Lakanal House: The Fire We Should Have Learned From

We start this week chatting about Hannah’s all-consuming new farming obsession (no, not in real life – in a mobile game) and Rachel’s daughter delivering the line of the year to a would-be eight-year-old suitor. 

But soon we turn to the devastating story of Lakanal House. In July 2009, a fire tore through the Camberwell tower block, claiming the lives of Catherine Hickman, Dayana Francisquini, her children Thais and Felipe, and Helen Udoka with her newborn daughter Michelle. It exposed fatal flaws in fire safety, building regulations, and the infamous “stay put” policy. This was a tragedy that should have been a wake-up call, yet eight years later, Grenfell showed how little had changed. We explore the events, the victims, the investigation, and the warnings that went unheeded.

Sources include 

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/mar/28/lakanal-house-fire-inquest-verdict

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-39211598

https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/news/news/lakanal-house-fire-the-human-cost-39170

https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/lakanal-house-fire-what-architects-must-learn/8650805.article

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/11461/2170793.pdf

https://assets.grenfelltowerinquiry.org.uk/LFB00032148_Exhibit%20RJD_9%20-%20Report%20‘Coroner’s%20Inquests%20following%20the%20fire%20at%20Lakanal%20House%20on%203%20July%202009.pdf

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/14887/fire-safety-purpose-built-flats.pdf

Transcript

Ep 31 - Lakanal House
Hello, I'm Rachel, and I'm Hannah. And this is the Sinister South podcast, your weekly dose of everything true crime south of the river. Oh, that was that was professional, right? She's in her broadcasting era.

I love it. I love it. Oh, dear.

How are you? All good. Good. All good.

Good. Yeah, we like it. There you go.

There we go. Benito done. Oh, no, I've got a bit of an achy hip.

Oh, I think it is a combination of sleeping at quite a weird angle and walking quite a lot. Yeah. Well, we we must suffer for age.

I mean, I wasn't going to say anything. But yes, 100 percent. We all must suffer for art.

I was going to say walking is apparently your art. Oh, wow. OK.

I thought I had more to offer than just being able to move forward on two legs. But I mean, obviously, you have so that's fine. You've made your position very clear.

How are you? I don't care. I was. I don't care how you are.

I don't go on the ship. I mean, that's probably very true. No one does.

How am I? I am fine. I'm fine. Life is good.

It's all good. There's nothing much to report. You've got me addicted to a bloody game.

I'm so sorry that I said to you specific like Trevor's. This is this is what pressure does. Right.

So Hannah has been like tinkering. I guess I get hyper fixations on things. Right.

And but. Minor, incredibly short lived. So probably by the time this is going out.

Yeah, I won't give a fuck about this anymore. You won't. But you will know what you've done to me.

Anyway, I was tinkering on my phone. Hannah was tinkering on her phone and she kept just and she kept swearing at him and being like, oh, and then suddenly she'd be like, but I don't need any more wheat. And I got very confused.

So I always need wheat. Just I am. I asked what what in the Lord's name she was doing.

And turns out she was playing a mobile phone game. Yeah. I run a farm.

She does. She runs a farm. I can't remember what the fucking game's called.

Townville. Townville. Something like that.

We are not sponsored. However, if they would like to sponsor us, I can give me more township. There we go.

Give me some more bloody space in my barn. That would be wonderful. I told you.

What was the first thing I said to you? The barn is going to really infuriate you. That barn is always at fucking capacity. Yeah.

And you always need wheat. Yes. And always make sure your cows are fed because you need milk for a lot more ingredients than you think you would.

Yeah. I don't know what the milk does in the crisps when you get a snack factory eventually, but it does. But yes, so she she says she's been playing this game and I am one of those people who like my favourite game as a kid was always the Sims or that's why I'm obsessed.

Yeah. Or theme park or theme hospital, which is now two point hospital. I absolutely fucking love it.

So the moment that I can essentially act as God, I am all here for it. So I was like, right, well, I'm going to save that because if I download it, I will become immediately addicted. And I was like, I won't do it because I've got a really busy week.

I've got loads going on this week. Can't be distracted. And then Hannah said to me, no, well, level one, there's just a load of waiting around.

So what you said, let's be frank and honest with the Trevors here. Go on. I don't know why you're lying to them.

I don't really remember what I said. I know it was something along the lines of you said, I've got a really long drive down to Devon coming up. I do.

And I'm obviously you're not the one driving. No, I'm not. And I need something to do.

And I was like, so I'll save the game for then. And I said, I'm not being funny, but you've got a couple of weeks till then. I would start now because the first few levels, like the first week of playing is quite dull.

I don't know how they've drawn me in, but it's quite dull. And you just it's a lot of waiting for things to be built and land expansion and trying to expand your bomb. Yeah, yeah.

And like you might as well like build it up to the point where I'm at, where I've got like an airport and a mine and a lab and other things you obviously find on a farm and you're constantly worried about having enough stock for the train. Yeah, like that kind of stuff. Like then, like on your drive, you'll be in the interesting part.

You'll be like, oh, my God, I've actually got to do this side quest part and all of this and like, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, it was very good advice. It's very good advice.

But what has happened is that today I have spent more time tending to my farm than I have to. It's not my fault you have no boundaries. I really don't.

I really do need to work on that self-discipline. That is a bit of self-care that she says. What time did you go to sleep last night? I had nothing.

I think it's none of your business. My farm needed me. I'm nothing if not loyal and dedicated.

OK. Are you living by actual farmer times as well? Is that what's happening? Oh, the cots going into the garden, getting some mud under my nails just to make it really authentic. Oh, dear.

But yeah, if you if Townville fancies sponsoring us, do let us know. Township, that one. We're never going to get any sponsors at this rate.

We could be like, you know, when all those there was a period of time. It's the reason why I play Best Fiends is because there was a period of time where every single True Crime podcast would go Best Fiends, like Friends without the R, and I never once heard that. Did you not? It was on everything.

It was on everything. And I am now out of it. At level.

We're ready. This is this is where my fixation goes to. I am at level.

Where are we? It's a bit like duo. I'm not learning anything on Duolingo, but it's just the stubbornness that I need to do it. I am currently on level 2093.

Fuck me. You run a business. I know.

You've got two kids. Look, I run a business. You employ people.

I didn't say I was any good at any of those things. Fucking amazing at Best Fiends. Friends without the R. Oh dear.

Right. Enough jibber jabber. You've got something fun.

Guys, it's the Patreon shout out. And this month, because I think we'll do it monthly. Yes, we will do it monthly.

Is the great Naumonge disappearance. Friday night, 7.36 p.m. A Naumonge order vanishes en route between Wok and Wow and Amanda Rose flat. Three bao buns, one truffle loaded pad thai, no trace.

Naturally, the Naumonge app says delivered. Naturally, Amanda saw red. Within minutes, the investigation began.

Rosie Chexfield demanded CCTV access from every ring doorbell within a two mile radius. Julie Andrew cross-referenced delivery routes, bus timetables and the tide schedule at Rotherhithe. Chris Williams built a timeline in Excel and added conditional formatting for suspicious delays.

Jessica interrogated her own delivery driver, just in case it was a cross-platform confusion. Sam McDonald started mapping sightings of rogue dumplings. Tracy KV contacted the restaurant, pretending to be a food critic.

Rosie Austin made a mood board of possible suspects. All were wearing North Face. Joe Cooper posed as a Naumonge employee and joined the driver WhatsApp group.

