One man’s battle to improve tower block safety

A born storyteller, Mr Webb talks enthusiastically, often punctuating his points with a disbelieving laugh at the various examples of bad practice he has uncovered over the years.

He first became concerned about LPS blocks shortly after he qualified as an architect in 1962.

This was an era of mass construction, as the country rebuilt after World War II, and successive governments saw prefabricated tower blocks as a way of delivering hundreds of thousands of low-cost homes.

In 1964, Mr Webb’s first wife was a fourth-year student at the Architectural Association School of Architecture and her year visited an LPS site in Greenwich.

They arrived as a load-bearing wall was being lowered onto bolts designed to help hold it in place.

“They lower it down and it won’t fit on the bolts. So these men come out with these big steel chisels and hammers, and start chipping away. They lift it up, lower it down. It still won’t fit. So the foreman beckons to this man, who comes out with a sledgehammer, and he bangs the bolt flat.

“Quick as a flash one student says, ‘Excuse me, should you really be doing that?’ And they are all whisked off the site, put on the bus and sent back,” Mr Webb states, adding that “the penny dropped with us” about the risks posed by the buildings.

Together with his future business partner George Fairweather, Mr Webb began to question the safety of this form of construction. “We started collecting stuff on these systems,” he says. “We did talk to people about it; engineers and so on. Some engineers were a bit quizzical.

"Others embraced it. It was huge money for them. And everybody assumed that as the government was backing it, it had to be alright.”

But, as Mr Webb and a few others feared, it wasn’t alright. On 16 May 1968 there was a gas explosion in Flat 90, on the 18th floor of Ronan Point.

This blew out the load-bearing wall of the living room and bedroom, starting a progressive collapse in which four people were crushed to death.

By this time Mr Webb was working as an architect at Camden Council. “People were just stunned,” he says of the atmosphere that day.

"The Ronan Point inquiry also pointed out that system-built blocks might be liable to progressive collapse as a result of fire"

The subsequent inquiry later in 1968 resulted in a number of recommendations and circulars being issued by the government.  
Broadly speaking, these meant that existing buildings with gas systems should be assessed to see if they could withstand static pressure of 5lb per square inch (psi) – and this was the minimum standard new buildings must meet. With widespread failures, councils were told that existing buildings where the risk of explosion could be reduced by removing gas supplies now had to meet 2.5 psi (if they didn’t already).

The inquiry also pointed out that system-built blocks might be liable to progressive collapse as a result of fire, although this was only briefly touched on and attention afterwards chiefly focused on gas. No one ever made sure councils appraised their blocks, however. Years later in 1984, the then-housing minister Ian Gow admitted “the ministry did not ask authorities to inform it of the appraisals or specific action taken”.

Aerial view of the collapsed flats in Newham, London

A busy period followed for Mr Webb, working with Paul Foot, a journalist at Private Eye magazine, to investigate Ronan Point and wider tower block safety failings.

This led to the uncovering of a notorious corruption scandal involving architect John Poulson that resulted in the resignation of home secretary Reginald Maudling in the 1970s.

It was in the 1980s though, when Mr Webb – by then lecturing at the Kent Institute of Art and Design – really made his name.

The National Tower Blocks Conference in 1983, where he spoke, was a turning point. Ronan Point tenants were there, along with Fred Jones, who chaired Newham Council’s housing committee. Ronan Point had been reoccupied, with the collapsed corner rebuilt. Tenants told Mr Webb about large gaps between the walls and floors in the block, and Mr Jones invited him to conduct a survey of it.

During the survey, Mr Webb tore off a strip of paper and dropped it through a gap in a tenant’s wall. It disappeared completely, indicating substantial gaps in the structure.

“One of the tenants said: ‘What have you done?’” Mr Webb says. “And I said: ‘I have just killed Ronan Point.’”

Mr Webb tore off a strip of paper and dropped it through a gap in a tenant’s wall. It disappeared completely, indicating substantial gaps in the structure.

He was right. By 1984, based on surveys carried out by Mr Webb and his students, the council had evacuated the block. Mr Webb insisted the block was dismantled rather than knocked down, to evidence exactly what had gone wrong. Just as importantly, he wanted to conduct a fire test on the empty building, feeling that there had been little focus on the potential impact of fire on large panel structures. He got his way – despite much official opposition – and a fire was lit in one of the empty flats. The test was meant to last 20 minutes.

“I stood on my own in front of the building thinking, ‘S**t, if I’ve got this wrong, they are going to nail me to the outside’,” Mr Webb laughs. “But I knew I was right.”

After 10 minutes, the dark smoke coming out of the flat “suddenly turned to white smoke, like a new pope had been elected”, indicating the fire had been put out early.

Mr Webb walked over to the building and was “met by these panic-stricken engineers from Newham and the Building Research Establishment who [were] all running out of the building”. When Mr Webb tried to enter he says he was told, “You can’t do that, the building’s going to fall down.”

The then-housing minister Mr Gow later admitted that safety limits on how much load-bearing ceiling panels could safely move because of the heat were reached after 10 minutes of the fire starting.  He told MPs in 1984 that “the test was stopped although the severity of the fire was beginning to decline and it is unlikely that further structural deformation would have occurred”. Mr Webb, however, says he knows what he saw on the day, and the movement recorded was potentially “very dangerous”.

In any event, councils were asked to appraise all their Taylor Woodrow Anglian buildings “to establish whether joints between panels can resist the spread of fire and fumes accurately”, and whether the joints provided adequate margins of safety.