Qualla: Lakanal House fire https://qualla.com/lakanal-house-fire en-us © 2026 Bendyline Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:40:14 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/u/lakanal-house-fire-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Lakanal House fire https://qualla.com/lakanal-house-fire Lakanal House fire: Introduction https://qualla.com/lakanal-house-fire/ Photo credit Secretlondon, CC BY-SA 4.0. Catherine Hickman was thirty-one years old and on the phone with the London Fire Brigade. She was a fashion designer; she lived on the eleventh floor of Lakanal House in Camberwell. The smoke had thickened to the point where she could not find the door. The operator told her, as the brigade then advised, to stay in her flat. The compartmentation that separated one flat from another was supposed to hold fire back for at least an hour. Hers held for less than five minutes. By the time the crews reached her floor, she and five neighbours were dead: Dayana Francisquini, twenty-six, and her two children Thais, aged six, and Felipe, three; Helen Udoaka, thirty-four, and her three-week-old daughter Michelle. The fire began on 3 July 2009. Eight years later, in Kensington, the same kind of fire would kill seventy-two people in Grenfell Tower. The names of Lakanal should have been read aloud in time to prevent it. They were not.

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]]> Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/u/lakanal-house-fire-wp/gcpu-lakanal-house-fire-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Lakanal House fire: A Tower Named for a Schoolteacher https://qualla.com/lakanal-house-fire/ Photo credit Secretlondon, CC BY-SA 4.0. Lakanal House is named after Joseph Lakanal, a French Revolutionary politician who helped found the modern French primary school system. The twelve-storey block, completed in 1959 as part of the Sceaux Gardens Estate, was built when British architects were experimenting with the ...

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]]> Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/u/lakanal-house-fire-wp/gcpu-lakanal-house-fire-a-tower-named-for-a-schoolteacher.mp3 0:06 2 full Lakanal House fire: Sixteen Minutes https://qualla.com/lakanal-house-fire/ Photo credit Secretlondon, CC BY-SA 4.0. At about ten past four on a hot Friday afternoon, a faulty television set in Flat 65, on the ninth floor, caught fire. Within sixteen minutes the flames had broken through the cladding and started climbing the outside of the building. Smoke filled the only stairwell. The London F...

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]]> Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/u/lakanal-house-fire-wp/gcpu-lakanal-house-fire-sixteen-minutes.mp3 0:06 3 full Lakanal House fire: The Inquest That Was Heard https://qualla.com/lakanal-house-fire/ Photo credit Secretlondon, CC BY-SA 4.0. Four years passed before the coroner returned narrative verdicts. The inquest found that substandard renovation work had removed fire-stopping material from between flats, breaking the compartmentation the building was meant to depend on. Safety inspections by Southwark Council h...

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]]> Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/u/lakanal-house-fire-wp/gcpu-lakanal-house-fire-the-inquest-that-was-heard.mp3 0:06 4 full Lakanal House fire: The Warning No One Acted On https://qualla.com/lakanal-house-fire/ Photo credit Secretlondon, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Lakanal inquest produced a series of formal recommendations, sent to the government in 2013, including a call to review the fire safety of high-rise residential blocks and to consider sprinklers in older buildings. The recommendations were acknowledged. They were not enacted....

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]]> Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/u/lakanal-house-fire-wp/gcpu-lakanal-house-fire-the-warning-no-one-acted-on.mp3 0:06 5 full Lakanal House fire: The Tower Now https://qualla.com/lakanal-house-fire/ Photo credit Secretlondon, CC BY-SA 4.0. Residents were rehoused. Lakanal House was boarded up for six years. In 2015 refurbishment work began, and the block reopened in 2017 with new compartmentation, new fire alarms, sprinkler systems, and an external fire escape. Nearby Marie Curie House, an identically designed bloc...

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]]> Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/u/lakanal-house-fire-wp/gcpu-lakanal-house-fire-the-tower-now.mp3 0:06 6 full