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Grenfell Tower fire in North Kensington - news and discussion

Trelleck's listed I believe which always adds kudos. Besides its an architectural concept building.
 
scifisam said:
Yeah, agreed about buy to letters (which will make it more difficult to ascertain how many people are missing) but the tenants would have had to be able to buy their flats to sell on in the first place.
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That's a good point. Maybe the fact that RtB is usually a lot cheaper than subsequent sales plays a factor? If the lender knows the value of the property is going to go up overnight, might grease the wheels a bit...
 
Cid said:
Paywall.
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yeah i don't know why it worked for me.
here it in full C&Pd if interested:

With flames licking from windows, smoke billowing into a black cloud spreading across London and a rising death toll, the fire at London’s Grenfell Tower has been the ultimate urban nightmare.

One of four towers in the Lancaster West Estate in north Kensington, Grenfell Tower was completed in 1974, towards the end of a boom in high-rise council, or social, housing in the UK. The tower was part of Kensington and Chelsea’s so-called “slum clearance” plan.

The concrete council housing towers of the 1960s and 1970s are often derided as inherently unsafe, and there have been a number of tragedies associated with them. But unlike, for instance, the cheap, system-built Ronan Point Tower that collapsed in 1968, Grenfell Tower was a substantial structure, using external concrete columns and in situ cast concrete.

Unusually for the time, it was not designed by the Greater London Council architects’ department, but by Clifford Wearden and Associates, a relatively small practice that had been working on the designs since 1964.

The tower had undergone an extensive refurbishment in recent years, carried out by architects Studio E and contractor Rydon Construction. The refurbishment, which was finished last year, included new facilities at the base of the building, new windows and a recladding of the façades.
Residents said on Wednesday morning that the cladding had caught fire, with one witness saying it was “flammable and it just caught up like a matchstick”.

Photos of the fire clearly reveal flames climbing the tower’s exterior walls in the early hours of the day. After the blaze was brought under control, the surrounding area was littered with black clumps of what locals suggested was the charred remains of the new cladding.

If the cladding really was acting as the vector for the spread of fire, it would appear that a “prettification” was at least in part responsible for this disaster. This would be ironic, as the nearby Trellick Tower — designed by Erno Goldfinger and completed two years before the Grenfell Tower — is now one of London’s most desired addresses, adored by lovers of its uncompromising concrete Brutalism.
In the 1960s and 70s, high-rise was the preferred method for building new homes, with councils incentivised by government subsidies for blocks of six storeys or more. Local authorities wholeheartedly embraced the modernist ideal of towers surrounded by public space and parkland — a reaction to the density, damp and darkness of slum housing. Well over 6,000 tower blocks were built by local authorities across the UK, although many have since been demolished, often to make way for lower-rise accommodation or private sector developments.

Despite the long-held popularity of exposed concrete housing towers such as Trellick Tower or the Barbican, local authorities now appear to have a prejudice against the material. The cladding used on Grenfell Tower was part of a programme of aesthetic “wrapping” to make the tower appear more in line with contemporary towers, which have come back into fashion in the private sector.

Concrete generally performs well in fires, but composite cladding like the kind used at Grenfell can facilitate fires spreading up the outside of a building.

It would not be the first time that cladding has contributed to the spread of fire.

On New Year’s Eve 2015, The Address, a 63-storey tower in Dubai, went up in flames. It was later determined that the fire had been accelerated by aluminium composite panel cladding material. An earlier fire in a 24-storey block in Shanghai in 2010 spread through external cladding, killing 58 residents.

But cladding is not the only factor that could have accelerated the devastating Grenfell Tower blaze.

In 2009 six people died in a fire at Lakanal House, a 14-storey block in Camberwell, south London. Southwark Council was fined £570,000 over safety failings at the site. Residents at Lakanal House had been advised in the event of a fire to shut themselves into their flats and wait to be rescued — the same advice that had apparently been given to residents at Grenfell Tower.
The plans for Grenfell Tower’s refurbishment show a new, denser layout at the north Kensington tower block and, astonishingly, only one stairway for all 120 flats. New apartments had been added in to the base of the tower, which had been designed as partly open space with community facilities. The building was raised on concrete stilts on an open base.

Flats in council tower blocks were initially designed to generous “Parker Morris” space standards, which were abandoned by Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1980. More recently, the trend has been to make city centre flats smaller, to cater for a younger population and offset high costs in the private rental market. This “densification” of tower blocks has led to a large rise in the number of dwellings — although safety provisions are not always increased accordingly, as in the case of Grenfell Tower.

According to first-person reports, none of the residents appears to have heard fire alarms during Wednesday’s blaze. It is unclear whether there were sprinkler systems — or if there were, whether they were working.
Plans for the refurbished tower also appear to lack fire lobbies for some of the flats, with many appearing to have been compromised in the process of squeezing more apartments into a typical floor. The original plans do not seem to feature lobbies — begging serious questions about how the plans were given permission in the first place.

