Numbers 3 to 19 Clifton Gardens, Maida Vale, ran the length of a quiet residential street between Warwick Avenue and Maida Vale. The houses were Edwardian, of four or five storeys, originally built for middle-class families. By 1974 they had been knocked through internally to form a single hotel - the Worsley - that operated mainly as accommodation for hotel and catering staff working in West End and Central London hotels. The residents tended to be young, often newly arrived in Britain, and often without family in the country. Many were foreign nationals, working on training programmes or working visas, sleeping in the building because their employers had arranged it. The Worsley was cheap and convenient and largely invisible to the city around it. That invisibility would matter when the fire came. The corridors were long. The stairs were stone. Many of the residents did not know each other well enough to raise the alarm together.

Two fires were lit in the early hours of the morning, in different parts of the building. Smoke woke some residents, who then alerted others as best they could. One man tried to use a fire extinguisher on a small fire but did not know how to operate it. The 999 calls reached A21 Paddington at 03:32. The first attendance - four pumping appliances, a turntable ladder, an emergency tender - arrived within minutes. The senior officer on arrival saw a serious fire in progress and many people needing rescue. He immediately called for reinforcements: Make Pumps 8 went out at 03:35, Make Pumps 15 at 03:41, Make Pumps 20 at 04:06, Make Pumps 30 at 04:15. Three turntable ladders were on scene; hose-laying lorries relayed water from the Regent's Canal at Little Venice. Two trapped residents escaped by jumping from upper windows - one into the topmost branches of a tree, one across a gap onto a fireman's ladder. The internal stairs were stone, which is fire-resistant in principle but in practice cracked dramatically when fire-heated stone was quickly cooled by water from the hoses.

A four-man crew - three firemen and a Station Officer - entered a second-floor room searching for the seat of the fire. While they were inside, the floors above gave way. The partial collapse of the roof, combined with the weight of a large water tank above them, brought the upper structure down on the crew. The devastation, by the accounts that came afterward, was concentrated almost entirely on that one room. Releasing the trapped firemen became the priority. Three were brought out alive: two with serious burns and one with a serious back injury. The fourth fireman was found dead. His name was Hamish Pettit. He was twenty-five years old, from Rochester, Kent, a probationary firefighter attending the fire with Red Watch of A21 Paddington - his local station. He was the first major loss for the London Fire Brigade's brand-new computerised mobilising system at Wembley, which had only gone live earlier that week. Four of the other firemen at the scene later received awards from the Queen.

The other six people who died that morning lived on the upper floors of the building, where the fire spread most quickly. Their bodies were found after the fire was out. The London Fire Brigade's official record names them: Patrick Dermitte, a seventeen-year-old waiter from France. Wilfredo Lacap, a thirty-six-year-old porter from the Philippines. Basdeobora Loakanadah, a twenty-three-year-old trainee manager from Mauritius. John Lloyd, a twenty-two-year-old trainee manager from Sway in Hampshire. Edward Simpson, a sixty-four-year-old porter from the United Kingdom. Ettore Luigi Vincon, a twenty-two-year-old assistant cook from Pinerolo in Italy. They had families in six different countries who learned what had happened in their second language, by telephone, in the early hours of a December Friday. They were not statistics. They were young men - and one older one - at the start of working lives in a city far from home. The fire industry that should have housed them safely had not.

A kitchen porter named Edward Mansfield, aged forty-one, was charged at the Old Bailey on 10 July 1975 with three arsons (the Worsley fire and two later fires at the Piccadilly Hotel) and the murders of the seven victims. The first trial ended on 23 July when the jury could not reach a verdict. The re-trial began on 12 November and ended on 1 December with a conviction for manslaughter on all seven counts and arson on all three. Mansfield received a life sentence. The Worsley building was rebuilt as flats and renamed Connaught House; a blue plaque on the wall of number 9 commemorates the electrical engineer Ambrose Fleming, who had once lived in the original house. The TV newsreader Gordon Honeycombe, who had become friendly with the Station Officer at Paddington Fire Station, wrote a book about the fire called Red Watch, published in 1976. It remains in print. The fire's other quiet legacy is in fire safety standards for buildings used to house workers: the loose patchwork of converted houses, with internal stairs unsuitable for emergency evacuation, became less acceptable in regulation. It took longer than it should have.