Lancaster West Estate
In the early hours of 14 June 2017, the Grenfell Tower caught fire, resulting in large loss of life.
[8] Samuel Lake, the founder of the Potteries, was a night soil collector by profession, and his associate, Stevens, invested £100 to buy some land in Connaught Square, where he established piggeries, before moving them into the Dale.
[8] Between 1837 and 1842, a part of the Dale to the east of Pottery Lane was fenced off to create a racecourse, the Kensington Hippodrome; the race track followed the line of Clarendon Road.
Furthermore, the ground, as suggested by the name 'potteries', was of soft clay, which made it unpopular with jockeys and most of the time unsuitable for either racing or training.
The last Grand Steeplechase, recorded in a set of prints by Henry Alken Junior, was in 1841, and the Hippodrome closed in 1842.
The waters that drained from the Dale ran through ditches and open sewers into a large pool south of Mary Street; this was known as the Ocean.
In 1850, after cholera had taken victims on Latimer Road, it was described by editor WH Wills in the first issue of Charles Dickens' publication Household Words as a 'Plague Spot'.
By 1860, a woman drowning in a ditch prompted the building of a mission hall and Blechynden Street ragged school.
The railway streets remained respectable for a century- when their lack of interior plumbing condemned them to be classed as slums.
[8] The women found well-paid work in laundering, at first by hand in their own homes but later in steam laundries opened along Latimer Road.
[8] On 29 August 1958, a marital argument outside a public house by Latimer Road station triggered the 1958 Notting Hill race riots, which were centred on White City and Blechynden Street.
[11] The original scheme was intended to link Latimer Road Underground station with workplaces, shops, offices and amenities in addition to considerable new housing whilst subordinating car-storage, but when these intentions were blocked, a later concept of the estate continued with the idea of raised streets with pedestrian access running along a walkway with vehicular access below at a basement level.
[10] By the time phase one was completed, the philosophy of public housing had changed, and raised walkways were abandoned and further development was conducted by the council's in-house architects using generic designs.
[17] In an attempt to bring residents together, during a time of racial tensions, the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Basil Hume, in 1979, personally led a Good Friday service in the shadow of the tower block.
This, and the recurrent failure of the district heating system serving the finger blocks, resulted in 2015 in the Grenfell tower being modernised, reglazed, insulated and clad in a highly-flammable aluminium sheet material.
Transport for London did not understand any possible commercial benefit or wish to be involved, whilst the Borough engineer objected to existing roads being 'decked'.
The 67.30-metre (220 ft 10 in) tall building contained 120 one- and two-bedroom flats (six dwellings per floor on twenty of the twenty-four stories, with the other four being used for non-residential purposes), housing up to 600 people.
[26] To achieve the required density LCC architects favoured tower blocks set in green space as can be seen in the neighbouring Silchester Estate, the Clifford Wearden & Associates architects propose a solution of densely packed low-rise apartments with landscaped greenspace.
[27] The finger blocks were very close to the annual disturbances in Notting Hill, and the walkways provided escape routes that the police were unable to control.
The job involved not just the signing but given the complexity of horizontal and vertical streets intersecting, working out the most efficient addressing system for the benefit of the postmen and residents.
[30][31] It was speculated even whilst events were unfolding that a recent refurbishment of the block had, through the flammable cladding panels that were added to the exterior, contributed to the speed of engulfment of the whole building.
[32] An official Government enquiry is ongoing into what caused the rapid spread of the fire and how the 2015 renovation of Grenfell Tower contributed to the failure of the building's fire containment capacities and thus caused so many casualties, with many media publications and the Metropolitan Police arguing there are considerable grounds for charges of Corporate Manslaughter to be made.
Lancaster West Estate is part of the Kensington and Bayswater constituency for elections to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom.
Kidulthood (2006) and Adulthood (2008), written and directed by British filmmaker Noel Clarke, were partially filmed on the estate.
