Reform & Revolution 8 - Ronan Point

Published by Hannah Wooderson for 24dash.com in Housing and also in Featured

Over the coming months 24housing is unravelling – through personal testimony – the top 10 events, chosen by our panel of experts, to have shaped housing in the last 60 years.

Number 8: Ronan Point

In May 1968, a gas explosion on the 18th floor of a 24-storey tower block in Canning Town, London blew out a load-bearing flank wall, causing the entire corner of the building to collapse, killing five people. Later that year the government published its report into the disaster, and spent the next five years testing and strengthening the building, before residents were allowed to move back into the block in 1973.

Sam Webb – an architect who helped submit evidence to the inquiry and who had misgivings about large panel system building for tower blocks – felt it hadn’t gone far enough, and spent the next 20 years trying to surface the truth. In an explosive interview with Ross Macmillan, he stands by his claims the Government ‘altered’ the official inquiry report, thus hiding damning evidence suggesting the tower could collapse again in high wind.

Where were you working when Ronan Point collapsed in 1968?

I was working for Camden Council as a project architect. You know you’ve seen the Hulton Press pictures of little boys holding up placards saying “War is declared” or “The Titanic sinks”, it felt just like that. It was very dramatic. The expression I tend to remember was “Oh shit”. You know what you felt like with 9/11? It was just like that. You were an architect working in a big London borough and you knew exactly the impact this was going to have; this was no one off thing, we all knew that.

You helped architect George Fairweather submit his points of evidence to the inquiry?

James Callaghan - who was the Home Secretary – appealed for people with experience of buildings to come forward and submit evidence to the inquiry.

George was the chairman of the British Standard Code of Practice CP3: Chapter IV (1962) Precautions against Fire in blocks of flats and maisonettes above 80'0" in height". He had been sceptical of system building – I think we all were in a way. There was huge pressure on local government to take these systems but Camden resisted. That was the interesting thing. Sydney Cook – who was the borough architect – wouldn’t have them.

What was significant – although we didn’t know it at the time of submitting evidence to the inquiry – was that shortly before George gave evidence in July 1968, the inquiry decided that it wouldn’t consider any aspects to do with fires in the building. It was only concerned with the immediate effects of the cause of the incident, not the wider public safety. We didn’t know that, and I didn’t find that out until I read the files and there were notes to that effect.

When did you go through the official files of the inquiry?

I went down to the ministry of housing in 1970 and asked to see them. Rather foolishly they allowed me to read them. It took me a month to get through all this paper. I don’t think anyone ever sat down and read the whole lot like I did. I don’t think there was time to do that. Even by the members of the Inquiry.

Having read all the evidence submitted, I knew very early on what had happened, but it took a very long time to come out. Today you’ve got instant communication through things like the internet and digital cameras, etc. It was much harder in those days for things to come out into the public domain.

What did you uncover?

I uncovered this extraordinary series of pages where Civil Servants had altered what Sir Alfred Pugsley – who was a member of the inquiry’s three-man tribunal – was saying. He warned the structural flank walls of the building could be sucked out in a high wind if windows broke. That did not appear in the final report.

He meant that at the top of the building if the wind was strong enough to break the glass, or if somebody inadvertently left a window open and the glass broke, then the wind could get on both sides of the load-bearing flank walls of Ronan Point and could move them. If it could move them, it could lead to the collapse of the building, again. That specific comment was crossed out, not just once, because Pugsley put it in more than one draft of his chapter on structure.

As well as Pugsley’s altered paragraph on structure, it was clear they knew within two days of the collapse that the force required to remove the load bearing wall from the side of Ronan Point in the flat where the explosion occurred was low.

How do you mean?

Any wall or column must safely transfer its load to the foundations and the ground otherwise it will collapse. The explosive force from the gas explosion didn’t kill the woman in the flat. She got up off the floor and walked out. It wasn’t a big explosion. If it had been she would have been killed because her lungs would have blown up and burst.

At Pugsley’s request, a full size test rig was erected at the Building Research Establishment in August 1968 and a vertical load identical to the one on the wall of the flat on the 18th floor was applied to the top of the wall.

