TOM FOSTER’S ARCHITECTURE COLUMN (November/December 2020)

TOM FOSTER’S ARCHITECTURE COLUMN

01647 24436   www.TomFosterArchitecture.co.uk   info@space-and-light.co.uk

Grenfell – Truth at last for the Building Industry

The three-year (so far) Public Inquiry into the Grenfell Tower fire disaster is at long last revealing the wilful ongoing public scandal at the heart of it.

On the night of 14 June 2017, an electrical kitchen fire in 24-storey Grenfell Tower, a poorly ‘renovated’ block of 127 Council flats in the London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, quickly spread to turn the whole into a Towering Inferno, burning to death or asphyxiating 72 of the mainly ethnic residents and injuring 70 more. The column of flame and toxic smoke could be seen from all over London.

Neither the fire-spread, nor the failure of evacuation, should ever have happened. Fire is understood the world over as the biggest risk in tall buildings. After WW2, the British Fire Research Station (FRS) and Building Research Establishment (BRE) laid foundations, codified into easily understood and enforceable Building Regulations including Fire, which were adopted all over the world.

Unfortunately, the living evidence that national benefit could come from taxpayer-funded institutions was deliberately destroyed, sold off, in the 1980s. Nowadays, the rebranded privatised remains of FRS, BRE etc and the Agrément Board for testing and certifying building products, count for nothing in the world. Public Building Regulations (including Fire) are still written as law, and public (Local Authority) Building Inspectors still operate, but weakened by numerous private consultancies alongside as an alternative channel, through which such law can be ingeniously evaded.

The Enquiry is now revealing (as if we didn’t know) that such semi-legalised evasion of Building Regulations (especially Fire) is what happened with the out-sourced £10m Grenfell ‘renovation’ project, to shave costs for the ultra-rich Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and to improve the contractor’s profits. The public Building Inspectors, salaried to Kensington and Chelsea, could feel their backsides well covered by things like Agrément Certificates, however un-credible.

The national privatisation and ‘deregulation’ project has for the last 35 years been sold to the voting public as removal of Red Tape, that unnecessary burden on industry (and City of London ‘liberty’). It feeds on the resentment of ‘bureaucracy’ that’s felt when a Building Inspector insists, for example, on subdivision by fire doors which seem to wreck someone’s spacious interior design concept.

But anyone who’s been in the horror of a fire, children terrified (or worse), the stink, the ruin (thankfully, not me so far), will passionately tell you that enforced Regulations to contain and to escape from Fire, are far from Red Tape, but are something you’ll be life-changingly grateful for when the time comes. One suspects that numerous other branches of dismantled Red Tape, from healthy food, through climate, to financial cheating, were originally there for reasons equally compelling to those holders of true experience from the sharp end.

As far as my experience at the sharp end, I find the public Building Inspectors a fantastic resource of deep local experience and technical helpfulness, still hanging in despite over-work/under-funding. I only wish for restoration or their powers/resources to enforce more comprehensively.

Perhaps because I respect and enjoy the Building Inspectors as peers, I find them ready to suggest creative solutions, for example a Fire Escape route from new attic sleeping space, down stair through Kitchen/Living Room to another stair to Exit two storeys below, all without fire doors or barriers to open spaciousness, by use of a sort of smoke-detecting airbag system under the sink, which fills the room with water-mist that evaporates the heat out of any flame.

While the Inquiry is currently naming and shaming the ‘professionals’ in the Grenfell ‘refurbishment’ who did their masters’ bidding to circumvent well established systems to contain and escape from any Fire, it must move on up to spotlight the political Leaders, the corporates and their shareholders in whose ‘interest’ such cheating is routinely part of the big-building industry. And beyond, to the mean politicians of the 1980s who set the whole enduring ethos, and the grim theorists who gave them voice – now thankfully dead.

Can we hope that the pandemic experience jolts enough of us back into fully-human empathy and action, into recognising and gently sidelining the sad silver-tongued sociopaths and the mad ideologues who disproportionately dominate politics and big business? Life on Earth depends on it.

 I specialise in new, old and historic buildings, for work or home.

Expert in EcoBuilding, ‘Passive House', Planning Permission, DNPA, Building Regs, build-contract admin;

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