Grenfell Tower

Grenfell Tower is a derelict 24-storey residential tower block in North Kensington in London, England,
the remains of which are still standing following a severe fire in June 2017. The tower was completed in
1974 as part of the first phase of the Lancaster West Estate.[1] The tower was named after Grenfell
Road, which ran to the south of the building; the road itself was named after Field Marshal Lord
Grenfell, a senior British Army officer.[2]

The building's top 20 storeys consisted of 120 flats, with six per floor – two flats with one bedroom each
and four flats with two bedrooms each – with a total of 200 bedrooms. Its first four storeys were non-
residential until its most recent refurbishment, from 2015 to 2016, when two of them were converted to
residential use, bringing it up to 127 flats and 227 bedrooms; six of the new flats had four bedrooms
each and one flat had three bedrooms. It also received new windows and new cladding with thermal
insulation during this refurbishment.[3]

Prior to a fire, which began in the early hours of 14 June 2017, the Royal Borough of Kensington and
Chelsea and central UK government bodies "knew, or ought to have known", that their management of
the tower was breaching the rights to life, and to adequate housing, of the tower's residents, according
to a later enquiry by the government's own equalities watchdog.[4] The fire gutted the building and
killed 72 people, including a stillbirth.[5] In early 2018, it was announced that, following demolition of
the tower, the site will likely become a memorial to those killed in the fire

The 24-storey tower block was designed in 1967 in the Brutalist style of the era by Clifford Wearden and
Associates, with the Kensington and Chelsea London Borough Council approving its construction in 1970,
as part of phase one of the Lancaster West redevelopment project.[7][8]

The 67.3 m (221 ft) tall building contained 120 one- and two-bedroom flats (six dwellings per floor on
twenty of the twenty-four storeys with the bottom four, the podium, being used for non-residential
purposes). The floors were named ground, mezzanine, walkway and walkway+1, floor 1, floor 2 etc.[3] It
housed up to 600 people.[9]

The tower was built to the Parker Morris standards. Each floor was 22 m square, giving an approximate
usable area of 476 square metres (5,120 sq ft). The layout of each floor was designed to be flexible as
none of the partition walls were structural. The residential floors contained a two bedroom flat at each
corner, in between which on the east and the west face was a one bedroomed flat. The core contained a
stair column and the lift and service shafts.[10] One-bedroom flats were 51.4 m2 (553 sq ft) in area and
two-bedroom flats were 75.5 m2 (813 sq ft).[9]
The building was innovative, as most LCC tower blocks used traditional brick work for infill whereas here
precast insulated concrete blocks were used, giving the walls an unusual texture. The ten exterior
concrete columns were also unusual.[11] In addition, other tower blocks of this era had four flats per
storey, rather than six.[10]

The original lead architect for the building, Nigel Whitbread, said in 2016 in an interview with
Constantine Gras, which was later partially repeated in The Guardian,[12] that the tower had been
designed with attention to strength, following the Ronan Point collapse of 1968, "and from what I can
see could last another 100 years." He described it as a "very simple and straightforward concept. You
have a central core containing the lift, staircase and the vertical risers for the services and then you have
external perimeter columns. The services are connected to the central boiler and pump which powered
the whole development and this is located in the basement of the tower block. This basement is
approximately four metres deep and in addition has two metres of concrete at its base. This foundation
holds up the tower block and in situ concrete columns and slabs and pre-cast beams all tie the building
together"