13:53

The lead architect for Grenfell Tower was Nigel Whitbread, who worked for Clifford Wearden and Associates. Whitbread is believed to live in Kensington, London, within half a mile of Grenfell Tower.

The building began in 1972 and finished in 1974. It was renovated last year, with external cladding added to the design. Serious questions have been raised about the new cladding.

Last year, the artist Constantine Gras described meeting Whitbread and escorting him on a tour around the estate. On the tour, Whitbread met residents and said it was “delightful to hear that residents thought flat arrangements worked well”.

Whitbread wrote an article about the development, saying it was the “first and only tower block I designed”.

In his article for Gras’s blog, Whitbread said that the Grenfell design had been influenced by the partial collapse of Ronan Point in Newham, east London, and was structured to stand for over a century.

Whitbread said: “Ronan Point, the tower that partially collapsed in 1968, had been built like a pack of cards. Grenfell tower was a totally different form of construction and from what I can see could last another 100 years.”

Whitbread, 78, said the Grenfell building was unusual in that it was designed so that “you could take away all those internal partitions and open it up if that’s what you wanted to do in the future”.

Whitbread said he went for an unusual internal apartment layout.

“I also don’t know of any other council built tower block in London or anywhere else in England that also has the central core and six flats per floor rather than four flats which is typically done on the London county council or Greater London council plans.”

Whitbread and his team decided that “putting bricks one on top of the other for 20 storeys was a crazy thing to do”.

Instead, we “used insulated pre-cast concrete beams as external walls, lifted up and put into place with cranes and they were so much more quicker”.

Discussing last year’s renovations before the disaster, Whitbread said the cladding had improved the insulation, but changed the building’s appearance. “We lost some of this verticality in the recent recladding but it’s not the end of the world. And the building is now better insulated as we had different standards then.”

Whitbread also said he was concerned about questions over the heating. He said: “I’m very much against knocking things down unnecessarily. I had heard that there had been problems a few years ago with the heating and it was no good and talk of the whole block having to come down. And I thought, if my heating goes wrong, I don’t want to pull my house down.”