Joe Darling recreated the entire route using Google Street View and Two Spring Rolls. Lou Took hacked his Fitbit to track the driver's heartbeat. Carl Rossini turned up at the depot and demanded answers while holding a sauce pot as evidence.

The case cracked when it was revealed the driver had eaten the bao buns and tagged them on Instagram as staff meal vibes. Justice was swift. The food was refunded.

And Naumonge is now trialling Patreon priority delivery TM, where your order comes with a laminated apology from everyone on this list. Thank you very much. You're welcome.

Ah, see, see, we do things properly. It might take us a bit longer to get them there, but they're worth it. All right.

They're worth it. I have already started next month with space for more names. If anybody's interested in signing up for Patreon, because I've got a whole like gangland saga.

Oh, nice. Percolating in my brain. So, yes, I have a whole gangland saga that I want to plan out.

But I really need more characters. Yeah. So, guys, if anyone listening fancies, it's from five and up.

Yeah. Anyone who fancies coming along and giving us five quid to have your name listed in one of Hannah's epic stories, then please do let us know or just go to Patreon and do it there. Yeah, I'll find it.

It's been a week. I'm still in summer holidays. And that just makes me delirious as well, because it's just like, hang on.

Where are they now? What are they doing? How what am I doing? Who's looking after them? Where's what? Who's picking them up? Did you pick them up? I got should they be here? Oh, although it was very amusing this morning, I took both of them to there, a holiday club thing. Yeah. And I took them both to the camp thing this morning.

And it happens to be in a school. It's a very posh. It's a local private school.

It's a it's a private school. And we walked in and my oldest turns out to me. She goes, hang on.

This is a school. I was like, yes, darling, it is. And she went, don't look like my school.

It's like, yeah, yeah. Well, this is this is where the other half go. We are not in that half.

That's it. Although we know people that went to that school. We do know people who went to that school.

Let's just say. Oh, and I'm allowed to say that because they're rivals in the sporting world of a school that my family. Yes.

Member went to. Yes. Yeah.

Why? I don't know what I'm loving. I'm loving the hand flick. But also they won't be at camp by the time this goes out.

So it's not like we're trying to protect them from being kidnapped from the camp. No, because they won't be there. They're not there anymore.

Or is it all a double bluff? Who knows? Who knows? They go to that school. You're really good at running a business. It was all a double bluff.

My farm is fucking thriving. Oh, dear. But yeah, it was just quite amusing.

It was almost as amusing as the other story she told me today. I just I'm going to tell it because it makes me giggle. Oh, yes.

So it was her birthday party a couple of weeks ago. I mentioned last week that we'd had the party. So at that party, she invited her school friends, as one does to a birthday party, and she invited a boy.

I'm not going to say his name, but just a boy. And he turned up. And on the day when he turned up, like the party was fine.

He was fine. It was all good. And then as we were like that evening, once we got home, she said to me, she's like, oh, I was a bit worried about the boy turning up.

And I said to her, like, why? Like you and you invited him like your choice. And she went, yes, but that was before the last day of school, mummy. OK, what's going on? What was what was the last day of school? She went, well, I was sat in the reading shack and I was reading a book.

And he came in and he waited for everyone else to leave until it was just me and him in the reading shack. And immediately my hackles are going. Yeah, I'm like, oh, I've got the hell an eight year old.

I've got to go and completely destroy his life. That's fine. And she was like, yeah, he waited for everyone to leave.

And then he shut the door and he said to me, I've got a crush on you. And I said, oh, OK. And I was like, OK, maybe I don't hate him so much.

It's quite cute, really. Like, you know, little eight year olds. And I said, oh, and what did you say? Do you do you have a crush on him? Which I find very weird because I'm against that whole like eight year olds don't need boyfriends.

Yeah, yeah. But did you tell him you had a crush on him as well? And she went, no. I just went, well, this is awkward.

What a legend. What a legend. Absolutely brilliant.

I've never been so proud in my entire life. It is also very much tell me that she's my daughter without telling me that she's my daughter. I did then say, what did you say to him? She said, I said, I just wanted to be his friend, just as as a friend.

I don't want a boyfriend. I said, OK, good. And then we did have the whole conversation about how you don't ever have to apologise for not wanting to be somebody's partner or want it.

You can just say, no, that's fine and move on and all of that. So but it was just brilliant. I mean, it's been a big few days for her.

She's also absolutely made up by telling me about her new deodorant. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then me telling her, yeah, I've got the exact same one. She was like, what? It's not like you. Are you using the children's one? I was like, no, no, because it's all natural and all organic.

It's safe for children to use. And I also use it, too. And it's really nice.

And I've got the same pink case. Yeah. Oh, my gosh.

She was absolutely made up. She's a proper grown up now. Like I say, she's eight.

That's the end of it. Like, it's very cute. It's very cute.

But bless her. Yeah. Well, this is awkward.

Oh, yes. Anyway, I've got a horrible story for you. Yeah.

If you'd like. We full disclose Trev's. I was meant to do this one.

My last story. But then we realized that there was too many fires. Yeah.

Next to each other. So we have moved it. But trigger warning for just basically really sad stuff.

Fire. All of that. And also because, yes, someone has watched the Grenfell documentary on Netflix.

This is exactly what I said when I saw it come on the list. It was. Yeah.

And yes, I did immediately start researching this case as soon as it came up. So you will. You beat me to it by probably five minutes.

Quickly under the shared drive. I was like, ah, fine, fine, dammit. But yes, as per usual, all of the notes will be in the show notes.

All of the links. Sources. That's the word.

All of them will be in the show notes. Just as as a point of safety for you. Yes.

But if at any point I'm looking at my phone, just know that I am listening. I'm also just a very fucking busy farm. Very busy farming.

Now, I will not. I will not judge you. I will not judge you.

That lab is not going to run itself. Exactly. Right.

So, yes, settle in. Get ready. I'm about to tell you a horrible story.

OK, here we go. Also, I am just going to say off the top trigger warning for lots. I've said trigger warning, but like there is mention of an infant dies of fire.

So I'm just going to put that out there. We will just like go very quickly into it and race past it. And I will try and get it right this time, because I did just say 20 years.

And that was incorrect. You'll see what I get to in a minute. Anyway, on the 3rd of July 2009, a fire broke out in a London tower block within half an hour.

It had torn through seven floors. Six people died. Three women and three children, including a baby who was just 20 days old.

Days, days. Oh, my God. The fire started with a faulty television in one flat, but it moved through gaps it should never have found across panels that should never have burned into homes where people had been told to stay put.

And if this fire and the information surrounding it sounds familiar, it's because unfortunately it happened again. This was eight years before Grenfell. Yet the parallels between the two incidences are haunting.

Both were social housing blocks. Both used outdated advice that proved fatal and both saw residents trapped in buildings that were meant to protect them. This is the story of Lackanell House.

So Lackanell House was built in 1959 as part of the Soe Gardens Estate in Camberwell, South London, a post-war attempt to reimagine urban housing. It was designed during an era of architectural optimism. It stood 14 stories high and contained 98 two bedroom maisonettes arranged in a system known as a scissor block, which was said to be almost futuristic at the time of its construction.

Now I'll go into what a scissor block is in a bit more in a minute. The building was named after Joseph Lackanell, a French revolutionary and education reformer in a nod to Camberwell's post-war ties with a Parisian suburb of Soe. Lackanell was part of a broader ideal about how people should live.

