The Fires that Didn't Have to Happen

Fifty years of the same failure

Three fires. Decades apart. The same failures.

There is a particular kind of grief that comes not from the unforeseeable, but from the preventable. The three fires examined here — Summerland in 1973, Lakanal House in 2009, Grenfell Tower in 2017 — are not three separate tragedies. They are, in many respects, one tragedy, repeated.

Each came with inquiries. Each produced findings. Each generated recommendations. And yet, across a span of 44 years, the same failures — combustible materials, failed compartmentation, compromised escape routes, ignored warnings — reappeared in the next building that burned.

This is an attempt to understand how that happened, and why it continues to matter.

Summerland, 2 August 1973

The Isle of Man was not a place people associated with disaster. In the summer of 1973, Douglas was doing what it always did — welcoming tourists, competing, with increasing urgency, against the new allure of package holidays abroad. Summerland was the answer to that competition. Opened in 1971, it was billed as the world's most innovative indoor entertainment complex: restaurants, bars, a heated swimming pool, saunas, a children's theatre, an underground disco. It could hold 10,000 people.

The building's exterior and interior were designed by two architects who did not coordinate their planning with each other, thereby creating a venue with significant fire risks. That detail — banal in isolation, catastrophic in consequence — would define everything that followed.

On the evening of 2 August 1973, approximately 3,000 people were inside the complex. At around 7:30pm, a fire started from a discarded match, dropped near an outdoor kiosk by three boys who had been smoking. The kiosk collapsed against the exterior wall. What happened next was determined not by accident, but by design.

The external wall ignited and transmitted the fire to the internal wall. There was little fire-stopping, and by the time the fire burst through inside, there was little anyone could do. The acrylic sheeting covering the roof and walls — a material later nicknamed "horrorglass" — caught and spread the fire ferociously, dripping molten burning material onto those trying to escape below. It had been granted a regulatory waiver. The building, as constructed, could not legally have been built in England and Wales without relaxation of the rules.

Inadequate ventilation and locked fire doors contributed to the death toll, with many forced to rush towards the main entrance, causing a crush. The fire service was not called until more than 20 minutes after the blaze took hold — and the first calls did not come from inside the complex, but from a passing taxi driver and a ship's captain who spotted the smoke two miles out at sea.

Fifty people died. Eleven of them were under twenty years old.

The public inquiry's report found, in its closing paragraph, that "there were no villains. Within a certain climate of euphoria at the development of this interesting concept, there were many human errors and failures, and it was the accumulation of these, too much reliance on an 'old boy' network and some very ill-defined and poor communications which led to the disaster."

The RIBA's then practice board secretary wrote to members the following month: 'Read, learn and do not forget: those Summerland victims need not have died.'

The industry read. It noted. It moved on.

Lakanal House, 3 July 2009

Thirty-six years after Summerland, a television set in Flat 65 of a south London tower block developed an electrical fault. By the time the fire was brought under control, six people were dead — three of them children, the youngest three weeks old.

Lakanal House was a 1950s tower block in Camberwell that had been refurbished in 2006-07. It was precisely those refurbishments that became the story. The external cladding panels fitted during that work were not fire resistant and allowed the fire to spread in under five minutes from the flat where the blaze started to the flat above. Crucially, they offered less resistance than the panels they had replaced. Nobody appears to have noticed. Nobody appears to have checked.

Emergency service operators told residents to stay in their flats. They were rightly following the 'stay put' procedure for tower blocks — a procedure based on the assumption that buildings have the correct fire safety measures in place. That was not the case at Lakanal House. Compartmentation had been compromised. Corridors were laden with combustible materials. Fire doors lacked seals. Southwark Council had been informed years before that if a fire should occur, it would spread rapidly.

No fire risk assessment had been carried out at Lakanal House before the blaze, despite it being a legal requirement.

The inquest ran for eleven weeks. The coroner made a series of formal recommendations: clearer guidance on fire risk assessments, clarity on the 'stay put' policy, review of building materials in high-rise residential blocks. Those words proved fateful. A 2019 report into the Grenfell Tower fire concluded that lessons had not been learned from Lakanal.

Grenfell Tower, 14 June 2017

The rest of this section is harder to write — not because the facts are unclear, but because they are so well-known, and because the people who died deserve more than a paragraph in an industry article. Seventy-two people. The deadliest structural fire in the UK since the Second World War.

The similarities to what had come before were not superficial. The fire spread over 20 floors via the building façade — not the first incident where fire spread externally in this way. The Summerland fire on the Isle of Man in 1973 shares many of the same hallmarks, and the key issues underpinning the systematic failure can be traced across both events across more than four decades.

Cladding that was not fit for purpose. Compartmentation that had been compromised. A 'stay put' policy that presumed safety measures which did not exist. Warnings that had been raised and not acted upon. A refurbishment that introduced risk rather than reducing it.

Forty-four years after Summerland. Eight years after Lakanal. The same failures. The same uncomfortable absence of a single villain to hold responsible.

What the thread tells us

It would be convenient to treat each of these fires as a product of its era — Summerland as an artefact of 1970s hubris, Lakanal as a legacy of underfunded social housing, Grenfell as the culmination of a regulatory environment that had grown hollow over decades of deregulation.

There is truth in each of those framings. But they also let us off the hook.

The more honest reading is that each fire was preceded by knowledge. Knowledge that the materials were wrong. Knowledge that the fire safety measures were inadequate. Knowledge that inspections were overdue, or incomplete, or recorded but never acted upon. The errors at Summerland included the use of combustible materials, a lack of effective fire control systems and evacuation, incompetence, time and cost cutting, and a cavalier attitude to rules. Replace "Summerland" with any of the subsequent buildings and the sentence holds.

The industry's obligation

Those who work in fire and life safety — in design, installation, inspection, and maintenance — operate in a field where the gap between compliance and competence can cost lives. Compliance asks: has the box been ticked? Competence asks: will this building actually protect the people inside it?

The Lakanal tragedy demonstrated that passive fire protection is only as strong as the quality of its installation, inspection, and maintenance. Fire-rated walls, ceilings, and floors must remain intact throughout a building's life cycle. Renovations introduce vulnerabilities. Refurbishments carried out without proper understanding of cumulative risk can undo decades of prior protection. Inspectors who arrive without adequate preparation — or whose findings are filed and forgotten — are not performing a function; they are performing the appearance of one.

The Building Safety Act 2022, the strengthened requirements around fire risk assessments, the golden thread of building information — these are responses to Grenfell, and they matter. But legislation changes behaviour only when the people responsible for applying it understand what it is actually for.

At Alphatrack Systems, working across fire detection, suppression, emergency voice communication, and life safety systems, these fires are not historical footnotes. They are the reason the work exists and the reason it must be done properly. Not because a regulation requires it. Because the alternative is a building that burns when it should not, and people inside it who were never given a fair chance.

The RIBA told its members in 1974 to read, learn and not forget.

We are still learning to mean it.