Then a horizontal force was applied to the entire wall surface and gradually increased until the wall started to move sideways. This was actually 1.8 pounds per square inch (psi), which is very low. The higher up the building you went the lower the force required to move the load-bearing flank wall got. So at the top of the building the load on the 22nd floor of flats all there was to prevent sideways movement would just be the weight of the wall itself and the part of the roof panel it was carrying. The sideways load required to move this was so low that a high wind in certain circumstances could have moved the wall. If the windows were open or broken then the wind could get to both sides. Winds at the top of 24 storey buildings in the Thames Estuary as Ronan Point was are high and can often reach 105mph in peak gusts.

On 18 May 1968 two days after the collapse the National Building Agency went to Ronan Point. It co-produced a report that stated:

“……the gable end wall being the most likely to have failed first, at an internal pressure of the order of 200lbs a square foot or 1.4psi.

“Of the three panels forming the gable wall, the centre one having no support from return ends or from intermediate walls, would probably have failed first, then pulling adjacent panels with it. This in turn would have led to the falling of the walls and floors above the 18th floor and, through gathering momentum, destroying the floors below.

“Floors there is little or no reinforcement to tie together the wall to wall, floor to floor, or wall to floor joints.”

Put in simple terms the only thing holding it all together was the action of gravity. It was like a house of cards. Move one and they all fall.

So they knew right from the outset how weak the structure was and instead of concentrating on that they went out of their way actually to take a different focus.

Do you remember your reaction when the report came out?

I remember sitting with Paul Foot, the Private Eye journalist, just before the report came out, we were planning an article and he said, “What do you think’s going to happen?” I said “they’re going to blame it on the building regulations,” he said why, and I said – “Because that gets everyone off the hook because you’re not talking about one building, you’re talking about hundreds and hundreds of these buildings up and down the country.” The number ran into many thousands in the end. There was a huge problem of how to put them all right. How to rectify them. For a considerable period after the collapse, the government didn’t put a veto on this form of construction. It was allowed to go ahead everywhere. Up and down the country people were going at breakneck speed – including on a site at Ronan Point. You would have thought that something as serious as that, they would have stopped that form of construction but they didn’t. Nobody’s ever satisfactorily answered that question as to why they didn’t.

Did Sir Alfred ever speak publicly about the inquiry?

In his only public statement on the disaster, Sir Alfred Pugsley had said that due to the need to get the report out, there wasn’t time to include all the technical submissions. This was said at a Public Meeting at the City University in February 1969 and published in the Structural Engineer’s Journal in July 1969.

He was no doubt thinking back to historical disaster reports like the Royal Commission into the Collapse of the Quebec Bridge published in 1908 which did include such reports. Maybe too he was still smarting over his parts of the report being so drastically altered. It was to my mind a very politically led inquiry.

Did you agree with the method of strengthening the government applied to Ronan Point and other system-built blocks above six storeys following the inquiry?

They bolted steel angles at ceiling level at the load bearing ends of the floor slabs at the outside edges of the buildings because the actual bearing of the floor slabs was very small. So they increased the bearings and they bolted angle brackets at floor level. Now it appeared if you didn’t know much about the construction this was a good thing but in fact the floor slabs had hollow cores running through them so they weren’t solid. In many cases – and we found this at Ronan Point – the bolts that went into hold these angles just went into space and you could twizzle them round with your finger.

In April 1970, they brought in the Fifth Amendment to the Building Regulations –which says buildings shouldn’t suffer progressive collapse. What subsequently happened after the inquiry was that local authorities were faced with this massive bill to bring their stock up to the required standard.

You viewed the inquiry files in 1970, yet in was 14 years later, in 1984 that you were quoted in The Times, alleging that Sir Alfred’s comments had been altered? Why did it take so long?

In 1984 I showed the handwritten notes – which contained Pugsley’s omitted statement – I’d made in 1970 to Charles Knevitt, the architectural correspondent for The Times. Charles then phoned Puglsley up – who didn’t deny it – and the story was run on the front page the following day.