So you've got to think like the war decimated this country. And so when we were trying to rebuild, it kind of was it was an opportunity to do something that was new, build back better, do something that was new, do something that may have made life easier or kind of like it was almost trying to figure out how it could be how it could accommodate London specifically, how it could accommodate the more sort of cosmopolitan, busy, bustling. No longer are we all in terraced houses in rows.

So this was a really important part of architectural history. And essentially. This building was one that was kind of, as I say, it was very futuristic, it hadn't necessarily been used, the architectural style hadn't been used very often.

OK, so it was very much seen as like the new, the you know, the maisonettes were designed to feel more like compact houses than flats. Each one spanned two levels as maisonettes I want to do. They had bedrooms and bathrooms on one floor and then kitchens and lounges on the other.

A very familiar layout today, but one which at the time gave families a real sense of space and privacy, which had otherwise not been seen in sort of in flats or where you had multiple people in so houses, multiple occupation basically within regular houses. Every flat had two possible exits, so there was one that was on to an internal corridor and one that was out onto an external balcony. OK, that is unusual.

And the corridors were built with cross ventilation in mind. So essentially, the idea was that the way that they were built is that it meant that airflow would, in theory, push smoke out right in a fire. So the way that again, it comes back to the scissor block thing where you would have one exit is across from one balcony.

So if anything was to happen in one flat, the idea was that there would be air pull through that would take it out. I say the building so it wouldn't be in the central column. A single central staircase linked all the floors and was meant to be protected enough to serve as a reliable vertical escape room.

At the time it was built, Lackanell House was considered really innovative, as I said, and it complied with the 1954 means of escape in case of fire guidance, which was a national fire safety standard that dictated how buildings should be designed to allow residents to escape in the event of fire. Under this guidance, a single central staircase was allowed in residential tower blocks, but only if certain conditions were met. So in order to comply, each flat had to have at least two independent escape routes and the building needed built in ventilation systems to disperse smoke and protect the escape path.

OK, so it met all of those things. But in the decades that followed, these assumptions were quietly eroded. The original building facades were replaced with a mix of timber and asbestos panels, which were both flammable.

In the 1980s, security doors were added to flats, but they interfered with the airflow and compromised the original ventilation design. The replacement vents were too small to function effectively in the way that they were supposed to. And later, suspended ceilings were installed in the corridors to hide pipes and wiring, because aesthetics is better than safety.

These ceilings were made of softwood and eventually were lined with chipboard and melamine laminate. None of this was just cosmetic. It introduced combustible materials, disrupted smoke control and undermined the very fire safety principles the building had originally been designed around.

So by 2006, Lackanell House was scheduled for a major refurbishment under the government's Decent Homes Programme, and that was a nationwide policy that was launched in the year 2000 and aimed at bringing all public housing up to a basic minimum standard because social housing, again, in the 80s and all the rest of it had just been kind of let to go to rack and ruin. People could buy their own. So people stopped caring about it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And this new standard focused on improving very specific elements of housing. So the heating, insulation, kitchens, bathrooms and then the general living conditions. But fire safety was never a primary concern in any of these building works, because why would it be? It just beggars belief.

Why would it be? OK. Southwark Council allocated £3.5 million to renovate Lackanell. But rather than making the building safer, some of the changes introduced even more new risks.

So that original panelling on the outside of the building and what we're all now in the post Grenfell world, we understand this panelling, cladding situation. But in the year 2000, so the asbestos and timber panels that had been put on the building facades, they were replaced, but they were replaced with aluminium composite panels. Right.

So apparently these are, although they are marketed as being fire resistant, they are not. No. And they're later.

They were later found to be capable of burning through in under five minutes. And these are the very panels that would become notorious in the wake of Grenfell. Yeah.

So despite the scale of the works, the upgrades were classified as routine maintenance and they weren't seen as a structural alteration to the building itself. So that meant that they didn't trigger a full building control process. So there was no comprehensive fire risk carried out beforehand.

And in effect, the building had undergone significant changes that no one went back to re-evaluate. And so no one knew whether or not these changes had compromised the original safety design of the building, because it was just routine maintenance. It's just, you know, sprucing up, tarting it up.

That's it. So to those who live there, though, Lackanaw wasn't defined by regulations or refurbishments. Its community was as diverse as the city itself.

Families from Brazil, Nigeria, Ghana and Eastern Europe lived alongside people born and raised in Southwark. People who'd come to London for work, education or simply a better life. There were parents, teenagers and retirees, long term tenants and people just starting out.

The South London Gallery ran regular art projects on the estate. There was a Saturday club for children and residents had recently planted a community fruit garden at the base of the tower. Plans were underway to turn that fruit garden into an orchard.

Inside the building, life followed a very familiar rhythm. Residents got used to the quirks of the building, like the fact that the flat numbers didn't always seem to follow logic and the lifts that worked. They worked only some of the time and neighbours that you came to know by sound as much as by sight.

But to outsiders, especially emergency responders, the building's internal layout was baffling. Lackanaw was, as I mentioned earlier, built using a scissor section design. Now, this is an architectural style that was apparently very popular in postwar period because it maximized space and light.

But Lackanaw was apparently one of the first ones in London. Right. However, the in order to make sure that you're and this is going back to my I know a lot about this stuff, right? I'm sorry, Trevor, I'm going to have to interrupt my own story.

I have a lot of in a past life. I used to work for a professional services body that operated very heavily within the construction sector. Yes.

And so there is a very small part of me that's like, oh, well, I understand it's the right to light legislation. Oh, that's building control number. I'm literally so sad that I was it.

Why not? I was writing it being like, oh, I actually understand half of this. Anyway. So, yes, to in order to maximize the space and light, to give people access to because the rights of light, the rights to light legislations are essentially that it's allowing people to have natural light in their space.

So in order to make that happen, there were quite a lot of complexities that had to be made in the layout of these buildings, especially seeing as the flats were two stories themselves. Yeah. So.

Instead of stacking a flat one on top of the other, so if you think of Lego bricks and just putting them on on top of the other, that's how standard tower block is built. This is a layout interlocked them diagonally. OK, so like if you think about blades on a pair of scissors, that's exactly how it works.

So you would have it like that. I'm doing it as a visual medium. Anyway, I'm letting Hannah know.

Scissors, think scissors. Each maisonette spanned multiple half levels crossing over and under its neighboring flats in a zigzaggy pattern. OK, OK, I'm with you.

So to put this into perspective, you might enter your flat from a communal walkway on the 10th floor. But once inside, your bedroom could be on the level below, effectively the ninth floor. Your living room might be positioned above someone else's hallway.

And because the front doors for alternating flats were set on different floors to neighboring households could be just a few meters apart horizontally, yet separated by an entire flight of stairs vertically. So from the outside, you couldn't tell which flat was where. And from the inside, if you didn't live there, you could get lost incredibly easily.

Yeah, there are like, I mean, it puts my now monge thing into like they'd have no chance. They would have absolutely no chance. But it was quite interesting because in in the research, I was like reading things and it was like they were saying even the postman like you would have if you were just using the letterboxes down the front.

Great. But if you had a parcel or whatever to deliver, the amount of stuff that just ended up in just ended up in the beginning, like in the the communal bit at the start, just like sorting for yourself. I don't know.

I don't understand. Each for their own enjoy. But yes, so this wasn't uncommon for mid-century high rise blocks, but it did pose a very specific problem in a crisis.

Firefighters, even with floor plans, struggled to match 999 calls to physical locations. So this was happening even before the fire, like any sort of incident. If you needed an ambulance, if you needed the police every single time someone came, they found it very confusing.

So residents would say something like I'm in flat 81, but it wasn't always obvious where that actually was. You couldn't then look for 80 or 82 necessarily to find 81. Exactly that.

