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The first residential tower block, "The Lawn", was constructed in Harlow, Essex, in 1951; it is now a Grade II listed building. In many cases, tower blocks were seen as a "quick-fix" to cure problems caused by the existence of crumbling and unsanitary 19th-century dwellings or to replace buildings destroyed by German aerial bombing. It was ...
Ronan Point was a 22-storey tower block in Canning Town in Newham, East London, that partially collapsed on 16 May 1968, only two months after it opened.A gas explosion blew out some load-bearing walls, causing the collapse of one entire corner of the building; four people died and 17 were injured.
Tower blocks were first built in the United Kingdom after the Second World War, and were seen as a cheap way to replace 19th-century urban slums and war-damaged buildings. They were originally seen as desirable, but quickly fell out of favour as tower blocks attracted rising crime and social disorder, particularly after the collapse of Ronan ...
The first block, the 28-floor slab block, was demolished by controlled explosion on 10 June 2012. [18] The steel structured tower took just six seconds to fall after a series of carefully timed explosions, using 275 kilograms (606 pounds) of explosive, ripped along the building around the sixth to eighth floors.
The towers were prominent in the Glasgow city skyline, as seen here from Duke Street railway station.. Faced with crippling housing shortages in the immediate post-war period, the city undertook the building of multi-storey housing in tower blocks in the 1960s and early 1970s on a grand scale, which led to Glasgow becoming the first truly high-rise city in Britain.
View of South Kilburn tower blocks. South Kilburn is a large housing estate in Kilburn, in the London Borough of Brent. [1] [2] Typical of brutalist 1960s designs of public housing in the United Kingdom, it is characterised by high-density housing in low-rise flats and 11 concrete tower blocks. It was approved in 1959 and extended in 1963.
Charlecote Tower was completed in 1965 and was followed by Chatsworth Tower and Packwood House in 1966. In 1967, Haddon Tower was completed, and in 1968, Longleat Tower was completed. Packwood House was the only 12 storey tower block on the estate. [7] The first multi-storey housing blocks to be completed were Avon, Nash and Lansdown House.
Following the Second World War, Hutchesontown was declared a Comprehensive Development Area (CDA) in 1957, in the aftermath of the Bruce Report. [1] [2] This called for the mass gentrification of the area which took the form of slum clearance and the replacement of overcrowded, insanitary tenement housing with new homes in high rise tower blocks. [3]