On 16 May 1968, Ivy Hodge got up to make an early morning cuppa. She lived alone at flat 90 on the eighteenth floor of Ronan Point, a brand-new tower block built for Newham Council at Canning Town in the east London Docklands. She lit the gas on her hob and the next thing she remembered was picking herself up off the kitchen floor. Ivy was lucky. The explosion brought down one whole corner of the 22-storey block, killing five residents and injuring seventeen more. It demolished more than part of a building: the gas leak at Ronan Point proved a fatal blow to high rise as the apparently unstoppable answer to postwar Britain’s housing problems.

Between 1955 and 1975, as Holly Smith tells us in her sparkling new history of the tower block, around half a million high-rise council flats were built in Britain. Their story has been charted numerous times since the 1980s, but Smith offers a fresh and welcome look through the eyes, lives and struggles of the people who lived in them. She proceeds by way of case studies going back to the 1950s, beginning with the gigantic Park Hill Estate in Sheffield and ending with the much-studied Heygate and Aylesbury Estates in Southwark. 

In between, she covers a formative moment in the tenants’ co-operative movement at St Katharine Docks in Wapping in the 1970s – an early instance of tenant control – as well as the shoddy government investigation into the Ronan Point disaster, which eventually led to the demise of system building