Harrow Court dated from the mid-1960s, one of the wave of concrete towers built to clear inner-city slums and house Britain's growing post-war population. Seventeen storeys high, it had six flats on each floor - four with two bedrooms, two with one. By 2005 it sat as social housing in a part of Stevenage close to the town centre, anonymous from the outside, completely ordinary in a way that British post-war architecture had taught everyone to overlook. Inside, the design followed the conventional logic of the era: 'stay put' fire policy. If a fire broke out in one flat, the compartmented construction of the building was supposed to contain it there long enough for the fire service to arrive. Residents in other flats were told to stay where they were. The doctrine assumed compartments would hold.

Michael Miller and Jeff Wornham went into the building knowing only what fire crews knew at every Stevenage call: contain the room of origin, search for occupants, get out. They connected their hose to the dry riser - the building's internal water supply for firefighting - but found that the riser outlets were located only on alternate floors. There was no outlet on the 14th floor, where the fire was. They had to run the hose up from the 13th floor and through fire doors to reach the burning flat. The fire doors then had to be held open. The moment they were, the compartmentation the building had been designed around collapsed. Air rushed in. Smoke and heat rolled out. The fire, fed with new oxygen, accelerated up the outside of the building. Inside the corridor, Miller and Wornham became tangled in cable trays running along the ceiling. The cables had been fastened with plastic hooks. The hooks melted. The trays fell on them. They could not get free.

A woman on the 15th floor told reporters what 'stay put' had meant to her that night. A fireman had told her and her family to remain in their flat. They went back inside. Nobody came. After an hour, they chose to ignore the instruction and try the stairs. 'It was sheer panic,' she said. 'It was smoky, we could not see anything, and the stairs were slippery. We are lucky to be alive.' Down on the 14th floor, in the flat where the candle had fallen through the television, one of the two occupants had been woken by the flames and had tried to put the fire out. The other occupant, Natalie Close, had not woken. She died in the bed where she had been sleeping.

Two firefighters, two missing dry risers on alternate floors, plastic hooks holding cable trays, fire doors propped open to fight the blaze - the investigation found a building that had been designed and refitted for a different era of risk. The melting plastic hooks would recur, five years later, at the Shirley Towers fire in Southampton, where two more firefighters died for the same reason. It was only after Shirley Towers that the rules were finally tightened. BS 7671, the standard covering electrical installations in the UK, was amended to require fire-resistant mechanical fixings for cables on walls and ceilings in escape routes. The new rule came into force in July 2015 - a decade after Miller and Wornham - and it was not retrospective. It applied only to new buildings and major refurbishments. Tens of thousands of older towers, with the same plastic-hook ceilings the firefighters at Harrow Court had been killed by, were left as they were.

In October 2018, more than a year after the Grenfell Tower fire in west London killed 72 people, BBC Two broadcast a documentary titled *The Fires That Foretold Grenfell*. Harrow Court was one of the five UK fires it examined. The pattern was already there in 2005: a fire that travelled faster than 'stay put' assumed it could, a compartmentation that failed at the moment fire doors were opened, residents who survived only by ignoring official instructions, and a regulatory response that came too slow and too narrow. In Stevenage, the council named two streets in a nearby development for the men who died - Wornham Avenue, completed in 2007, and Miller Way the year before. On 1 October 2018, a different Stevenage tower called simply The Towers caught fire. A man on the fifth floor died from his injuries on 16 October. The town reckoned again. After Grenfell, plans were announced to retrofit sprinklers in Stevenage's tower blocks. Harrow Court still stands. The candle that started it all had cost perhaps a pound. The cost of what it revealed, and what was not done with that knowledge, is still being counted.