The Ronan Point disaster was the first warning of a nationwide high-rise safety crisis. This tower block was utterly structurally unsound, due to defects that were shared by hundreds more buildings across the United Kingdom. In the decades since, reams of high-rise residents, architects, journalists, social workers, and activists have campaigned for improvements to building safety.
The scans of fragments of Ronan Point were made by Ferdinand Saumarez Smith for Dr. Holly Smith and will form the centrepiece of a new digital archive: Tracing the Tower Block Campaign. Launching in late 2026, this resource aggregates hundreds of primary materials from a host of archives, to trace a decades-long battle by grassroots actors for safe and affordable housing. It will serve as an interactive and usable toolkit for the pursuit of housing justice today.
Access the 3D model collection on Sketchfab
Tracing the Tower Block Campaign is a scholar-activist collaboration between the advocacy group Tower Blocks UK and historians from the University of Cambridge and the public history co-operative On The Record. This project has been funded by a Right to the Discipline Grant from the Antipode Foundation (2025-6). The work of Factum Arte has ensured that these arresting artefacts will be preserved and made accessible to people lobbying for change today.
