Ronan Point was the second of nine identical blocks planned for completion in the post-war housing construction programme undertaken in the then London Borough of Newham. It comprised 22 floors of flats built in the then innovative Larsen Neilsen prefabricated concrete panel system. Construction began on 25 July 1966 and was completed by March 1968, with tenants moving in almost immediately. At approximately 5.45am on Thursday 16 May 1968, just two months after the blocks started to be occupied, the gas cooker in Flat 90, the home of Mrs Ivy Hodge, exploded. The explosion blew out the non-load-bearing face walls, but also an external load-bearing flank wall causing a progressive collapse of the floor and wall panels of that corner of the block right down to the level of the podium [image_1] [image_2] [image_3].  Four people died and 17 were admitted to hospital with injuries, with one of the injured dying later [1]. What do we start to see when we get closer to an event like this?

System failures or explosion has commonly been used within the field of science and technology studies as a way of seeing into how things normally hold together and, in their terms, sustain the machinic qualities of a ‘black box’. An explosion or a system failure marks a point where the varied allies that work to hold something together stop working together. Technical failure is in part about a loss of faith, about an object loosing the allies (technical, social, political, cultural) that hold it in place. In the UK public housing context the highrise is a project that originally triggered enthusiasm but came, relatively quickly, to be met with scepticism.  Latour speaks of just such a process when thinking of inventions and scientific claims that simply do not take off:

‘If people are not interested, or they do something entirely different with the claim, the spread of a fact or of a machine in time and space does not take place… Theories that had started to infect the world shrink back to become the idée fixe of some lunatic in an asylum….Established facts are quickly turned into artefacts, and puzzled people ask, “how could we have believed in such an absurdity”…and dissenters who interrupt the spread of any fact or artefact proliferate’ [2].

At least some of the STS work on disasters and system failures has dealt with the character of the explanations that are given, often through the formal procedure of the public inquiry [3].  These explanatory stories often have a spatial character. It is not only that they happen somewhere, but that the character of explanation is often a search, as John Law reminds us, for where responsibility lies [4]. The matter of where responsibility lay was central to the Inquiry into the Ronan Point collapse. Was it something Mrs Ivy Hodge did with her gas cooker? Was it something that Mr Charles Pike, her friend who fitted the gas cooker, did not do right? Was it something to do with the system of provision of ‘town gas’? Was it something to do with the way the building was built: the materials used, or the inadequate following of manufacturers instructions for the Larsen Neilsen system, which had never before been used on such a tall building? In short, was this a systemic (big) failure involving many things or the fault of one small thing? In this sense the Ronan Point inquiry is quite literally an inquiry into the scale of something.

The Inquiry into the collapse of Ronan Point reminds us of the machinic quality of the highrise, outlining in great detail the systems, technologies, individuals and materials that come together to produce the building and, subsequently, its failure. Latour, as it happens, gives us a very nice description of a machine, by contrasting it to a tool. ‘A tool’, he specifies, ‘is a single element held directly in the hand of a man or a woman’: ‘Useful as tools are, they never turn Mr or Ms Anybody into Mr or Ms Manybodies!’ [5]. This question of tool versus machine was central to the Inquiry and the question of where blame could be laid. And central to determining that fact was whether the damage was the result of the explosion alone, or the result of events prior or subsequent to the explosion.

In the Inquiry into Ronan Point both Mrs Ivy Hodge and her handyman friend Mr Charles Pike were kept in the position of Mr and Mrs Anybody: small users of tools. Although her lighting a match to boil her kettle ignited the gas explosion, Mrs Ivy Hodge was quickly seen as a victim rather than perpetrator. Indeed Mrs Hodge and what was left of her kitchen [image_4] soon became important evidentiary points in the careful forensic efforts that constructed the story of ‘where blame lay’: ‘Three biscuit tins, which Mrs Hodge said she kept in the kitchen cupboard, were recovered from the debris. They were charred and buckled and one contained the remnants of burnt cake’ [6]. Experimental tests were carried out on the tins to ascertain the levels of pressure needed to produce the buckling they exhibited. And Mrs Hodge’s own (still alive and still pretty much in tact) body provided additional evidence about the size of the explosion. The fact that her eardrums were not broken assisted greatly in providing the inquiry with a quantified measure of the pressure created by the ignited gas.

Mr Pike was not so lucky. As an unqualified DIY-er who fitted the cooker as a favour to Mrs Hodge, his workmanship and his tools came under close scrutiny.He explained in detail to the Inquiry how he fitted the cooker, the pipes he used, the elbow joints, the brass connectors, the asbestos string, and his use of a controversial Stillson pipe wrench. [7] The Stillson wrench in the hands of Mr Pike was a potential candidate for the matter of ‘where to lay blame’ because there was a risk of breaking the brass connector by over-tightening [image_5] [image_6]. As it turned out, Mr Pike said he knew of such risk and had not used the Stillson, but a pair of pipe grips. This explanation was accepted by the inquiry, although not simply on trust, for the marks left on the brass connecter were checked and found to confirm Mr Pike’s version of event.  Indeed, by the time the Inquiry report was written it was made clear on the opening pages that Mr Pike and his DIY gas fitting efforts had nothing at all to do with the disaster: ‘let it be said immediately that it has been shown that no blame for this disaster attaches to him’ [8].

Where did blame attach according to the Inquiry? The blame for this disaster came to lie in the hands of ‘Mr and Mrs Manybody’. The disaster, in the first instance, was divided into two events: the explosion and the subsequent collapse. The explosion was according to the Inquiry: ‘the result of an unusual and unhappy combination of events unlikely to be repeated in the future, and for which not blame attaches to those concerned with the construction or Ronan Point or the installation or use of any of the gas fittings therein’.  What appears to be a big event and those immediately implicated in setting it off, are here positioned as small. The collapse is another matter. The collapse was considered to be an outcome inherent to a ‘weakness’ in the design of the building. This said, the Inquiry quickly added:

It was a weakness against which it never occurred to the designers of this building that they should guard. They designed a building they considered safe for all normal uses; they did not take into account the abnormal. They never addressed their minds to the question of what would happen if for any reason one or more of the load-bearing members should fail. [9]

But has blame really found a home now? Not quite, for the designers too were, it seems, as much ‘victims’ as Mrs Ivy Hodge and the others who lost their lives and their homes. The designers, the Inquiry notes:

fell victims, along with others, to the belief that if a building complied with the existing Building regulations and Codes of Practices it must be deemed to be safe. Experience has shown otherwise. We are, it concludes, not concerned to point the finger of blame specifically at the designers of Ronan Point but to ensure that the eyes of all may be opened in the future. [10] 

In short, the Inquiry into the Collapse of Flats at Ronan Point, secured the systemic character of this exceptional event. A story that might have been about a Mr Anybody and his tool become officially one about Mr Manybody. And in that translation, the building and its many makers become an emblematic point in the big story of the demise of the highrise as a sanctioned housing type in the west.