The writer is the FT’s architecture critic
 
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bimble said:
yeah i don't know why it worked for me.
here it in full C&Pd if interested:

With flames licking from windows, smoke billowing into a black cloud spreading across London and a rising death toll, the fire at London’s Grenfell Tower has been the ultimate urban nightmare.

One of four towers in the Lancaster West Estate in north Kensington, Grenfell Tower was completed in 1974, towards the end of a boom in high-rise council, or social, housing in the UK. The tower was part of Kensington and Chelsea’s so-called “slum clearance” plan.

The concrete council housing towers of the 1960s and 1970s are often derided as inherently unsafe, and there have been a number of tragedies associated with them. But unlike, for instance, the cheap, system-built Ronan Point Tower that collapsed in 1968, Grenfell Tower was a substantial structure, using external concrete columns and in situ cast concrete.

Unusually for the time, it was not designed by the Greater London Council architects’ department, but by Clifford Wearden and Associates, a relatively small practice that had been working on the designs since 1964.

The tower had undergone an extensive refurbishment in recent years, carried out by architects Studio E and contractor Rydon Construction. The refurbishment, which was finished last year, included new facilities at the base of the building, new windows and a recladding of the façades.
Residents said on Wednesday morning that the cladding had caught fire, with one witness saying it was “flammable and it just caught up like a matchstick”.

Photos of the fire clearly reveal flames climbing the tower’s exterior walls in the early hours of the day. After the blaze was brought under control, the surrounding area was littered with black clumps of what locals suggested was the charred remains of the new cladding.

If the cladding really was acting as the vector for the spread of fire, it would appear that a “prettification” was at least in part responsible for this disaster. This would be ironic, as the nearby Trellick Tower — designed by Erno Goldfinger and completed two years before the Grenfell Tower — is now one of London’s most desired addresses, adored by lovers of its uncompromising concrete Brutalism.
In the 1960s and 70s, high-rise was the preferred method for building new homes, with councils incentivised by government subsidies for blocks of six storeys or more. Local authorities wholeheartedly embraced the modernist ideal of towers surrounded by public space and parkland — a reaction to the density, damp and darkness of slum housing. Well over 6,000 tower blocks were built by local authorities across the UK, although many have since been demolished, often to make way for lower-rise accommodation or private sector developments.

Despite the long-held popularity of exposed concrete housing towers such as Trellick Tower or the Barbican, local authorities now appear to have a prejudice against the material. The cladding used on Grenfell Tower was part of a programme of aesthetic “wrapping” to make the tower appear more in line with contemporary towers, which have come back into fashion in the private sector.

Concrete generally performs well in fires, but composite cladding like the kind used at This can facilitate fires spreading up the outside of a building.
It would not be the first time that cladding has contributed to the spread of fire.

On New Year’s Eve 2015, The Address, a 63-storey tower in Dubai, went up in flames. It was later determined that the fire had been accelerated by aluminium composite panel cladding material. An earlier fire in a 24-storey block in Shanghai in 2010 spread through external cladding, killing 58 residents.

But cladding is not the only factor that could have accelerated the devastating Grenfell Tower blaze.

In 2009 six people died in a fire at Lakanal House, a 14-storey block in Camberwell, south London. Southwark Council was fined £570,000 over safety failings at the site. Residents at Lakanal House had been advised in the event of a fire to shut themselves into their flats and wait to be rescued — the same advice that had apparently been given to residents at Grenfell Tower.
The plans for Grenfell Tower’s refurbishment show a new, denser layout at the north Kensington tower block and, astonishingly, only one stairway for all 120 flats. New apartments had been added in to the base of the tower, which had been designed as partly open space with community facilities. The building was raised on concrete stilts on an open base.

Flats in council tower blocks were initially designed to generous “Parker Morris” space standards, which were abandoned by Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1980. More recently, the trend has been to make city centre flats smaller, to cater for a younger population and offset high costs in the private rental market. This “densification” of tower blocks has led to a large rise in the number of dwellings — although safety provisions are not always increased accordingly, as in the case of Grenfell Tower.

According to first-person reports, none of the residents appears to have heard fire alarms during Wednesday’s blaze. It is unclear whether there were sprinkler systems — or if there were, whether they were working.
Plans for the refurbished tower also appear to lack fire lobbies for some of the flats, with many appearing to have been compromised in the process of squeezing more apartments into a typical floor. The original plans do not seem to feature lobbies — begging serious questions about how the plans were given permission in the first place.

The writer is the FT’s architecture critic
Click to expand...

