Wikipedia Deep Dive

Grenfell Tower fire

12 min read

In the early hours of June 14, 2017, a refrigerator caught fire in a fourth-floor flat of a London tower block. Within ninety minutes, that small kitchen blaze had transformed into a seventy-two-death inferno that would burn for sixty hours, expose decades of regulatory failure, and fundamentally reshape how Britain thinks about building safety.

The Grenfell Tower fire became the deadliest structural fire in the United Kingdom since the Piper Alpha oil platform exploded in 1988, and the worst residential fire since the Blitz of World War II. But unlike those tragedies, Grenfell was not caused by enemy action or industrial accident in a remote location. It happened in one of London's wealthiest boroughs, in a building that residents had repeatedly warned was a death trap.

They had been ignored.

A Tower Built for Containment

Grenfell Tower rose twenty-four stories above North Kensington, part of a council housing estate designed in 1967 and constructed between 1972 and 1974. Council housing in Britain is publicly owned residential property, built and managed by local government authorities to provide affordable homes for lower-income residents. The tower contained 129 flats housing up to six hundred people.

Like most British high-rises, Grenfell was designed around a concept called compartmentation. The theory works like this: thick concrete walls and specialized fire doors divide a tower into separate boxes. If fire breaks out in one flat, it should stay contained in that flat while firefighters arrive to extinguish it. Only the residents of the affected unit need to evacuate. Everyone else should stay put behind their own fire doors, safe in their own compartments.

This "stay put" policy means British towers typically have only one central staircase. Unlike buildings in many other countries, there is no requirement for a second escape route. There is no centrally activated fire alarm because, in theory, most residents will never need to evacuate at all.

The system depends entirely on one assumption: that fire cannot spread from flat to flat through the building's exterior. For four decades at Grenfell Tower, that assumption held true. In 2010, a fire broke out in a lobby and was quickly extinguished.

Then, in 2016, the building received new cladding.

The Renovation That Created a Chimney

Grenfell Tower underwent major renovation between 2015 and 2016. The most consequential change was the addition of new exterior cladding, panels attached to the outside of the building ostensibly to improve heating efficiency and appearance. The cladding system had three layers: thermal insulation fixed directly to the concrete walls, then aluminum composite panels as the visible outer surface.

The aluminum panels were manufactured by a company called Arconic under the product name Reynobond PE. Each panel consisted of two thin aluminum sheets bonded to either side of a polyethylene core. Polyethylene is plastic, essentially the same material as shopping bags, and it burns readily.

An alternative version of the same product existed with a fire-resistant mineral core instead of plastic. It was refused due to cost.

The original contractor hired for the renovation had quoted 11.278 million pounds. The Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation, or KCTMO, the body responsible for the borough's council housing, considered this too expensive. They put the contract out for competitive bidding and selected Rydon, whose price came in 2.5 million pounds lower. The cladding subcontractor, Harley Facades, later testified that "from a selfish point of view," their preference was to use cheaper aluminum composite material.

The renovation wrapped the building in what was essentially a vertical fuel source, separated from the concrete structure by an air gap that would act as a chimney once flames entered it.

Warnings Ignored

Residents had been raising alarms for years before the fire. The Grenfell Action Group, a residents' organization, ran a blog documenting safety problems and criticizing both the council and KCTMO for neglecting fire safety and building maintenance.

In 2013, the group published a fire risk assessment that had been conducted by KCTMO's own health and safety officer. The findings were damning. Firefighting equipment had not been checked for up to four years. Fire extinguishers had expired. Some were so old they had the word "condemned" written on them.

The council's response to these concerns was not to fix the problems but to threaten legal action. In 2013, officials told one of the bloggers that their posts amounted to "defamation and harassment." Two women living in Grenfell Tower, Mariem Elgwahry and Nadia Choucair, were threatened with legal action by KCTMO after they campaigned for improved fire safety.

Both women died in the fire. Elgwahry was twenty-seven years old. Choucair was thirty-four.

In January 2016, the Grenfell Action Group issued what would become a prophetic warning: people might be trapped in the building if a fire broke out. They pointed out that the building had only one entrance and exit, and that corridors had been allowed to fill with rubbish, including old mattresses. In November of that year, the group wrote that "only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence" of the management organization, adding: "They can't say that they haven't been warned."

Seven months later, they were proved horrifically correct.

Meanwhile, in June 2016, an independent fire safety assessor had identified forty serious issues at Grenfell Tower and recommended action within weeks. By October, more than twenty of those issues remained unaddressed. In November, the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority served a formal fire deficiency notice listing multiple safety problems that required action by May 2017.

The fire broke out less than six weeks after that deadline.

The Night of June 14

At 12:50 in the morning, a resident named Behailu Kebede was awakened by his smoke alarm. He discovered smoke coming from a fridge-freezer in his kitchen. After alerting his lodgers and neighbors, he called the London Fire Brigade at 12:54.

The first fire engines arrived from North Kensington Fire Station within five minutes. The incident commander could see the fire as a glow in the window of flat 16 on the fourth floor. By normal standards, this was a routine kitchen fire in a compartmentalized building. Firefighters set up their operations base on the second floor, connected their hoses, and entered the flat at 1:07.

What happened next had no precedent in British firefighting experience.

At approximately 1:08, the fire penetrated the window frame and reached the exterior cladding. Within minutes, the plastic-cored panels had caught fire. A column of flame began racing up the side of the building at what witnesses described as a "terrifying rate." By 1:30, just forty minutes after the original emergency call, flames had reached the roof twenty stories above and the fire was completely out of control.