And though each flat had a second exit in theory, it was often through a bedroom window or along a balcony, which during a fire might already be filled with smoke. Yeah. And when the central stairwell filled up, your escape becomes essentially impossible.

Lackanaw House was and it's really I need to say this. It's going to sound really weird out of context, but it wasn't a slum. It wasn't a place where people got chucked and forgotten.

It wasn't. It was a thriving community. There were Saturday classes.

There was an well planned orchard. Exactly. People gave a shit.

They did. It was a thriving community. And even though it was social housing, it was there was there was this sense.

Well, we both have families or family connection to both the Aylesbury and the Haygate. Yeah. In Anfield Castle, like really like infamous estates in South London.

And I know that when my she's my great aunt lived on the Haygate. Yeah. She knew everyone.

Everyone knew everyone. And they were everyone like maintained that were most pretty much 99 percent of the residents maintained their flats to a meticulous standard. They were really proud to be there.

Yeah, they were lovely flats inside. Like I really fond memories of the of the flat. And like I don't obviously I was a child, so I don't know if I felt unsafe outside or if I would have done or whatever.

But like they were they were really beautiful because everybody gave a shit about where they were living. Exactly. And I think it's like there are some tower blocks and we've spoken about a couple in this podcast before, like Eros House.

Oh, God. And that has just been let go. Just no one gives a shit.

Completely. The people that live there don't give a shit about it. Exactly.

But that isn't what Lackanell House was. It was very much a solid, stable building. And for many families, it was a big step forward in their own lives.

But by 19 sorry. But by 2009, it was also a place where compartmentation had been breached. So this was around all of those.

Compartmentation is is how that ventilation was allowed to happen. So that was then with the building works that had been done by the council and then people giving a shit about their own homes. But there were certain things that happened.

So I just put something like or change something. Exactly. And not really knowing what they were changing.

Exactly. Would have such a knock on effect. They would then end up kind of or some baffling decisions by the council.

Baffling decisions. And but basically one of the biggest things that became compromised was the escape routes. Right.

And part of this was because there were certain assumptions that had been made about how fire behaves in a building of that type. Right. Without them realizing that actually the building of that type was no more because of the amendments that they've made to the building.

I say so. It had all the features of a modernist housing block, but it also had the vulnerabilities of a building that had been altered without being truly understood. It looked like a safe place to live until it wasn't.

It was a warm Friday afternoon in July. The end of school term was approaching and the pavements outside Lackanell House was scattered with children heading home, neighbours chatting on balconies, the occasional pushchair wheeling past the playground at the foot of the block. South London in summer, muggy, restless, full of energy.

The kind of afternoon where windows are open, fans are on and the usual hum of domestic life echoes between tower blocks, kettles boiling, televisions murmuring, kids laughing and someone's radio playing through a cracked window. Lackanell stood quietly among it all. In flat 65 on the ninth floor, an old television set sat idle in the living room.

No one could have guessed it was about to fail catastrophically, or that within minutes the flat would be engulfed in flames. At around 4.15pm, smoke began to rise. It's thought due to an internal electrical fault within that television.

Right. The television sparked into fire, plastic wiring, casing all caught quickly and at 4.16pm the building's smoke alarm sounded. Luckily, the woman who was inside flat 65 managed to escape and one minute later at 4.17pm, the first 999 calls were made.

OK, so it's all pretty quick. Really quick. But once the fire had taken hold of the living room, it found new fuel.

The wall panels and the window surrounds had been installed during the 2006 refurbishment. These aluminium composite panels that have become notorious had been installed under bedroom windows across the building to offer insulation, but instead they became kindling. And in less than five minutes, flames had burned through them, broken the windows and spread vertically to flat 79 directly above.

The fire also entered the corridor outside, racing along one of the suspended ceilings. Jesus Christ. Smoke began to pour into the communal areas and through ventilation grills, extractor fans and service voids.

By 4.22pm, just minutes after ignition, fire crews arrived, but the fire was already moving in multiple directions, upwards to flat 79 and beyond, as we mentioned, downwards as melted plastic and embers dropped to flats below, sideways through wall voids and shared ceilings. Lackadale House was constructed around this principle of compartmentation. The idea that each flat was act as its own fire resistant unit sealed off from neighbouring dwellings.

So the walls, floors and ceilings were designed to contain fire for at least 60 minutes, giving firefighters crucial time to respond and allowing residents in other parts of the building to remain safe in their homes in place. This was the foundation for the stay put guidance, a policy built on the belief that fires would be slow to spread and that the safest option was often to remain inside your own flat. But by 2009, that principle had been quietly and dangerously eroded.

So over the years, I've mentioned already refurbishment works chipped away at the integrity of the fire barriers without any proper oversight. But this wasn't just things like the suspended ceilings and the infamous external cladding panels. Electricians had drilled holes between flats to run cabling, but then failed to reseal the openings with fire resistant materials.

Maybe that's your DIY-er who's just doing something for quick. Kitchen and bathroom refurbishments often meant breaching walls or ceilings, but contractors hadn't restored the original protections. These small fragmented decisions added up to a complete breakdown of the compartmentation system.

At least 20 flats were affected by fire or smoke. In flats above the source of ignition number 79, 81 and beyond, residents were calling 999, not in panic at first, but in fear and uncertainty. Some said they could smell smoke.

Others reported heat on their walls or strange noises above them. The operators at the time followed procedure. The standard advice for high-rise fires in buildings like Lackanaw was clear.

Stay in your flat, block the doors, put wet towels at the base. Wait, help is coming. The assumption was that each flat would contain the fire for at least 60 minutes, but this was disastrously wrong in this particular scenario.

Fire had bypassed the fire stopping barriers and the air was becoming toxic. Some callers said they couldn't breathe. Others said they could hear glass breaking.

Some described the walls getting hot. But still, the advice was stay where you are. Fire crews are on their way.

Many residents didn't understand the layout of the building well enough to describe exactly where they were, and many control room staff didn't understand the scissor design well enough to interpret it. Flat 79 didn't sit cleanly above flat 65. Flat 81 was partially above and beside it.

Callers would give their number, their flat number, but it wasn't always clear which physical floor that meant. Some fire crews reached the wrong flats or searched on the wrong levels. Radio signals failed inside the building.

Teams were having to count doors manually. Every second lost to confusion was a second gained by the fire. In some cases, callers were told to stay, even if the fire had already entered their flat.

Jesus Christ. The first fire crews arrived at Lackanaw House at 4.22, as I said, so this was just six minutes after the first 999 call was made. From the outside, the situation was already worse than expected.

Flames had broken through the windows and smoke was pouring from multiple levels. Fire was climbing and falling at the same time. London Fire Brigade did their best.

They brought in manpower and resources, but even so, Lackanaw worked against them at every turn. The single central stairwell intended to be protected from smoke quickly became impassable. As firefighters opened doors to rescue residents, backdraft and heat pulled thick smoke into the stairwell.

Negative pressure drew fumes downwards, and what was meant to be the safest route in and out became a vertical tunnel of toxic smoke. Crews had to move the bridgehead, which is their command post, several times as conditions changed. And inside the building, communication was breaking down.

Radios were losing signals in the concrete structure. Messages were not getting through and instructions were being missed. Firefighters became separated.

Aerial ladders were brought in to reach balconies from the outside, but as hard as they tried, they just couldn't access everyone. In one instance, a firefighter smashed through a bathroom wall to reach a resident. In another, a woman and child were rescued from a bedroom window with just seconds to spare.

