The 24-storey tower block was designed in 1967 in the Brutalist style of the era by Clifford Wearden and Associates, with the Kensington and Chelsea London Borough Council approving its construction in 1970, as part of phase one of the Lancaster West redevelopment project.

[5][6] The 67.3 m (221 ft) tall building contained 120 one- and two-bedroom flats (six dwellings per floor on 20 of the 24 storeys with the bottom four, the podium, being used for non-residential purposes).

You have a central core containing the lift, staircase and the vertical risers for the services and then you have external perimeter columns.

This foundation holds up the tower block and in situ concrete columns and slabs and pre-cast beams all tie the building together".

The mezzanine floor would be continued across the full width of the building making space for three four-bedroom, 101.5 m2 (1,093 sq ft) six-person flats.

The £8.7 million refurbishment, undertaken by Rydon Ltd, of Forest Row, East Sussex in conjunction with Artelia for contract administration and Max Fordham as specialist mechanical and electrical consultants, was completed in 2016.

[21] The government has voiced its intention to allow the survivors to "...guide the way future decisions are made" about the tower site and memorial.

[23] The Grenfell Next of Kin group has proposed turning the tower into a green wall vertical garden as a memorial to the victims.

[26] On 5 February 2025, the Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner told bereaved relatives and survivors that a decision had been made to demolish Grenfell Tower.

[29] In an interview with Constantine Gras, quoted in The Guardian, he said that "he was born in Kenton, his parents had a grocer's shop on St Helen's Gardens, North Kensington.

He was educated at Sloane Grammar school and then got a position with the architects Douglas Stephen and Partners, who, though small, were applying the principles of Le Corbusier and the modernists.

"[29] He worked alongside Kenneth Frampton who was the Technical Editor of the journal Architectural Design; and Elia Zenghelis and Bob Maxwell.

[31][32] A residents' organisation, Grenfell Action Group (GAG), published a blog in which it highlighted major safety problems.

[33] Prior to a fire, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and central UK government bodies "knew, or ought to have known", that their management of the tower was breaching the rights to life, and to adequate housing, of the tower's residents, according to an enquiry by the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) published in 2019.

[36] In 2020, survivors of the fire stated that "nothing has changed" three years later and expressed feelings of being "left behind" and "disgusted" by a lack of progress in making similar buildings safe.