools and places of work. Of course, these concepts were ultimately rationalised to a simplified arrangement, three finger blocks of housing culminating in Grenfell Tower to the north of the site, a proposal that was signed off by the newly formed Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea in 1967. Construction was completed in 1974.

“I don’t see it as utopian really, as it was clearly very achievable. (The Kensington Council Housing Committee) seemed from all the newspaper reports to be quite horrified. Because it was so new, not what they were expecting, it was not a neat and tidy, cheap little council estate. The scheme that is now existing falls far short of what we hoped to achieve. All the amenities weren’t there…and essentially people don’t want to spend their tax money on helping other people.” – Peter Deakins.

 

The design of Grenfell Tower was assigned to another young Architect in Wearden’s firm, Nigel Whitbread – there is a great interview with Nigel on the website of Constantine Gras, a community artist who was working with the development team during the refurbishment of the tower before the fire.

“Grenfell tower is a flexible building although designed for flats. You could take away all those internal partitions and open it up if that’s what you wanted to do in the future, This was unusual in terms of residential tower blocks. I also don’t know of any other council built tower block in London or anywhere else in England that also has the central core and six flats per floor rather than four flats which is typically done on the London County Council or Greater London Council plans.” – Nigel Whitbread

The fist council tenants were, by all accounts, thrilled with their new homes – anecdotally describing them as “palaces” – with large separate living rooms, private bathrooms, and multiple bedrooms – a far cry from the shared run down old terraces that were provided to them on the private market at a cost per room by London’s notorious slum landlords of the era. There is an informative documentary aired by the BBC in 2018 called Before Grenfell: A Hidden History, which delves into the historical social urbanism of the area, its residents, and the class issues associated with development in North Kensington – no longer available on iPlayer, you can still watch it on Dailymotion. It includes an interview with Peter Deakin, the estate’s original masterplanner.

 

Like many of the council estates that were built in the sixties and seventies public housing boom – by the eighties, Lancaster West soon became neglected through lack of maintenance and management.  The political mood had changed, and the new mantra was private housing and commercial development – there was no investment for council housing which had become regarded as an anachronism of past regimes. The cynical might say that they were allowed to become run-down for political reasons and to enable the market to step in. By beginning of the nineties, Right to Buy policies had fragmented the ownership model, with leaseholders of previous council stock being expected to contribute towards upkeep.

In 1996, The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea took the unusual step of transferring the responsibility of council housing care to the newly formed Kensington & Chelsea Tenants Maintenance Organisation (KCTMO). TMO’s are relatively common, but are most often given responsibility for looking after one estate, or block. The KCTMO, however, was charged with looking after the needs of all council properties in the borough, some 9,000 homes. The council did this in response to the government drive to introduce Compulsory Competitive Tendering (CCT) –  a policy that committed all councils to contract out management of their housing stock by 1999. The KCTMO exploited a loophole in this legislation, that effectively kept control of the maintenance and management within the borough.

By 2010 – when Grenfell Tower was over 35 years old – very little maintenance had occurred on the building – largely limited to security measures, creating card access to the building for residents. The windows were in need of replacing, as well as the central heating system. And so a pot of money, some £10 million, was allocated to the KCTMO to refurbish the tower.

The architectural firm Studio E were appointed to lead the design team which included Maxwell Fordham as sustainability engineers. A planning application was submitted in October 2012, and consented in January 2014, subject to a Section 106 agreement. The contractor Rydon won the contract to deliver the project, and construction began in 2015, with the project completed in July 2016, less than a year before the fire.

By all accounts the construction was problematic, with both Rydon and the KCTMO in the firing line from residents who had become fed up with the intrusion, and critical of the quality of the work. There is a 2021 Channel 4 documentary Grenfell: The Untold Story, that poignantly documents this period of negotiation in an clear and open way, as much of the project development had been filmed by Constantine Gras – his work becoming a more useful document than the KCTMO could have ever imagined.

The works comprised the removal of the entrance walkway to create a new public entrance and reception at ground floor; refurbishment of the lower amenity levels to offer reconfigured office facilities, nursery school, and boxing gym; infill of podium voids to provide new housing at the lower levels; replacement of the central heating system throughout the building; replacement of all the windows; and the addition of over-cladding to the concrete façade.

 

Of course, there has been much discussion about the façade over-cladding, the ultimate cause of the extended fire, and its reasons for being part of the design brief. Maxwell Fordham’s sustainability report from August 2012, makes the rationale quite clear:

“Grenfell Tower currently suffers from chronic overheating in the summer… The wall construction of Grenfell tower is a solid concrete construction. Insulation is provided by a 12mm layer of insulation bonded to the rear of the integral plaster board lining… Improving the insulation levels of the walls, roof and windows is the top priority of this refurbishment. Improving the insulation levels on a solid wall construction is always best done from the outside of the wall. This solves several issues with thermal bridging and interstitial condensation… The chosen strategy is to wrap the building in a thick layer of insulation and then over-clad with a rain screen to protect the insulation from the weather and from physical damage.” – Max Fordham, 2012

Now, there are many of us who love the authenticity, historic relevance, and formal composition of concrete brutalist structures of this era – but there are also many who don’t. The “beautification” of the tower was also an issue that carried the proposal through planning – and in reading the published engagement reports provided by the design team as part of the planning application, it seems that there was little in the way of objection to the cladding proposals at the time. However the planning application proposed zinc cladding, and this is what was consented:

“The over-cladding works are an integral part of the upgrade to the heating of the building, while also being a complete overhaul to its appearance. New windows will deliver improved thermal performance and better functionality. The existing windows are 40 years old and at the end of their design life…A zinc composite rainscreen cladding is proposed to the upper levels.  Zinc has the advantage of being a self-finished natural material that will not corrode or weather as a coated finish eventually would. It offers a clean appearance, crisp detailing at joints and an attractive dull lustre.” – Studio E, 2012

As we now know – this specification was later changed, swapped out to aluminium composite cladding panels for a cost saving of £293,368. It is this single value engineering decision that cost the lives of so many people, and it is this one specification that has been the subject of the Public Enquiry that has cost the British Government more than £200 million. In fact the total direct public costs of that decision is estimated to be over £1.2 billion so far including compensation and rehousing – and that does not include the knock on effects to the wider economy.