But despite the heroism of individual crews, the system itself was struggling. Commanders hadn't been trained to deal with a fire spreading this fast across multiple flats and floors. The building's layout wasn't in their standard plans, and there was no full fire strategy on file that reflected the 2006 refurbishment.

On the 10th floor, Xu Qilam was jolted by a loud bang. When she looked out of her window, thick black smoke billowed past the glass. She phoned her husband, panic already rising in her voice, and grabbed what she could.

The stairs were choked with smoke. She couldn't see her hand in front of her face, just the beam of a firefighter's torch cutting through the dark. Quote, I couldn't breathe.

I couldn't see. I just knew I had to keep moving, she said later. Holding the wall for guidance, she says she felt her way through the gloom, finally emerging into daylight, shaking and breathless, but alive.

Georgia Thomas managed to escape from the top floor of Lackanell House with her two children and neighbour, Norman Ebiowe. She recounted the harrowing experience during the later inquest, stating it was hard to breathe. I had to get my children out of there.

She described the smoke as being at its worst on the ninth and eleventh floor floors, making it extremely difficult to breathe. But despite the thick black smoke, she was determined to save her family, saying, I think the only thing that kept us going was adrenaline. I just continued down.

Smoke began to get clearer, and I remember seeing other people on the stairwell. There was just panic everywhere, but at least I could see them. Norman Ebiowe, who also lived on the 14th floor, fled with his wife and two young children, demonstrating remarkable bravery.

He had actually got his wife and children out of the flat and he ran back upstairs. Oh, my God. To assist Georgia and her children.

Wow. He described the experience as, quote, It was like fighting for one's life. I noticed it was difficult breathing, but there was only one thing in my mind.

We all had to get out of there. What a man. Exactly.

Eleven floors up, Sunders Bashir was heavily pregnant. Her husband spotted the smoke first curling in from the balcony. They didn't wait for the advice.

They knew what they had to do. They soaked towels, covered their faces and ran. The stairwell was chaos, she said.

People were shouting, crying, crashing into each other in the dark. Quote, It was so hard to breathe. I could feel my baby kicking as I held my stomach and prayed.

Fucking hell. Sunders said she never saw the faces of those beside her, only heard their panic echoing off the concrete walls. From her flat on the seventh floor, Camilla Abassi watched the fire move like a predator leaping from one part of the building to another.

She said it was too fast, too alive. It was like the building was breathing fire. She tried to knock on neighbours' doors, shouting warnings, but the smoke was already really thick.

Her son clung to her, sobbing from the heat. She kept him low to the ground, crawling their way to the exit. It felt like we were in hell, she said.

The alarms were screaming, the walls were shaking and the air was thick. It was terrifying. On the ninth floor, Anthony Williams had done what he'd been told.

He stayed put. But when the smoke began to creep under the door, his trust in the advice was shattered. He rushed into the corridor, knocking on his neighbours' doors, urging them to leave.

Quote, People were coughing, crying. Some were crawling on hands and knees. We were all just trying to survive, he said.

The stairwell, once the escape route, had become a battleground of heat, smoke and fear. Eunice Akintola had smelled something earlier in the day, but thought it was just cooking. By the time the alarms had sounded, it was too late.

She opened her door and was swallowed by smoke. Retreating into her bathroom, she stuffed wet towels against the door, hoping the fire wouldn't reach her. She waited and waited.

Quote, I didn't know if I was going to make it. I just waited and prayed. I just kept thinking of my grandchildren.

Oh, my God. In total, the London Fire Brigade deployed over 100 firefighters 18 fire engines and 9 fire rescue units to combat the blaze. The fire was declared extinguished later that evening on the 3rd of July, but firefighters were still conducting rescue operations and extinguishing remaining hotspots into the night, with some victims being found and pronounced dead between 7.10pm and 9.13pm. More than 150 people were evacuated or rescued that day.

38 were brought out by firefighters. Dozens more escaped with help from neighbours. At least 20 people were injured.

The fire at Lackanell House claimed the lives of six residents, three women and three children who died primarily from smoke inhalation. In total, the fire burned through at least seven floors of Lackanell House. Flats as low as the fifth floor caught fire from falling debris, embers that dropped from windows and reignited elsewhere.

I obviously, as is our want, I wanted to take some time to try and tell you some more about the six victims of the fire. There is only a small amount of information about them in the public record. So this is what I could find.

But I am aware that there's not as much as I would have liked to have been able to talk about. Sometimes that happens. Exactly.

So Catherine Hickman. Catherine lived in flat 79, which was above the origin of the fire in flat 65. At 4.21 p.m., Catherine called 999 reporting smoke entering her flat.

Throughout the call, she described the worsening conditions, stating, quote, now, actually, before I say this, this is horrible. Right. Just to listen to.

Quote, It's orange. It's orange everywhere. And later, oh, my God, I can see flames at the door.

Despite being advised to stay put, the fire rapidly engulfed her flat. The emergency operator at the other end of the line heard her screaming as burning debris fell from the ceiling. Approximately 40 minutes into the call, she ceased responding.

Oh, God. And by 4.55, the operator could no longer hear her breathing. Oh, my God.

Her body was later found in the living room. The fire had reached her flat from below and through the corridor. Catherine was described as a talented designer who had created her own fashion label.

Moi, moi et Cat, moi et Cat. Me and Cat. Me and Cat.

And she had designed outfits for singer Bjork. Oh, wow. Mm.

Her family remembered her as, quote, beautiful, kind, loving, warm, genuine, trustworthy, loyal, funny, proper, sweet, pure, classic, talented, unique and irreplaceable. Wow. Catherine's death occurred within 33 minutes of the fire starting.

She was just 31 years old. Catherine's grieving boyfriend, a hairstylist who had been in New York at the outbreak of the blaze, told of how he woke up every night screaming and crying after her death. The couple had been together for six years, and it was also emerged that her family had not been told until five days after the fire that her body had been found.

What? Yeah. Couldn't find any further info on that. OK.

Diana Thay and Philippe Francisquini, I think is how you pronounce it. Easy for you to say. Exactly.

Diana was originally from Brazil, but had moved to the UK to make a better life for her and her family. She was 26 and was working as a bank clerk, living in flat 81 of Lackanell House. She lived there with her two children, Thys, age six, and Philippe, age three.

Her partner, Raphael Servi, who had met Diana in a Brazilian nightclub in London, was stepfather to Thys, describing her as a dream daughter and father to Philippe, who he said was sometimes a naughty little boy, but who was incredibly sweet. On the day of the fire, Diana sought refuge in the bathroom of her flat with her children and neighbor, Helen Udoka, and her newborn baby, Michelle. They had been sealing the door with magazines and towels to block the smoke, but the heat was too intense.

The vents, which were meant for airflow, let the smoke in. Oh, my God. Despite making a distress call to Raphael, who was at work and being advised by firefighters to stay put, the group succumbed to smoke inhalation.

Raphael recounted the harrowing experience of speaking to Diana moments before she hung up, unable to breathe and later discovering that his entire family had perished. Oh, my God. Helen and Diana and their children had been just yards away from a balcony where firefighters rescued two young girls.

The crews were unable to go back because their oxygen levels were running dangerously low. Tragically, none of them knew the balconies opened onto escape routes. What the fuck? A fund was set up by the Southwark News newspaper to help Raphael lay his family to rest in their home country of Brazil.

Their bodies were flown to Curitiba in the south of the country with donations from the Camberwell community and funeral director Barry Albin, after Raphael promised Diana's father that he would return them home. Oh, my God. It's just I'm literally gone cold.

