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From Socialist Worker, No. 96, 9 November 1968, pp. 1 & 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
TOWER BLOCKS of council flats built to the same design as Ronan Point, which collapsed killing several tenants earlier this year, have been completed and occupied.
Work has continued on the ‘high-rise’ blocks in spite of the fact that the Griffiths Report on the Ronan Point disaster in London’s East End was only published this week.
Three weeks ago Dodson Point, on the same Newham Borough site as Ronan Point, was occupied by council tenants.
The contractors had continued with their work throughout the summer while the gutted building close by remained as a terrible reminder of the death and havoc these shoddy constructions can cause.
Several floors of the 22-story Ronan Point collapsed last May. Five people were killed, many more injured and made homeless.
A gas explosion is thought to have blown out a wall.
An almost exact replica of Ronan Point has just been completed at the Broadwater Farm site near Lordship Lane in Tottenham. Haringey Council plan two 19-storey blocks there built by the same construction company – Taylor Woodrow Anglian – under the same industrial building system – Larsen Nielsen – as Ronan Point.
The first block was ‘just off the ground’ according to a council spokesman when Ronan Point collapsed. Taylor Woodrow Anglian, after some discussions with the council, went on with the construction.
The Griffiths Report is likely to demand modifications in Larsen Nielsen tower blocks. The cost at Broadwater Farm of such modifications will be in the region of £50,000.
It the site had waited for the Report, the modifications would have cost only £5,000.
To foot the bill, the council will probably have to borrow more money at exorbitant interest rates. The luckless tenants of the ‘instant death’ flats will pay back the moneylenders through high rents.
Under the Larsen Nielsen system, four-ton slabs are rested on wall panels. There is an overlap of 1¼″ and concrete is poured into the gaps.
The Report will recommend that steel loops and rods should bind the slabs together, with concrete poured over the joints.
Air pockets could result that would seriously weaker the structure of the building. A high wind, subsidence or heat contraction could break a joint and force out a wall, sending several storeys crashing to the ground.
This is the kind of cheap, shoddy and danger- [line of text missing] other such tower blocks under construction in Britain, which will provide homes for 10,000 people.
Tenants’ organisations and local groups of socialists should band together to demand that these tower blocks should be scrapped.
If the moneylenders squeak, the answer is simple: why doesn’t the government break their stranglehold by taking over the banks, building land and construction industry and base housing on need not profit?
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Last updated on 30 October 2020