16 years on, Lakanal House continues to haunt the built environment

Posted on: 30 April, 2025

While the impact of the Grenfell Tower Fire and subsequent legislation continues to be felt to this day, another fire eight years prior served as an earlier warning sign that the built environment failed to heed.

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The last decade has seen unprecedented upheaval in the built environment. From net zero emissions targets to growing skills gaps and digital transformation, our sector is on a trajectory of change from which there’s no going back.

Then, of course, there was the Grenfell Tower Fire.

The disaster that claimed 72 lives on 14 June 2017 has had an irrevocable impact on the built environment. Eight years on, we’re still working our way through the aftermath, with the hope that the Building Safety Act will deliver real change and accountability in the building lifecycle.

But the seeds of doubt in building safety that Grenfell, the resulting UK cladding crisis and subsequent national inquiry have sown aren’t isolated to one event. Since Grenfell, there have been several similar incidents in Bolton and the London towns of Barking and Dagenham, leading many to question whether we’re learning from the disaster.

However, in 2009, another fire in a London tower block was arguably an early warning to incidents like Grenfell, and one that the built environment failed to acknowledge.

The Lakanal House fire

At around 16:15 on 3 July 2009, a fire broke out in Lakanal House – a 16-storey tower block of 98 flats in Camberwell, London.

The cause of the fire has been cited as an electrical fault with a television in Flat 65, which quickly spread upwards to Flat 79 before moving to other locations in the building.

18 fire engines attended the incident, but within minutes of their arrival, there was a flashover on the top floor – an almost simultaneous ignition of combustible materials within an enclosed space – which meant the fire could spread further.

While many were rescued, six people were killed, at least 20 were injured and hundreds were left homeless.

The background

Lakanal House was built in the 1950s to the building and fire safety standards of the time. Back then, it was considered state-of-the-art.

It underwent several refurbishments throughout its life – initially in the 1970s when its external façade was replaced, before security doors were installed a decade later.

In terms of fire safety, the Local Authority stipulated that there needed to be an open vent in the security doors to maintain cross ventilation – air passing from one end of a corridor to another – in case smoke needed to be cleared.

A suspended ceiling was also installed along the full length of the corridors. This was made of softwood, with panels made of chipboard and a melamine laminate.

How was the fire able to spread?

There was no single factor that led to the Lakanal House Fire being so devastating. However, the failings in building and fire safety reflect how knowledge, policy and best practice in this area changed in the last few decades.

The suspended ceiling that had been fitted, for instance, posed a major safety risk to occupants as it created a high fire load.

The walls of the flat were designed to offer around 60 minutes of fire resistance. However, with services running through compartment walls like heating, this jeopardised their ability to stop fire, with pipes in the bathroom of Flat 81 for instance allowing smoke to enter its bathroom.

The linings for the corridor walls also had 13 layers of paint, reducing their ability to resist fire and enabling it to spread further.

Cross ventilation was considered best practice at the time, although its flaws are now widely recognised. The use of security doors hindered its effectiveness, with the addition of vents only making this worse.

Despite containing almost 100 flats, Lakanal House had only one staircase and no sprinklers. This staircase was also combustible. On the day of the fire, the firefighter’s lift was out of action, and with no floor labelling in the staircase, firefighters had to mentally count which storey they were on.

However, the biggest controversy around Lakanal was the implementation of a ‘stay put’ policy, instructing tenants and residents to stay in their homes and await rescue rather than trying to escape themselves.

With the aggressive nature of the fire’s spread, this policy was dangerously inappropriate, and confusion on how it should be best implemented didn’t help.

One resident spent forty minutes on the phone to 999 after being told to stay put by operators, only to die in the fire.

The investigation and aftermath

An inquest was launched following the Lakanal House fire, whereby various recommendations were made to Southwark Council, the Department for Communities and Local Government and the London Fire Brigade.

The investigation found that Southwark Council had failed to spot fire safety breaches, and that the London Fire Brigade’s information about the building was years out of date.

Frances Kirkham, Coroner Judge, wrote to the then Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, Eric Pickles, urging him to:

• Publish guidance on the confusing ‘stay put’ policy
• Review the safety of building materials
• Produce new guidance for safety
• Consider retrofitting sprinklers across high-rise buildings

However, no action was taken on these recommendations.

The outcome

In the wake of Grenfell and other recent incidents, the impact of the Lakanal House fire continues to haunt the built environment.

In 2017, Southwark Council pled guilty to four charges of breaching safety regulations. They were fined £270,000.

Just last year, an article by BBC News published an article questioning whether enough had been done to address safety concerns since the incident. It cited how Marie Curie House, an ‘identical’ block to Lakanal House, had been given improvements but didn’t meet the higher standards introduced post-Grenfell.

As Mike Edge, the Chair of the Sceaux Gardens Estate Tenants and Residents Association, pointed out, residents ‘have been living in an unsafe building for 10 years.’

More needs to be done to avoid repeating history

Mbet Udoaka, who lost his wife and baby during the incident, made the following comment at the end of the inquest into the Lakanal Fire in March 2013:

“We fear very much that lessons have not been learned.”

These words proved fateful four years later when Grenfell Tower was set ablaze. Unless our sector takes stronger and firmer action and fully embraces its responsibility to keep people safe, there’s a very real risk that these disasters could repeat themselves in the years to come.