Yes, it is horrible. It's unimaginable. Helen lived on the 11th floor of Lackanell House with her newborn daughter, Michelle, who was just 20 days old at the time of the fire.

A smoke filled her flats. Helen sought safety in Diana's flats, hoping it would be safer. Tragically, both mother and daughter died from smoke inhalation while sheltering in the bathroom.

Helen was originally from Nigeria, which is where she had met her husband, Mabet. I think that's how you pronounce it. It's spelled M-B-E-T.

When they were both studying at university in Lagos. Helen called him to tell him about the fire and he raced home, but he was prevented from entering the building. Oh, my God.

The last words Helen said to him on the phone were, quote, the smoke is too much and that their daughter was going to heaven. He later saw his three week old child, who he described as lovely and a happy baby, carried out of the burning building and traveled with her to King's College Hospital. Not knowing his wife's fate, he was told to go to St. Thomas's Hospital, where there was no sign of Helen.

She was later found dead at Lewisham Hospital. Oh, my God. Mabet expressed deep sadness and frustration, stating, quote, if I was allowed to go upstairs, maybe, maybe I would have been able to rescue them myself.

Yeah, like that powerlessness and just never knowing. It's just horrific. Oh, fucking hell.

Vigils were held at the base of Lackanell House. Flowers and tributes filled the railings. There were raw, unanswered questions on every tongue.

How had the fire spread so fast? Why weren't the residents told to flee? Who was responsible? The building stood as a grim symbol of what many feared lay hidden in tower blocks across the country. Inadequate fire safety, poor communication and dangerous assumptions about how the fire would behave. But in the days and weeks that followed, there were no quick answers and the wheels of justice moved painfully slowly.

The London Fire Brigade launched an internal investigation into the events of the 3rd of July to determine if any individuals or organisations were criminally liable. It was clear almost immediately that the fire had not been contained the way it should have been. The investigation found that vertical service voids, some of which had been left completely unsealed, had allowed flames and smoke to travel with devastating speed.

The previous refurbishments had, as I mentioned before, not been properly assessed for fire resistance. Fire and smoke had travelled externally via combustible balcony components, bypassing any compartmentation the internal layout was meant to preserve. The probe considered charges of gross negligence, manslaughter and corporate manslaughter, focusing on Southwark Council, who was the building owner and landlord and possibly any of the refurbishment contractors.

The CPS Crown Prosecution Service found insufficient evidence to meet the high threshold for criminal manslaughter. Essentially, they couldn't pin the deaths on a single controlling mind whose gross negligence directly caused the fatalities. This decision, while disappointing to some families, was kind of assumed would be the case.

But it did then clear the way for coroner's inquests to proceed without awaiting a criminal trial. And it's worth noting that the criminal burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt was a hurdle in this case. So although there were loads of evident failings, attributing them to a specific culpable individual was not deemed to be feasible.

Right. A joint inquest into all six deaths was held in January of 2013, some three years after the fire. This was led by coroner Judge Francis Kirkham, and over 11 weeks evidence was presented from residents, firefighters, experts, council officials and contractors.

The session examined nearly every facet of the fire, from the initial ignition to the building's structural flaws, to guidance residents received during the emergency. Expert witnesses, council officers, architects and firefighters were all called to give evidence. And in March 2013, a jury delivered narrative verdicts, detailed accounts of how each death occurred rather than simple short form verdicts, which are, yeah, the usual.

The jurors highlighted numerous failings and missed opportunities that contributed to the lethal outcome. So key points from the inquest's findings include Southwark Council had not conducted a fire risk assessment for Lackanaw House's common areas, despite this being a legal requirement by 2006. This meant that hazards like missing fire stopping or panel combustibility were not identified and remedied.

The council was found to have breached its duty in this regard. The refurbishment works in 2006 to 2007 were carried out without adequate consideration of fire safety. The jury pointed to the replacement panels and other works as failings by the council's building design services and contractors, which directly contributed to the fire spread.

The London Fire Brigade's stay put advice and operational response came under scrutiny. The jury noted confusion and inconsistency in messages to residents during the incident. Some were told to stay, others to evacuate.

And there was also a lack of urgency in switching tactics as the compartmentation failed. Firefighters and 999 control staff were hindered by incomplete knowledge of the building layout, which delayed rescues. Although I don't really think we can be blaming them for that.

It's a bit of a... But the policy itself is fucking bullshit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we should have learned.

Yes. Overall, the inquest jurors and the coroner in her summation made it clear that the deaths could have been prevented if known fire safety measures had been taken. Judge Kirkham stated that the tragedy resulted from, quote, a serious failure of multiple systems and was not simply bad luck.

Following the verdicts, Judge Kirkham issued Rule 43 recommendations, which are reports to prevent future deaths, to three entities, Southwark Council, the London Fire Brigade and the Department for Communities and Local Government, also known as DCLG. And they are the national ministry that oversees building regulations. My little geek hat.

These recommendations, there were over 40 in total, addressed issues such as providing better fire safety information to residents, i.e. what to do if a fire isn't contained and smoke enters their flat, ensuring fire services were given up to date building layout plans to avoid wayfinding delays, reviewing the stay put guidance for high rises and when full evacuation is appropriate and updating building regulations. For those who care, it was approved to document B to clarify guidance on external fire spread and retrofitting sprinklers. One specific recommendation was for Southwark to consider retrofitting sprinklers in its high rise residential blocks, which hadn't up until that point been on the table.

The coroner didn't assign blame in a criminal sense, but her reports clearly delineated accountability. The Council for Building Safety Failures, the London Fire Brigade and by extension, national guidance for emergency response shortcomings. After years of pressure from victims, families and fire safety campaigners, Southwark Council was eventually prosecuted for its role in the Lackadaisle House fire.

But the process was slow and the accountability was only partial. Separate from the inquest, regulators pursued action under fire safety laws. And in 2015, the London Fire Brigade, which is the enforcing authority for the fire safety order, brought charges against Southwark Council for breaches of the regulatory reform order 2005 in relation to Lackadaisle House.

These charges covered the council's failure to properly assess risk and ensure adequate fire precautions. And after legal delays in February 2017, Southwark Council formally pleaded guilty to four fire safety offences in Southwark Crown Court. These included failing to carry out a suitable and sufficient fire risk assessment and failing to ensure the premises were safe.

The council admitted it had not taken general fire precautions to ensure the safety of people in the event of fire, particularly in relation to the spread of fire, protection of escape routes and the presence of combustible materials on balconies and within flats. At sentencing in March 2017, the court heard that the council had failed to update fire safety assessments or take remedial action despite known issues. The building had not had a full fire risk assessment until 2008, just a year before the blaze.

And even then, no significant improvements had been made. Southwark Council had also failed to act on multiple opportunities to rectify safety problems following smaller fires in the building in the years prior to 2009. Fuck's sake.

Judge Geoffrey Pegdon QC, KC now, imposed a fine of £570,000, reduced from £800,000 due to the council's early guilty plea and ordered £300,000 in costs. It was at the time the largest fire safety fine handed to a local authority in the UK. The judge noted that while no individual council employee was being prosecuted, the failings were institutional and longstanding.

He stated that the council had, quote, placed residents at risk over a sustained period of time and that the breaches were of the utmost gravity. Despite the fine, the verdict offered little comfort to many survivors. Can I also just... What I've never really understood about fines to local governments or local authority or like when it happened, like when the NHS was like, I don't understand the point of the fine because it's public funding.

