In the early hours of June 14, 2017, a fire broke out in the kitchen of a fourth-floor flat in Grenfell Tower, a 24-storey council housing block in North Kensington, London, starting in a fridge-freezer. It should have been a containable flat fire, of the kind firefighters deal with every week. Instead the flames broke out through the window, took hold of the building’s recently refurbished exterior, and within hours the whole tower was ablaze. Seventy-two people died.
The refurbishment completed in 2016 had wrapped the tower in a rainscreen cladding of aluminium composite material (ACM) panels with a polyethylene core, fixed over combustible plastic insulation. The Phase 1 report of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry found that this system acted as a fuel source and was the principal reason the fire spread so rapidly up, down and around the building, defeating the compartmentation on which the tower’s safety depended. Because the building had a single staircase and residents were initially advised to follow the “stay put” policy, many were still in their flats when the fire and smoke made escape impossible; the advice was not abandoned until nearly 2:47 a.m.
The disaster did not come without warning. Grenfell’s residents, through the Grenfell Action Group, had complained for years to the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation about fire safety in the tower, and after an earlier fatal cladding fire at Lakanal House in 2009 a coroner had recommended a review of building regulations and the retrofitting of sprinklers — recommendations that were never properly acted on.
The public inquiry chaired by Sir Martin Moore-Bick published its Phase 1 report in October 2019 and its final Phase 2 report on September 4, 2024. Phase 2 traced what it called decades of failure by central government, and found that the manufacturers of the cladding and insulation products had engaged in systematic dishonesty — manipulating fire tests, misrepresenting results and misleading the market about the safety of their products — while the council and its tenant management organisation bore considerable responsibility for the state of the tower. The report’s 58 recommendations, and the Building Safety Act 2022 passed in the fire’s aftermath, have reshaped British building regulation, though the work of remediating thousands of other buildings with unsafe cladding continues, as does the police investigation.