The reason it took so long for it to come out was because the files were under the 30-year rule on government disclosure. Charles was the only reporter who had the courage to print it. Nigel Spearing, MP for Newham South sent the then housing minister Ian Gow a written question about the allegations. He subsequently released all the Ronan Point files I had read in 1970. At last I had proof, although over half of them were missing and there was a note to that effect with them. The Senior Civil Servant in charge asked me as I was leaving the ministry in 1986 if I could supply him with copies of my notes so they could plug the gaps…I told him I hadn’t fallen out of the nearest tree.

How did you get to survey the flats inside Ronan Point?

At the National Tower Block Conference in October 1983, held at the Labour Party Offices in Plashet Grove, Newham – where councillors, MPs, engineers and even some of the Ronan Point residents were present – I identified a major fire risk in Ronan Point. Gaps were emerging between walls and floors through which smoke could pass.

Some of the tenants said to me: “We’ve found it, we’ve got it.” So I went to Ronan Point the following week and carried out some basic tests. All you needed to do was tear a narrow strip off a sheet of paper, put it at skirting level underneath the windows parallel to the floor slabs and it dropped down and came out at the room below. I also did this with a coin which I dropped. It went down the gap and came out in the flat below. You couldn’t have a clearer demonstration that there was no fire compartmentation. If there was a fire in the flat below it would come up through the gap, and due to the expansion of the structure, it would cause the collapse of the building.

Did the council ask you to survey the building?

The chair of Newham’s Housing Committee, Fred Jones, asked me to conduct a survey to assess the condition of the building. I, and a team of architectural students, tenants and staff from Community Links (an East London charity) surveyed nearly half of Ronan Point’s one hundred 10 apartments one Sunday.

What did you find?

We did a whole series of surveys and found things like cracks in the building that shouldn’t have been there – particularly in the lower levels. I went to Fred and told him what I had discovered. It meant we wouldn’t just have to evacuate Ronan Point but eight other blocks – all built the same way – on the Freemasons Estate because they were structurally unsound. I told Fred that if we didn’t do it – and what we subsequently found at Ronan Point proved it – it may well have collapsed on its own accord one day. You couldn’t put a date on it but there was so much wrong with it, and the other ones as well. It was the construction crew that didn’t do what they should have done. The system itself was questionable – it shouldn’t have been used for that height.

What about the government’s strengthening?

The government came up with a system of strengthening. But it wasn’t strengthening. They bolted steel angles at ceiling level at the load bearing ends of the floor slabs at the outside edges of the buildings because the actual bearing of the floor slabs was very small. So they increased the bearings and they bolted angle brackets at floor level. Now it appeared if you didn’t know much about the construction this was a good thing but in fact the floor slabs had hollow cores running through them so they weren’t solid. In many cases – and we found this at Ronan Point – the bolts that went into hold these angles just went into space and you could twizzle them round with your finger.

So it was evacuated?

They evacuated Ronan Point in 1984. In order to speed it up I suggested that we emptied the lowest floor first and we moved all the housing officers and engineers in there. All the residents were offered alternative accommodation – they could stay in Canning Town if they wished or go to Milton Keynes or Harlow, wherever. A lot of people we never saw again. You’ve never seen people so happy as they were at moving out of Ronan Point.

The couple who lived in flat 90 on the 18th floor where the explosion had occurred couldn’t open their balcony door. They had reported it but nothing was done. They had a little baby. To hang the nappies out to dry, the mum had to stand on a chair and climb out of her kitchen window to her balcony and then climb back in again. The next day Fred Jones sent workmen round to fix it.

Other people said with real tears in their eyes, “I want to live in a house with a garden. I’ve never lived in a house with a garden.”

Was a fire test carried out?

The fire test was carried out in July 1984 on the 3rd floor in the building with the engineers and the Fire Research Station on the floor above. The fire brigade had to put the fire out after 10 minutes because there was so much movement in the building the engineers in charge thought it would collapse again.

So a decision was taken to dismantle it?

From that point on we got the agreement from Newham Council – that was, the majority – as some wanted to save it – to dismantle the building. There were a number of councillors, council architects and engineers who defended it to the hilt because they were involved when it was constructed in the 1960s. To them it wasn’t just a building. It was like a totem pole or a flagstaff in a medieval battle that you fought around and if you got the flag you controlled it. And if we demolished the building, you demolished their reputation.

