At a meeting last week (2 December),\u00a0 Southwark Council\u2019s cabinet agreed to flatten the 16-storey Marie Curie House in Camberwell following a recent structural and fire risk assessment.<\/p>\n
Six households still live in the council-owned building, which contains 98 homes. It was built almost identically to Lakanal House as part of the Sceaux Gardens Estate by former Southwark Council architect FO Hayes.<\/p>\n
The Lakanal House fire occurred in \u00a0July 2009, spreading through several flats in the 12-storey building and killing six people.<\/p>\n
The final report into the Grenfell Tower fire, which killed 72 people in 2o17, found that lessons had not been learnt<\/a> by the government over the Lakanal House fire and that the government\u2019s response to regulation post Lakanal had been \u2018inadequate\u2019.<\/p>\n A report on Marie Curie House said the 1960s block was \u2018high-risk\u2019 and had presented signs of \u2018significant structural degradation, compromised fire resistance, and risk of building failure in the event of a fire incident\u2019.<\/p>\n The report blamed the introduction of the Building Safety Act 2022, a post-Grenfell piece of legislation, on \u2018significantly\u2019 increasing the cost of refurbishing the building, and went on to recommend demolition as \u2018a definitive and permanent solution to the building\u2019s safety and compliance challenges\u2019.<\/p>\n It will now be demolished at a cost of \u00a33 million. The cost of refurbishing and retrofitting the building was put at \u00a323 million.<\/p>\n Four years ago, Marie Curie House residents were told they would be relocated to make way for major building refurbishment, but this was later scrapped. Instead, both Lakanal and Marie Curie were fitted with new internal and external fire-resistant doors and extensive fire-stopping works.<\/p>\n