It's public funds. So who, how, how is that going to deter or like deter institutionalized thinking and bad behaviors and cost cutting and all of that? When the only people that are really going to be. Touched by this or have any impact of this to the public.

Yeah, I've got services we cut. Money is going to have to be found from somewhere. But yeah, because they're already if they're already.

I get the significance of it. Like I get the the yeah, like having to do something and the fine being potentially the only thing that could be done. Yeah.

But I've just never understood why it's even on the table, why there isn't, you know, OK, a complete overhaul of your senior leadership team. Yeah. If you're found guilty, you're all fucking out.

Yeah. And your pensions are cut. Yeah.

It would make more sense. I have absolutely no idea. All it means is we don't have libraries anymore.

We don't have libraries anymore. That's all it fucking means at the end of the day, isn't it? It does. It's got to come from somewhere.

And as you say, like there's things like with the cost cutting and whatever. How are they going to stop? They're not going to stop cost cutting if you take. Sorry, you once looked at a child, so you can't have IVF now.

Yeah, exactly. In 2006, you happened to make eye contact with a small child on the road. No, sorry.

That invalidates you. Yeah, there's no funding for you. There's no money.

There's no money. There's no. I don't understand.

I don't. I'm with you, mate. I don't understand it at all.

And neither did the victim's families. They. Sorry, have I just trodden on your toes massively? No, no, no, not at all.

They were incredibly upset that there were no criminal charges brought against individuals. I mean, we've spoken about this in quite a lot of episodes. It's really hard when it is a multitude of failings to pin something on one person.

But these institutions do have senior leadership teams. They do. And these people tend to be in power or at the head of their organisations for long periods of time.

It's not like every four years they voted a new one or whatever. Like if you're the chair of the council, like whatever, like you hold that position for years and years and years. Yeah.

So chances are you were in on the fucking decision making. Yeah, that's true. Yeah.

No criminal charges were brought against any individual and no one was held personally accountable for the conditions that contributed to the fire or the decisions that led to residents receiving stay put advice as the building burned. Campaigners argue that the outcome amounted to a financial penalty with absolutely no justice. It's important to note that no contractors or third party firms were prosecuted in relation to Lackanaw either.

The focus remained on the council as the landlord with ultimate responsibility. Civil litigation, i.e. compensation claims by victims' families, was settled out of court, with Southwark reportedly reaching settlements with all the families, although details were not made public. The legal aftermath of Lackanaw constituted to the thorough fact finding inquest and the landmark fire safety prosecution rather than any manslaughter trial.

The council expressed regret at the time and apologised to the families, although what that does no one, you know, anyway. They stated that they had made major improvements to fire safety across their housing stock since the fire. But many observers noted that these changes came far, far too late.

The fire did lead to some regulatory changes, for example, in 2011, the Department for Communities and Local Government published new national guidance titled Fire Safety in Purpose Built Blocks of Flats. This document replaced an older piece of advice and had attempted to bring greater clarity to the fire safety responsibilities of housing providers, councils and landlords, especially in buildings constructed decades ago. And it addressed issues such as the stay put policy, explaining when it should apply and when it should not.

Compartmentation, reinforcing the need for fire stopping between flats and communal areas, fire risk assessments, urging more thorough inspections that will take into account any alterations to the original design and refurbishment oversight, stressing that changes like installing suspended ceilings, external cladding or new services had to be reviewed through the lens of fire safety, not just aesthetics or utility. Crucially, the guidance stopped short of mandating retrofitting with sprinklers or external cladding reassessments, leaving many decisions to be made at the local authority or housing association level. And this lack of enforcement would later come under scrutiny again.

Fire services also reviewed procedures and councils across the country reassessed fire risks. But there was no large scale legislative overhaul, no new building safety law, no radical review of tower block safety. The sense of urgency faded and then Grenfell happened.

Now, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this, but I did think it was worth a quick mention. So Grenfell Tower caught fire on the 14th of June, 2017, just over eight years after Lackanell. And in this one, 72 people died.

Once again, a tower designed for working class residents became a graveyard of preventable loss. And once again, the nation asks, how could this happen? The parallels between the two fires are chilling. Both buildings were mid-century high rises with complex layouts and poor fire compa... Compartmentation.

There we go. Bloody hell, it's late. Both had residents who raised concerns about fire safety long before disaster struck.

Both saw fires that breached compartments, spread externally via cladding or balconies and overwhelm a system that was meant to contain and suppress them. But perhaps the most disturbing similarity lies in what happened after Lackanell. The 2013 inquest made it clear building materials must be assessed for fire risk.

The stay put policy must be reviewed. Councils must act on known risks. And yet by the time of Grenfell, none of these recommendations have been made mandatory.

They were advisory. The Grenfell inquest has confirmed that the government had been warned through the Lackanell inquest, through expert advice, through campaigns by fire safety professionals and survivors. The coroner's letters from Lackanell were not acted on in full.

Guidance was updated, but weakly. Enforcement was left to overstretch to local authorities. No national register of high risk buildings was created.

In short, the state just didn't listen. In the wake of Lackanell, authorities had the opportunity and the obligation to act decisively. There was the National Fire Safety Audit, a government led audit of all social housing tower blocks with similar construction to Lackanell, which should have been conducted immediately and wasn't.

A mandatory evacuation policy review, stay put guidance should have been revised and formalized to reflect scenarios where it would no longer be safe with clear thresholds and communication plans. Legislation on building materials, flammable materials used in external and internal walls should have been banned outright, not simply flagged in optional guidance. Stronger regulation and enforcement.

So the regulatory reform fire safety order 2005 cited in Lackanell prosecutions left enforcement to local fire brigades without any central oversight. There should have been a more robust regulatory regime. It was needed and it had and it should have had meaningful penalties and central accountability.

And at Lackanell, just as at Grenfell, residents had raised concerns about safety. A formal system for resident whistleblowing and independent inspection could have helped ensure that those warnings were not ignored. Had these actions been taken, had the lessons of Lackanell been not only learned from, but applied, the Grenfell fire may never have reached the scale it did.

Instead, history repeated itself, this time with even more devastating consequences. Lackanell House didn't just burn, it exposed something festering beneath the surface, a housing system built on compromise, maintenance regimes riddled with gaps and a tendency to deflect rather than act. It was supposed to be a wake up call, but it wasn't.

Eight years later, Grenfell Tower burned, and only then did the country start asking the questions Lackanell's victims and survivors had raised long before. Why wasn't their fire enough? What happened at Lackanell was preventable, but prevention requires more than paperwork and promises. It demands urgency, accountability and a refusal to accept that some lives are simply less protected than others.

If there's one thing the Lackanell fire makes clear, it's this. When warnings go unheeded, tragedy isn't just possible, it's inevitable. And when authorities choose delay over reform, it's not ignorance, it's a decision.

The names of those who died in Lackanell House must never become historical footnotes. Their story isn't just a precursor to Grenfell. It's a standalone injustice and a permanent reminder of what happens when systems built to protect fail.

May. The end. Yeah, sorry to bring it down a bit.

It's just. It's just unfathomable. It is.

It's like I'm left with the same question that a lot of these cases, especially when there's like institutional failure. Where is the grown up in the room? Yeah, exactly. Where is the adult? Where is the person going? Hang on, what? Yeah, I know.

The thing that gets me is it's and I'm sure a friend of the podcast, Luke, who's listening, will be able to give me this answer at some point. But the thing I don't get is why would why would staying put in a burning building ever be more sensible than leaving? Well, I think because of the danger of smoke. And if it is that your escape routes are compromised, but they're compartmentalized.