Were you surprised to see as many faults as you did in the construction when Ronan Point was dismantled?

I knew we were going to find bad workmanship – what surprised me was the sheer scale of it. Not a single joint was correct. The biggest shock of all was the crucial H2 load-bearing joints between floor and wall panels. Some of the joints had less than 50 per cent of the mortar specified. We took the first panels off and there they were: we found bottle tops, bits of wood, polystyrene cement bags, copies of the Daily Mirror, where the cement should have been.

We started to take it to bits and all hell broke loose. We found cracks in the central stairwell and elevator shaft, which indicated movement throughout the building. We found that in high winds the building was beginning to break up. The building was moving on its lifting bolts and was held up by the ‘blast angles’ (fitted after the public inquiry). The drypack mortar had been crushed – or was never there in the first place.

The wall panels had two big steel bolts sticking out the top which had a nut on them. They were used for lifting them up into place and then they stuck out the top of the panel. Then the walls from the floor above were lowered on to those bolts and the nuts were adjusted to level the wall. Now because there was inadequate dry pack mortar to carry the load the whole weight of the building was being carried on those bolts. If not the whole, probably about 80-90 per cent. That was very dangerous. As we got to the bottom of the building the weight on those bolts – particularly in wind when the building swayed – caused the wall panels to crack. But you couldn’t see that until you actually took the block down.

During the survey we carried out a woman who had been living in the block when it collapsed and went back said to me, “You’re a clever young man. When it’s windy why does my living room carpet lift up in the corner?’ She knew and knew I knew that meant the wind was blowing through the load-bearing joint. Except there was no load-bearing mortar. She was on the 19th floor in the North-West corner. How do you answer a question like that? She was one of the first to move out three months later.

The construction crew were working piecework so the more panels put up the more they got paid. The real problem was that you could not check the quality of the workmanship because it was impossible to do. Once the panels were on that was it, you couldn’t check it. You could only check the workmanship if you stood over the guy doing it.

That was the thing I was most worried about and what I thought would lead to the collapse of Ronan point. Particularly if you’ve got a combination of that and the fire risk.

Did tenants understand the faults?

My students built me a beautiful half full size wooden model of the key joints so it was quite clear. The tenants grasped it immediately. I used to hold seminars in Community Links with them. They learned all the names of the joints: H1, H2, H4, V1, etc. H – was a horizontal joint, V – was a vertical one.

Remember their lives depended on all this. It was like when I learned the parts of a Bren Gun when I did National Service so I could take it apart and put it together again in my sleep. So when an engineer or housing officer came and told them how their home was as safe as houses they would innocently ask if he knew how the V3 joint was put together. That took the wind out of his sails.

Were they happy to see it in bits?

They were ecstatic. During the demolition we had a great party in a marquee arranged by Fred and paid for by the demolition contractors. The world’s press came and they were shown on Australian TV and of course what was really important just before Eastenders.

You could pick out the individual blocks on the credits of Eastenders. They cast diagonal shadows on the ground in the photo. Today most of those shadows have gone.

What did it mean to them?

What happened to those tenants inspired them, gave them confidence and courage. They got their self-respect and their lives back. They won. Against all the odds they won. They defeated the might of Thatcher in the middle of the Miners’ Strike. What more could be better?

Ronan Point – the aftermath:

Following the Ronan Point inquiry report, nearly 600 system-built blocks of flats over six storeys, including Ronan Point, were strengthened due to the inadequacy of the buildings’ design and construction, which complied with the then Building Regulations. In April 1970, the Building Regulations were amended to include the Fifth Amendment – which takes into account progressive collapse. In addition, there were interim recommendations about gas disconnection.

The timeline:

1968: partial collapse of Ronan Point
1973: tenants move back into Ronan Point after building’s joints are strengthened, following inquiry
1984: Ronan Point evacuated after a council engineer’s report confirms that gaps had emerged in structure causing a fire risk. Tenants from the five other Taylor Woodrow-Anglian blocks in Canning Town of the same design also re-housed, pending more tests on the building.
1986: Ronan Point dismantled to reveal full extent of the building’s faults.