Sam Webb obituary | Register

Sam Webb was vilified, ridiculed and most importantly ignored in 50 years of campaigning to persuade governments to make council tower blocks safer. Talking to the Today programme on the morning after the Grenfell fire in North Kensington, west London, in June 2017, the architect almost broke down as he described the blaze that claimed the lives of 72 people as a “disaster waiting to happen”.

Decades before the worst peacetime fire in a block of flats, Webb had been warning against flammable cladding materials (such as the ACM cassette rainscreen panels used at Grenfell) that could cause fire to spread rapidly. He argued that the material behind the surface cladding should be fireproof by law (under the existing building regulations only surface cladding needed

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sam-webb-obituary-xrb3m28pl

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