Progressive collapse
How the collapse of a tower block in East London ended the era of progressive optimism.
It is 5:45 on the morning of Thursday, 16th May, 1968.
Ivy Hodge is an early riser. She gets out of bed in her flat on the 18th floor of Ronan Point, a newly-built tower block in East London.
It had been a warm night. Temperatures the day before had topped 27 Celsius / 82 Fahrenheit, and some residents were unhappy about the “excessive heat” in the block.
Yet even on this muggy May morning, Ivy wanted to start the day with a cuppa. She went into her kitchen to make a brew on the gas cooker.
A second after she struck a match, there was a loud bang. Ivy was thrown back across the kitchen, and out of the way of onrushing danger.
“Everything sort of shook”
The bang was followed by shouts and cries from tenants of the block caught up in the blast. One resident described how “everything sort of shook”.
The explosion had been caused by a faulty fitting connecting the cooker to the wall standpipe. It triggered a progressive collapse in the south east corner of the building, as you can see in the picture above.
The blast had blown out the load-bearing sidewalls that held up the apartments above Ivy’s. Without this crucial support, the flats fell in on themselves. This was the moment at which disaster became inevitable.
Ronan Point had been built without ‘alternate load paths’. These function like shock absorbers. In response to an external strike, like an airplane collision, or internal shock, like an explosion in a kitchen, the load paths absorb and re-direct the energy away from the most vulnerable parts of the building.
Without this kind of structural interstitium, the shockwave caused by the collapse of the flats at the top ran a destructive path all the way down the building.
Four people were killed instantly. Their names were Thomas and Pauline Murrell, Thomas McCluskey, and Edith Bridgestock. 13 more were injured and 80 families were made homeless.
The official inquiry and independent investigations by activists and journalists exposed a litany of errors in the planning, design, and construction of Ronan Point. You can read about the significant changes that were made to building design and construction codes following the collapse.
In this article, I want to look more broadly at how the fall of Ronan Point ended the era of progressive optimism. It was the fourth, final, and knockout blow against the post-war idea that the state could abolish poverty.
The Five Giants
These blows were dealt in consecutive years — 1965, 1966, 1967, and 1968 — and their aftershocks are still being felt today. Let’s go back to era of post-war optimism to understand why they were so disturbing and destabilising to the political consensus of the day.
Ronan Point was a product of the post-war welfare state. In the 1942 report that laid the foundations for its formation, William Beveridge identified the ‘Five Giants on the road to post-war reconstruction’. These Giants were: Want; Disease; Ignorance; Idleness; and Squalor.
After 1945, the Attlee administration replaced the warfare state that had defeated the Nazis with the new welfare state. Its mission was to drive the Five Giants from the path of progress once and for all.
To tackle Want, a new national system of benefits would replace the inadequate pre-war patchwork of ‘Poor Law’ arrangements. Free healthcare on the NHS would inoculate the nation against Disease. Ignorance would be addressed by a nationalised system of comprehensive education.
Keynesian full employment would solve the problem of Idleness. While Squalor would be vanquished through a national programme of housebuilding.
“A marginal issue of conscience”
Throughout the 1950 and early 1960s, many people retained their faith in the organisational ability of the state to make poverty history. Here is a segment of the official history of the Benwell Community Development Project, from Ruth Lupton’s Poverty Street, describing the assumption of the time:
“It was generally believed in official circles in that widespread poverty and deprivation in Britain were things of the past. The age of affluence was upon us…Poverty was a marginal issue of conscience — the real problem was how to manage growth.”
The parallel assumption was that the cost of welfare would fall. As Nicholas Timmins, author of ‘The Five Giants: A Biography of the Welfare State’ puts it, Beveridge believed that the cost of the NHS would go down “once a mighty backlog of treatment had been dealt with.”
This serene confidence that the welfare state would complete its mission within a generation was about to shaken and, by the time we get to Ronan Point, utterly shattered.
1965 — Poverty is re-discovered
The first blow to the edifice of post-war optimism came from an unlikely source. Peter Townsend and Brian Abel-Smith were academics at the London School of Economics.
In 1965 they published The Poor and The Poorest. Through detailed analysis they arrived at a devastating conclusion. The Giant of Want was not just still alive; it was still growing.
Yes, some of the cruellest aspects of life prior to the creation of the welfare state had been banished. Free healthcare, free schools meals, and unemployment benefits meant that a family was not doomed to starvation or the workhouse if the main breadwinner fell ill.
