The residential tower block had only been open for two months
Newham is a true patchwork of East London’s past and present, with the glimmering new builds of Stratford virtually shoulder-to-shoulder with mid-century towers, Victorian terraces and the industrial remains of the Royal Docks. A glimpse into the borough’s past reveals a tragedy that shaped the way buildings are constructed across Britain to this day – yet many current residents don’t even know it happened.
In 1968, a gas explosion in a brand-new tower block caused an entire corner of the building to collapse, resulting in the deaths of five people (four at the scene and one later in hospital) and leaving a further 17 injured. The Ronan Point disaster exposed shocking flaws in how thousands of homes across Britain had been built, and the lessons learned in the disaster are still relevant today – particularly in the wake of the 2017 Grenfell Tower disaster.
It was at around 5.45am on May 16, 1968, when a woman named Ivy Hodge got up in her flat on the 18th floor of the brand-new Ronan Point tower in Newham, striking a match to light the gas for her kettle. However, Ivy had no idea that gas had been silently leaking from a faulty connection to her cooker throughout the night.
Ivy was knocked out and suffered minor burns in the small explosion, but ultimately survived. However, the blast did blow out the load-bearing concrete walls of her flat, which caused the floors above to collapse. The falling rubble crashed down onto the floors below, with witnesses describing the incident like watching the fall of “a house of cards”.
The fact that the death toll was not far higher was largely down to luck, as most residents were still asleep in their bedrooms, away from the living rooms that took the brunt of the collapse. Dockers from the nearby Royal Victoria Dock were among the first on the scene to help rescue survivors.
Ronan Point was not an old or neglected building – in fact, it had only been open for two months at the time of the collapse. The incident shocked London, and left many wondering how a seemingly minor explosion could bring down an entire corner of a brand-new building.
Ronan Point was built as a remedy for the post-Second World War housing crisis, as many buildings had been destroyed across the city. Combined with a post-war baby boom, the pressure was on to provide cheap Council homes for the city’s swelling population.
Tower blocks seemed like a modern and efficient answer to the problem, able to house hundreds of families on a much smaller plot of land than the brick terraces which had come before. Techniques were employed to build the towers as quickly as possible, with one being the Large Panel System, or LPS.
LPS towers were constructed by stacking large precast concrete slabs on top of one another to form the walls, floors and ceilings of each flat. The system was fast and cheap, and could be done by relatively unskilled workers.
However, in order for the LPS system to work, it was crucial that the components were joined together properly. According to the BBC, technical guidance from the time even warned: “One can hardly over-emphasise the absolute necessity of effectively joining the various components of the structure together in order to obviate any possible tendency for it to behave like a ‘house of cards'”.
At Ronan Point those joints were catastrophically poor, with missing or not properly tightened bolts, and wall cavities that should have been filled with concrete found ‘stuffed with rubbish and newspaper’. Meanwhile, the builders were paid through piecework, so the more they built the more they were paid – which encouraged them to cut corners, according to the London Museum. As a result, the building may have looked finished but was actually hiding critical structural weaknesses.
The aftermath
An official inquiry was launched in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, which unsurprisingly found that thousands of homes across Britain had been built using the same Large Panel System. The inquiry ordered that LPS buildings should be checked and structurally strengthened, and gas cookers replaced with electric ones.
The damaged section of Ronan Point was rebuilt, and new tenants moved in. However, safety concerns did not go away and by 1986, after years of campaigning by local residents, the decision was made to demolish Ronan Point entirely. The demolition was carried out carefully so that investigators could examine exactly how the building had been put together.
The rubble was sold to Taylor Woodrow-Anglian, the firm that had originally built the tower. Some of it was used in the construction of the runway at London City Airport — which stands nearby to this day.
According to a report by the Institute of Structural Engineers, there were around 575 buildings constructed using LPS still standing in Britain as of January 2025. You can usually recognise them by the absence of gas fittings and signs telling residents they are banned from bringing bottled gas such as Calor gas into the building.
While many of the buildings still standing will have been strengthened over the years, their age presents fresh problems such as rusting bolts and cracks in concrete, and wear and tear from the weather. For example, residents of the LPS-constructed Ledbury Estate in Southwark, South London, were ordered to evacuate over safety concerns in 2017.
Thankfully though, the majority of LPS buildings in Britain have since been demolished or rebuilt. Today, the Ronan Point disaster stands as yet another tragic reminder of who pays the price when corners are cut and safety isn’t prioritised.
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