Urban-planning lessons from Grenfell Tower
Area’s poor design impeded access for firefighters, says Lance Berelowitz.
Did anyone notice how virtually all of the news images and videos of the recent fire disaster at Grenfell Tower in London were shot from some distance or from the air? There were no views from adjacent streets. This wasn’t just because of public-safety reasons, but something more fundamental: There are no adjacent streets.
In fact, one of the contributing factors in the disaster was that large fire engines had great difficulty getting right up beside the building and were hampered in their efforts to douse the fire. Why was this? If you look at a Google Earth photo of the area around Grenfell Tower, you will notice a striking feature. While surrounding areas have a fine-grained traditional street network, Grenfell Tower is at the centre of a large, amorphously shaped area that has no through streets. It’s as if the city planners forgot to complete this part of London’s urban street network.
In fact, they didn’t forget. If you use the historical timelapse button on Google Earth, you can see that there was indeed a local street network up to about 1945. The blackand-white photo is blurry, but the roads are clearly there. Through streets, short blocks, row houses and the like are all visible.
What happened? PostSecond World War urbanplanning orthodoxy declared war on urban streets, inspired by the likes of Le Corbusier. This new theory of urbanism saw cities demolish older compact areas or clear bomb rubble and replace it with a new form of (anti-) urbanism. Anne Power, a British housing expert, has spoken of the craving of architects and planners at the time for “something distinctive and prestigious.” Architects and planners even invented a vocabulary: They would build “vertical streets ... villages in the sky ... new cities for a new age ...” and so on.
Lancaster West Housing Estate, of which Grenfell Tower was the centrepiece, was built according to these ideas, as part of the slum-clearances projects of the 1960s and ’70s. The estate stands on land previously occupied by several public streets. Those streets (and the row houses fronting them) were replaced with pathways, private driveways leading to underground parking garages, and housing complexes surrounded by greensward. Houses no longer faced a public street. Social consequences (and local residents, as it tragically turned out) were damned.
Writing recently about the Grenfell Tower fire in The Guardian, Simon Jenkins said, “I could not help noticing the charm of the surrounding streets, squares and precincts of North Kensington, of Avondale Park and Walmer Road. This is not smart Kensington: these ... houses, mixed public and private, are built on streets, pleasing to look at, densely packed but low-rise. Each seemed a neighbourhood in itself, 100 miles from the (Grenfell Tower) horror that loomed overhead.”
As a student in London, I lived on one of those charming streets, no more than four blocks from Grenfell Tower. Elgin Crescent is everything that Lancaster West Estate isn’t: a coherent, humanly scaled, intact and elegant piece of urbanism that was itself a speculative housing development in its day (the Ladbroke Estate, developed in the mid-1800s and sold on long-term leases, and which now forms one of London’s most expensive and fashionable neighbourhoods).
Most importantly, all the attached terraced houses, which back onto communal garden squares, front directly onto the gently curving streets. It’s this elegant yet simple arrangement of private buildings facing public streets that created a real sense of community on my street. It’s precisely what Grenfell Tower lacked, and this dysfunctional, postwar, urban-spatial arrangement not only helped kill the housing estate’s sense of connection to the larger city, but many of its residents as well.
We all need to learn the real urban-planning lessons from the Grenfell Tower disaster.
Streets matter, critically.