Shortly after midnight on 14 June 2017 an electrical fault in a refrigerator set fire to the corner of a fourth-floor kitchen in Grenfell Tower.
By the time firefighters arrived around 1am, the fire had become what they described as a “curtain of flame from about 2-3 feet in the air to the ceiling”.
Crucially – and fatally – it had also spread to the outside of the building.
Within 30 minutes the curtain of flame draped all the way from the top of the 24-storey block of flats. Its spread was fuelled by combustible materials in the external cladding, promoted by cavities within the cladding structure.
The fire moved quickly from the eastern side and soon burned over all four faces of Grenfell Tower. By 4.30am, almost the entire building had been engulfed. It continued to burn for 24 hours.
The inferno killed 72 people. Some 570 people lost loved ones, neighbours and their homes. It remains the worst residential fire in the UK since the London Blitz.
Answering the call
Two days after the fire the UK Government summoned the University of Edinburgh’s Fire Research Centre.
“On the morning of 14 June 2017 we offered our support and assistance,” says Professor Luke Bisby, Chair of Fire and Structures, and a key figure within the Fire Research Centre.
“Two days later I found myself in a meeting at the Home Office in London, working urgently with other experts from across the country to help Government understand the causes of the fire, and to quantify the potential scale of wider problems across the built environment. That critically important work continues, now more than eight years later.”
In many ways, the call was inevitable. For more than 50 years, the Centre’s experts have been at the forefront of fire safety investigations following major disasters.
They have sifted through the evidence following tragic fires – Piper Alpha, King’s Cross, and the World Trade Centre – to explain what happened, why it happened, and how it can be prevented from happening again. In the process, their interventions have helped change UK society and engineering practice.
Those historic disasters all taught painful, costly lessons. So too now with Grenfell.
Sources of tragedy
After more than seven painstaking years, in September 2024 Sir Martin Moore Bick presented the Grenfell Tower Inquiry’s final report on the Grenfell Tower Fire to Parliament.
Central to his inquiry’s recommendations was the decades-long work of academics and researchers from the Fire Research Centre.
As instructed expert witnesses they led the investigations that identified – among other key issues – the mechanisms that spread the fire around the cladding, such as its incendiary polyethylene core, and the architectural and engineering features that turned a kitchen fire into an unimaginable tragedy.
“We worked on the Grenfell Tower Inquiry for more than seven years,” says Professor Rory Hadden, Personal Chair of Fire Science.
“This included a detailed forensic study of the external fire at Grenfell Tower, and a significant programme of bespoke experiments to identify and understand how the design of the cladding and the choice of products used resulted in the fire spread at Grenfell Tower. The path to the Grenfell Tower fire was understood through our detailed historical studies of fire safety regulation, testing, and previous cladding fires in the UK. We can clearly see our work, and most of Professor Bisby’s recommendations, echoed in the Inquiry’s final report.”
How to respect victims
As a result of the Centre’s work on Grenfell, since October 2019 in Scotland, all new buildings over 11 metres must follow new regulations for fire safety for non-combustible cladding. Edinburgh experts were also invited to advise on amendments to the English Building Regulations prior to a public consultation in 2020.
More recently, Prof Bisby was appointed to the UK Government’s post-Grenfell Advisory Panel on Fire Engineers to advise on a range of recommendations from the Grenfell Inquiry about the education and regulation of the fire engineering professions.
“Learning from tragedies such as Grenfell – and then supporting and enabling change – is one of the Centre’s core purposes,” says Dr Angus Law, Senior Lecturer in Fire Safety Engineering. “And it’s one of the few ways to truly respect victims and survivors.”
Preventing the next disaster
The Centre’s other key role is to get ahead of the next tragedy by ensuring buildings are safe from fire in the first place, something that the public should be able to take for granted. For fifty years it has used its educational, research, and investigative efforts to help make this ideal a reality.
Its researchers have improved the safety of buildings around the world by conducting fundamental and applied research into fire science and engineering. They test the fire resistance of construction products. They model how fire moves and behaves in different environments.
But it is more than physics, chemistry and engineering. The fires that consumed the likes of Grenfell, Piper Alpha and the World Trade Centre were more than a deadly confluence of oxygen, fuel and a spark. To understand these tragedies, and prevent the next one, the Centre treats them as multifaceted phenomena, with socio-technical and political origins that predate the initial flame.
The Centre works with sociologists to unpick the cultural forces that lead to ineffective (or absent) regulation. Psychologists are consulted on human behaviour and crowd dynamics. The Centre is uniquely collaborative.
“The Centre’s work is fundamentally multidisciplinary, comprising colleagues from across engineering and the physical sciences, architecture, science and technology studies, ecology, law, policy, emergency services, and more,” says Dr Zak Campbell-Lochrie, Lecturer in Fire Science.