Yeah, Asian and stuff like it's meant to stop the spread of the fire. So if you're in flat one over there, the fires in flat 96 over there. Actually, you running around in the fire escape trying to get out isn't useful to anyone.

Yeah. And you might actually be blocking the exit for people that want to like that actually need to use it. And because of the design of the apparent design features, you're not in danger over there.

You're fine. Yeah. Yeah.

So stay put. Yeah. And I think I think that was it.

And they're meant to be built in a way that. You can't like the ventilation is such that you're not meant to get into that position where there's smoke coming under your door. It's meant to have gone isolated in that.

Yeah. And they're very separate in that is my understanding. Yeah, I mean, it makes sense.

And I can I can understand it from the point of view of like, you know, if you think about the Grenfell documentary, for anyone who hasn't watched it, right, it's heartbreaking. It's heartbreaking. So incredibly hard to watch, but watch it.

Oh, it's so it's it's it should be mandatory. Yeah, it is. It's it's.

Yeah. And Lackanell Lackanell House is in the documentary, which is where I kind of triggered. But I remember when Grenfell happened, there being so many reports being like this happened already.

We already know what happens here. We already know the answer to this story. Haven't we done this? Why is it that, you know, three women and three children die losing their lives, one being a 20 day old baby? Just fucking unbelievable.

Why isn't that enough? Why haven't people acted? And I'm not saying for a second that like, oh, well, lives are worth more than others. It's not the point. But it's like 72 lives could have been saved.

Exactly. If they'd taken any fucking notice of. It's just that like we can give you all the answers in the world and we can give you all of the the do this and you will be fine.

Yeah. In the world. If you're not going to fucking listen and act on it, then what's the point? Exactly.

Exactly. Just renders everything. Yeah.

Fucking worthless. It's ridiculous. Everything that came after Lacknell House before Grenfell was fucking worthless.

Yeah, it was. And what's the point? And I go home and write the world's most detailed and brilliant fire safety plan and then just tear it up and throw it in the bin. Yeah, exactly.

Because that's what they did. It is 100 percent. And it's just so.

It it's just so difficult as well, because as as we mentioned earlier, like I can completely understand the victims. Families, the people who were in that house, who couldn't get out of it or who did get out of it, but are traumatized because I cannot imagine what surviving a fire is like. It's it's.

You want to have somebody to blame. You want to have there should be a criminal prosecution. You need that.

And I can completely get it. But how how do you do that? How do you you've got to tear down the system? It isn't one part. And that's the problem.

If it was one person, then, you know, that one person might make different different decisions. Yeah, that's true. But it's not.

You've got a thousand voices in a room all talking at cross purposes, none listening to each other. Yeah, nothing's going to happen, is it? Is Southwark the same council as Bullock, Bullock, Forsyth? That was Lambert Lambeth. They're close together.

Yeah, they are. But yeah, and if one of them listened to the other. Yeah, maybe maybe they would have sorted.

But it is just it's yeah, it is horrific. Any. I've said it before.

I think when on the episode you did on the Masood sisters, like I am. I don't think anyone likes fire. No, no, no.

But like it is the most terrifying. Yeah. I just can't.

I've like. I'm kind of speechless. Just how fucking terrified they must have been.

And the. At what point did they kind of recognize it was inevitable? And at what point does it stop becoming about surviving and then accepting your fate and. But see, this is the other thing, right? So if we go back to Catherine, who was the first victim that I spoke about.

Yeah. So she's in the flat directly above the one that's well, not directly above because of the building. Just don't talk about scissors again.

But above that, she's above the flat where the fire broke out. We know that the fire was an electrical fire. This shit happens like it's.

Yeah, it's the same. We've never been able to get up to it. Exactly.

It's the same at Grenfell. You know, it was a faulty fridge or something. Fridge freezer or something, wasn't it? Yeah.

It's electrical fire. These things happen. And it's like, you know, I can't imagine the guilt that that poor woman whose house it was that went up with the telling how much she.

Oh, Jesus Christ. But she has nothing to feel guilty about. No, but she's on the phone to emergency services.

And just going back to my whole question about when is stay put the right thing to do? She's saying it's orange. She's saying that there's stuff falling from the ceiling. Why isn't she being told to leave? Yeah, no, that is unpardonable.

That I don't understand. I mean, I get it. If there's if it's orange outside her front door, how's she going to get out? Yeah, there's the fire.

If there's the balcony. But isn't there also there's a whole train of thought, and I don't know enough about this to talk about it with any authority, but there's also like the hysteria of someone in an emergency versus the call handler or versus the policymaker, I should say, like, yeah, because it's not the call handlers fault either. They were acting on what they're told to do.

Of course. Oh, no, I'm not. But like the there's like a level of, you know, when when you someone collapses and you ring nine nine nine and you're like, OK, and you're going, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God.

And they're like, right, you're going to have to stay calm. You have to fucking talk to me about this and listen to this. And this is how you do chest compressions and have to stay.

Robotically calm the. You that there's like a whole train of thought about the underestimation of just how bad it is because of the level of hysteria that might be being felt. Yeah.

So I think probably in that first call or that by the time she called, it's like, OK, yeah, we understand. Helps on the way. Keep calm.

Stay put. That's what I'm being told to tell you. Yeah.

And actually, I know it's scary, but everything here on paper is telling me you're safest where you are right now. Yeah. Oh, it's like it's it's already probably outside.

It's probably not as bad as you think. Like, yeah, you've got to kind of mitigate the level of adrenaline and emotion that's coming from the from the caller. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, I get that. Not blaming. Like, anyway, no, it's a minefield.

Like I said, I don't know enough to talk about it with any. No, but you've got a point in the facts that like, yeah, call handlers are trained to be the calm head in that room. And it is a case of you have to be because you don't know what that's your job.

Exactly. But it does it does just remind me of the way that she died reminds me of in the Grenfell documentary where you have the first responder who says that he's on the phone to that woman and her son. And it's just yeah, it's just it's unbearably make sure that if you haven't watched it and you're going to, you are in a very stable state of mind before you watch it.

Look after yourselves. Do protect your own mental health, mental health, mental health, your own mental health. No, but honestly, it is it's everyone should watch it.

But it is hard, is hard. And with Lackanaw being. So close to home.

Yeah. And. Just it's interesting that it's another like social housing.

I mean, I don't necessarily think that that you personally I don't have it in private housing because they've got the money. Yeah. And they don't like well, I mean, they do cut corners, but not not to the same extent.

Yeah, I can't without absolutely libeling myself up to the eyeballs here, talk about this much further. But I've seen the difference between a tower block going up that is known to be going to be sold to private investors and private buyers and a block that is being built in the same estate that is known to be reserved for social housing. And I've seen the difference in materials.

Yeah. Yeah, that's all I'll say about that. Moving swiftly on.

Anyhow, darling, thank you. That was a lot of complex information to pull across in an accessible way. And I think you aced it.

Thank you very much as always. Thank you. So I also think that cases, they all deserve the dignity and respect, but there is something particularly heinous about this.

Knowing that Grenfell was around the corner. Yeah, that I think we don't try and lighten the mood. No, we just go in and say, you know, all the nice stuff is.

Yeah. Search sinister South. It'll all come up in some guys.

It will look after yourselves this week. Yes, please. And all weeks.

And I think all we should say is that we love you very, very much. More than you know. And we will see you next week.

See you later. Bye bye. Bye bye.