I think most news sites allow you to read a few free articles/month. Thanks.
 
teuchter said:
What are you on about? When I say visual impact, that means, what it looks like, viewed from within a conservation area, or in some cases, in views towards a conservation area. What it looks like from the street and what it looks like from inside buildings, in that conservation area. Yes those buildings may be homes for wealthy people. I think you have made that rather obvious point enough times now. However, that is not what determines whether or not it is assessed in the planning report.
Click to expand...
There are processes and there is context. For some reason you seem keen to ignore the context.
 
teuchter said:
What are you on about? When I say visual impact, that means, what it looks like, viewed from within a conservation area, or in some cases, in views towards a conservation area. What it looks like from the street and what it looks like from inside buildings, in that conservation area. Yes those buildings may be homes for wealthy people. I think you have made that rather obvious point enough times now. However, that is not what determines whether or not it is assessed in the planning report.
Click to expand...
yeh but it's such a pity that you don't seem able to take the obvious point

upload_2017-6-15_14-48-36.png

not, you note, the living conditions of the people inside the towerblock.
 
Wilf said:
There are processes and there is context. For some reason you seem keen to ignore the context.
Click to expand...
For some reason certain people are willing to ignore the facts about process when they turn out not to support their interpretation of the context.
 
Pickman's model said:
yeh but it's such a pity that you don't seem able to take the obvious point

View attachment 109406

not, you note, the living conditions of the people inside the towerblock.
Click to expand...

There's a full consultation document with the resident's views. You, or the people you're quoting, are taking a very specific bit of the planning application and reading too much into it.
 
n.b Not saying those views are accurately represented, or that the techniques used aren't selective etc. But the fact is residents are addressed in a different part of the process.
 
scifisam said:
Unless substandard cladding was chosen because it looked better is it really so bad that the building's appearance was considered? I mean, I doubt "building will look nicer" was one of the residents' objections.
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not sure how to answer it being as the cladding's being blamed for the fire's spread.
 
Pickman's model said:
not sure how to answer it being as the cladding's being blamed for the fire's spread.
Click to expand...

Being blamed, yes, but we don't know if it really was the choice of cladding or rather the way it was put on, leaving a gap behind. Or something else altogether. And if the cladding was at fault then is it because they chose a nicer looking one rather than a safer one? I find that unlikely because they would have just gone for whichever was cheapest.

You have noticed that the building's appearance was not the sole reason for putting cladding on, yeah?
 
teuchter said:
For some reason certain people are willing to ignore the facts about process when they turn out not to support their interpretation of the context.
Click to expand...
Given that neither you or I were present/party to the various meetings and discussions, there's no way to make statements about how things 'turned out'. But given the socio-economic context and political control in that borough, there's an open question about how processes played out. You seem very keen to dismiss that.
 
Wilf said:
there's no way to make statements about how things 'turned out'.
Click to expand...

No, it's quite simple: tabloid newspapers and some here had quoted part of the planning report that mentioned consideration had been given to the visual impact on adjacent conservation areas. They had then claimed that this demonstrated that the main motivation for the cladding of the building was to improve the appearance for residents in those areas. However, it "turns out" that this argument makes no sense whatsoever as this is a completely standard part of the process for any planning application. It "turned out" thus, in the sense that people who know how planning works pointed out a simple fact.

There may well be lots of open questions about how many processes played out. I think those questions should be pursued. Not this idiotic red herring about the whole thing having been driven by conservation area residents demanding the prettification of a tower block. It's just a stupid, simplistic distraction from what will be much more complex processes that led to this tragedy.
 
teuchter said:
No, it's quite simple: tabloid newspapers and some here had quoted part of the planning report that mentioned consideration had been given to the visual impact on adjacent conservation areas. They had then claimed that this demonstrated that the main motivation for the cladding of the building was to improve the appearance for residents in those areas. However, it "turns out" that this argument makes no sense whatsoever as this is a completely standard part of the process for any planning application. It "turned out" thus, in the sense that people who know how planning works pointed out a simple fact.

There may well be lots of open questions about how many processes played out. I think those questions should be pursued. Not this idiotic red herring about the whole thing having been driven by conservation area residents demanding the prettification of a tower block. It's just a stupid, simplistic distraction from what will be much more complex processes that led to this tragedy.
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Yeh. Have you ever considered supporting your position with evidence? This "I'm right and your wrong" bluster isn't persuasive.
 
EastEnder said:
£275K for a 2 bed flat?! That's super cheap for London, let alone Kensington...
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Depends on how much of the leasehold remains, lenders often specify a minimum (think it's 80 or 90 years) before lending. If the remaining lease is shorter than that, it'll be in cash buyer only territory, and cheap.

When refurbishment works like this take place it is normal for private leaseholders to pay their share, which can be in the tens of thousands. This is sometimes a prompt for people to sell up, to avoid these charges.

Rightmove has three other sales recorded going back to 2003, which suggests there probably weren't that many privately owned flats in the block.
 
Where are all these people going to be rehomed? It's been promised they will all be housed locally, but where?
I doubt there is the political will to do so in our present Government, but can properties be requisitioned in emergencies by local or national governments? It's happened in wartime, so there must be some sort of legislation for it.
 
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