The fire was burning primarily behind the waterproof outer layer of the cladding system, in the air gap that acted as a chimney drawing flames upward. Water sprayed from the outside had almost no effect. Meanwhile, as the fire spread laterally as well as vertically, smoke and flames began entering flats across the building through windows and ventilation systems.

The compartmentation that was supposed to contain any fire had been bypassed entirely. The fire was not spreading from flat to flat through internal walls. It was spreading around the outside of the building and attacking from the exterior.

Stay Put Becomes a Death Sentence

When residents called 999, they were given the standard advice for high-rise fires: stay in your flat unless it is directly affected. This was the policy that made sense when compartmentation could be trusted. But compartmentation had failed.

Residents who followed official advice and stayed in their flats found themselves trapped as smoke and fire entered through their windows. Those who attempted to evacuate faced a single smoke-filled staircase, the only escape route for the entire building. Some residents made multiple trips up and down the stairs helping elderly neighbors. Others became disoriented in the smoke and could not find their way out.

The fire brigade did not issue a general evacuation order until 2:47, nearly two hours after the fire started and more than an hour after flames had reached the roof. By that point, for many residents, escape was no longer possible.

One factor worked in favor of survival that night. It was Ramadan, the Muslim holy month during which observant Muslims fast from dawn to dusk. Many residents were awake at that unusual hour preparing suhur, the pre-dawn meal eaten before the day's fast begins. They were able to alert neighbors who might otherwise have slept through the critical early minutes.

By daybreak, the full horror was visible to all of London. The burned-out shell of Grenfell Tower stood against the sky, flames still flickering from windows, with the exterior stripped away entirely in places to reveal the concrete skeleton beneath. The fire would not be fully extinguished for another two and a half days.

The Response

More than 250 firefighters from stations across London fought the blaze, using 70 fire engines. Over 100 ambulance crews responded on at least 20 ambulances, joined by specialist paramedics from the Hazardous Area Response Team, trained to operate in dangerous environments. Police and air ambulance helicopters assisted with the rescue effort.

Seventy people died at the scene. Two more died later in hospital. More than seventy were injured. Two hundred and twenty-three people escaped.

The fire was declared a major incident, triggering London's emergency response protocols. Dany Cotton, commissioner of the London Fire Brigade, drove to the scene from her home in Kent when she was called out during the night. She later described the fire as "unprecedented" in the brigade's 150-year history.

A System on Trial

In the aftermath, the question was not merely what had happened, but how it had been allowed to happen. The Grenfell Tower Inquiry, a formal public investigation with legal powers to compel testimony, began in September 2017.

Its first report, released in October 2019, addressed the events of the night itself. The findings were stark. The building's exterior had not complied with fire safety regulations. The cladding system was the central reason the fire spread. The fire service had been too slow to advise residents to evacuate, continuing to give "stay put" advice long after compartmentation had clearly failed.

The inquiry's second phase examined how the building came to be clad with flammable materials, who knew the risks, and why warnings were ignored. Its final report, published in February 2025, found systematic failures across the building industry and regulatory system. The government accepted all 58 recommendations.

As of early 2025, police investigations continue to determine whether criminal charges should be brought. The complexity and volume of evidence means cases are not expected to be presented to prosecutors before 2027 at the earliest. Twenty-two organizations, including the cladding manufacturer Arconic and appliance maker Whirlpool, reached a civil settlement with 900 people affected by the fire. Seven organizations remain under investigation for professional misconduct.

A Pattern Revealed

Grenfell was not the first fire to expose the dangers of combustible cladding. The 1973 Summerland disaster on the Isle of Man, which killed fifty people at a leisure center, spread partly because of acrylic sheeting on the building's exterior. In 1991, a fire at Knowsley Heights spread up the entire height of an eleven-story building via its exterior cladding, though fortunately it did not enter the interior and no one was injured. The 2009 Lakanal House fire in Southwark, which killed six people, involved similar composite panels.

The pattern was clear enough that Scotland, after a 1999 tower block fire, ordered the removal of laminate panels and enacted legislation to prevent their installation. England and Wales did not follow suit.

In May 2017, just weeks before Grenfell, the London Fire Brigade warned all 33 London councils to review the use of external panels and "take appropriate action to mitigate the fire risk." That warning came after a 2016 fire at a Shepherd's Bush tower block spread to six floors via flammable cladding.

After Grenfell, governments across the United Kingdom and internationally began investigating buildings with similar cladding systems. Hundreds of towers were found to have comparable materials. The effort to identify and replace dangerous cladding has itself created a crisis, as flat owners in affected buildings find their properties unsaleable and face enormous bills for remediation works. This ongoing problem has become known as the United Kingdom cladding crisis.

What Remains

The charred remains of Grenfell Tower stood for eight years, wrapped in white sheeting, a monument to the seventy-two people who died there. Demolition began in September 2025 and is expected to take two years.

The legacy of Grenfell extends far beyond one building. It revealed a regulatory system that had prioritized cost over safety, a management culture that treated residents' concerns as nuisances rather than warnings, and an industry that sold combustible materials knowing they would be used on residential buildings. It showed what happens when the people responsible for protecting the public decide that their complaints are harassment rather than evidence.

Nigel Whitbread, the original lead architect of Grenfell Tower, had said in 2016 that the building had been designed with attention to strength and "from what I can see could last another hundred years." He was talking about the concrete structure, which did survive. What he could not have anticipated was that the building's later renovations would turn its exterior into kindling.

The residents who warned of the danger have been vindicated, though far too late. The Grenfell Action Group's final pre-fire blog post ended with words that now read as epitaph: "They can't say that they haven't been warned."

They could not. They cannot. And seventy-two people paid the price for the warnings that were ignored.