“The diversity of ideas, interests, and perspectives in our research is immensely challenging, engaging… and rewarding.”
Initial sparks
In many ways, the Centre was distinctive from the start.
A chance meeting between a firefighter and a University Principal on a flight from London led to the creation of the UK’s first university department in Fire Safety Engineering in 1973.
Frank Rushbrook, a former firemaster for the city of Edinburgh, recognised there was a disconnect between the physical understanding of fire – the physics, the chemistry, and the mechanics – and the operational side of fire safety, firefighting and fire investigation.
His solution, with which the Principal Michael Swann agreed, was that only a university could fill in these gaps. Funds were raised and In June 1973 Dr David Rasbash became the first professor of the discipline and proceeded to develop a groundbreaking postgraduate course.
Similar courses have since been created all over the world.
The need for the Centre was underlined within months. In August 1973, Summerland, a complex for holidaymakers on the Isle of Man, was destroyed by fire, killing 50 people. A cigarette had started the blaze, which was fuelled by flammable construction materials and compounded by design oversights and procedural failures.
In response, the Centre’s educational offerings initially focused on the behaviour of flammable materials.
The 1980s brought their own tragedies.
The deadly fires at London’s Kings Cross station in 1987 and on the Piper Alpha North Sea oil platform in 1988 killed hundreds of people. The Centre’s experts were present in the aftermath to inform both inquiries. They helped create a legacy that changed processes, design, infrastructure and training for train stations and oil platforms.
Responding to industry needs as the world confronted the collapse of the Twin Towers in 2001, the programme became more focussed on structural fire safety.
Global diaspora of excellence
The Centre’s courses have always been trailblazers. Its MSc in Fire Safety Engineering was the first of its kind in the world. Its Structural and Fire Safety Engineering degree is distinctive as it focusses on undergraduate students with a structural engineering background.
Centre leaders recognise that these are niche yet essential educational products – the total number of PhD graduates is less than 200 – but its graduates that are now leading figures in fire safety around the world.
For example, graduates Colin Todd MBE and Barbara Lane were other expert witnesses in the Grenfell Inquiry. Marianne Foley has shaped Australia’s fire safety regulations as a Principal Fire Safety Engineer with Arup, a global collective of designers, engineers and technical experts. Alumni are leading lights in Dubai and the US.
The Centre’s international influence extends beyond its graduates.
Its consultancy work into the Twin Towers collapse on 9/11 led to the development of structural modelling techniques which were then widely adopted by industry.
The team has also conducted work on fires in informal settlements in countries such as South Africa, India and Bangladesh, highlighting the social forces behind the world’s poorest people suffering disproportionately from unintended fires.
Wildfires and timber buildings
As the department marked 50 years recently, as a consequence of Grenfell, the focus returned once more on combustible materials and the growing international problem of wildfires.
The LA wildfires in early 2025 underlined the need for this pivot. In North America and in Scotland, the Centre has developed modelling tools and a danger rating system which are used to understand wildfire risk and evaluate fire danger based on the types of fuel, weather and fire patterns.
“Wildfires are much harder to understand and control because of the greater number of variables in the natural environment,” says Professor Rory Hadden. “And they are only going to become more common as the climate becomes more extreme. We have been working hard to bring a new level of understanding to these incredibly unpredictable fires.”
Grenfell was a tragic example of innovation in building materials outpacing the ability to test for safety and regulate accordingly. The Centre’s work on mass timber engineering has potentially caught up with another innovation before disaster struck.
Prof Bisby says: “As the materials used to construct the built environment evolve to address the climate emergency, in particular leading to rapid and transformational increases in the amount of combustible timber and other bio-based construction materials being used, to displace carbon-intensive but non-combustible materials like reinforced concrete and structural steel, the Centre’s work has proved pivotal in ensuring that these innovations are being implemented safely by designers around the world.”
“Stubborn and tenacious”
To have this impact of how buildings are constructed and designed – essentially changing how we live – demands difficulty.
“And we are okay to be the ones having those difficult conversations,” says Prof Bisby. “Sometimes we need to have them repeatedly over many years, and often conduct targeted research to prove what we already know, but we’re a stubborn and tenacious bunch. We hope that helps to change things.”
By being difficult – and determined – Prof Bisby and colleagues are in demand.
Together, they help ensure the Centre lives up to its founding principle – to saves lives.
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Photo credits: Grenfell Tower – Gurbuz Binici /Getty Images; victims – Dan Kitwood/Getty Images; King’s Cross – Keystone/Getty Images; LA fires – Mario Tama/Getty Images. Feature image: Apu Gomes/Getty Images