However, many low-income families were struggling to afford the basic things that most people took for granted. Even worse, the authors described the “re-emergence of poverty over the latter part of the 1950s.” The proportion of households living below the poverty line had gone up; from 10.1% in 1953/54 to 17.9% in 1960.
Those percentages translated into about 7.5 million people living in poverty, including 2.25 million children and a similar number of pensioners.
Poverty had been re-discovered, and its harsh new realities were about to projected into the living rooms of millions of people.
1966 — “An ice pick in the brain”
On the 1st November, 1966 BBC1 aired the drama Cathy Come Home in its weekly ‘Wednesday Play’ segment.
It depicted the story of a young couple, Cathy and Ray, who meet and fall in love, but are dragged into a spiral of poverty and homelessness. Cathy leaves her job when she becomes pregnant, and the couple have to move out of their flat because their landlord wouldn’t allow children.
After Reg loses his job, they skitter from one unhappy and unstable short-term accommodation to the next. They are evicted from their final flat for non-payment of rent before they end up squatting an abandoned building. Ultimately, the couple split, the authorities take away the children, and Cathy is forced to sleep rough in a train station.
The play was watched by 12 million people, a quarter of the entire population, with more tuning in for repeats. For years afterward, Carol White, the actor who played Cathy so convincingly, couldn’t walk down the street without strangers stopping to give her money and ask after her wellbeing.
Cathy Come Home didn’t just prick the conscience of the nation. In the words of TV Review magazine, it delivered “an ice-pick in the brain of all who saw it.”
1967 — More slums than ever before
The third blow came from deep within Whitehall itself. In 1967, officials at the Ministry of Housing were finalising the findings from the national survey of housing fitness.
An earlier set of survey results had provoked acute embarrassment in government. The 1965 returns had revealed that there were 860,000 slums houses in the country. This was pretty much the same number as there had been in 1945.
After twenty years, multiple acts of parliament, and millions of pounds spent on inner-city demolition programmes, there had been barely been a reduction in the number of slums.
Worse was to come. The 1967 survey revealed that there were two million slums across the country; more slums than ever before. This was partly the result of the more rigorous data-collection techniques used by the Ministry.
More substantively, the rise reflected the self-defeating nature of large-scale, clean-sweep demolition in the inner cities. In the two decades after the war, councils had enthusiastically used their powers to declare vast tracts of urban land, and everything within them, fit only for demolition.
Scheduling an area for demolition not only added thousands more people to the waiting list, it had the practical impact of blighting nearby neighbourhoods. So for every 10 streets in a clearance area, the surrounding twenty would rapidly decay. Until they too were marked for demolition, blighting the areas around them, and so on and so on.
As Patrick Dunleavy argues in The Politics of Mass Housing in Britain, 1945–1975: “Clearance would result in increased housing need; which in the closed urban land system in city areas would justify further clearance to provide land for housing waiting list applicants; which would worsen the housing situation and produce further development.”
Under this kind of pressure, the justifications for demolition became increasingly tenuous. The Westbourne Road area of Islington was scheduled for clearance because the local medical officer declared that it was “full of prostitutes and pimps”.
This couldn’t go on forever. Land is finite and often expensive. Even the biggest cities started running out of available and affordable lands.
The last hope was the high-rise flat. In the words of Frank Price, the Mayor Birmingham, they “had no other choice but to go up”.
1968 — The fall of high rise
And so we come to fourth and final blow to the already teetering edifice of post-war optimism.
In its detail, Ronan Point was a specific case of poor planning, design, and construction. The tower had been built using the Larsen-Nielsen method, by which large concentre panels were made off-site, transported by truck, and then assembled on-site. This type of prefab construction method was popular with volume housebuilders because it allowed them to build at pace and at scale.
Yet Larsen-Nielsen was designed for buildings no higher than six floors. Ronan Point was 22 storeys high. Flaws in the design were exacerbated by shoddy construction. After the tower was dismantled in 1984, on-site investigators found evidence of “appallingly poor workmanship.”
Look at the bigger picture and the collapse of Ronan Point is part of a pattern of post-war failure in the fight against poverty.
The explosion in Ivy’s kitchen destroyed not just the corner of a tower block, but the cornerstone of a nation’s faith in the progressive power of government.
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I’m a freelance consultant and writer in the fields of urban and economic development. I help councils, community groups, developers, and housing associations to attract funding, develop and deliver strategies, and evaluate the effectiveness of their work. I’ve worked in all parts of the country and I’m always interested in talking about what I can bring to a place and what I’ve learned elsewhere. Get in touch with me to arrange a chat.
