February 2025, Southampton
On the evening of 22 February 2025, leaseholders and tenants at Sundowner Court — a nine-storey, 40-apartment block overlooking the marina at Ocean Village, Southampton — received a letter from their incoming managing agent. They had until 19:00 that night to leave.
The building had been completed in 2004 by Wilson Bowden, later acquired by Barratt Developments, now Barratt Redrow. For 21 years, residents had lived, worked, and slept in it. In that time, it had been signed off by building control, managed by successive agents, cleaned, maintained, and inspected for cladding removal. Nobody had found what a single invasive structural survey — commissioned by HMS Property Management Services ahead of their planned April takeover — found in a matter of days.
The building's entire steel structural frame had no fire protection. In the event of a serious fire, the nine-storey building would have been at risk of collapse.
HMS director Sean Eckton said publicly that residents had been fortunate that no disaster had occurred in the two decades since the building was constructed.
The defect did not stop at Sundowner Court. Surveys of neighbouring blocks at the Admirals Quay complex found identical issues. Sirocco (114 apartments) was evacuated by 22 June 2025. Mistral (62 apartments) was evacuated by 29 June. Residents of Ranger Court were permitted to remain under round-the-clock waking watch fire patrols. [4] Surveys of further blocks in the complex were ongoing. Total confirmed displaced: over 216 apartments. Total potential exposure across Admirals Quay: 400+ apartments.
The developer confirmed the building was signed off by Southampton and Eastleigh Building Control at the time of construction. The building control authority confirmed its investigations into the building's construction were ongoing[1] — meaning the defect was present from day one. The building was constructed without fire protection on its steel frame. It was inspected. It was signed off. It was occupied.
For 21 years, the following was also true:
The 21-year documentation gap is not a side issue. It is the issue. When the crisis emerged in February 2025, there was no baseline. No record of what the building had looked like in 2004, 2010, 2015, or 2020. No audit trail of what operatives had observed and reported in the years before the evacuation. No way to demonstrate whether warning signs had been present and ignored, or genuinely absent.
Barratt Redrow is funding the full remediation programme — no cost to leaseholders. Barratt Developments had already put aside £192 million to remediate dangerous buildings, taking its total provision to over £807 million across three financial years. [2]
Round-the-clock waking watch fire patrols were required at the blocks where residents remained. Government estimates put waking watch costs at between £12,000 and £45,000 per week per building, depending on size.
Southampton and Eastleigh Building Control faces ongoing questions about how a building with no fire protection on its structural steel frame was signed off in 2004. Under the Building Safety Act 2022, as a nine-storey higher-risk building, Sundowner Court requires a Golden Thread of occupation-phase information. That thread does not exist for the first 21 years of the building's life.
Tenant Remy Kirk was in Cornwall when the evacuation letter arrived. She rushed home and packed in ten minutes. Leaseholder Penny Bowen messaged her tenant: "You're going to have to get out of this building by seven o'clock." He thought it was a joke. Then he panicked.
These were people who had done everything right — bought or rented a property in a waterfront development in Southampton, in a building that had been constructed, inspected, and signed off by the proper authorities. They had no reason to believe they were living in a building that could collapse in a fire. They were not told. Nobody knew. Nobody had looked properly — or if they had, nobody had written it down in a way that survived.
Over 216 households across three blocks lost their homes in 2025. The full extent of the Admirals Quay defects is still being established.
Sundowner Court is the local case. It happened here, in Southampton, in 2025. It is happening now — surveys of further Admirals Quay blocks are ongoing as this article is published. It is the reason CleanReports was built.
The caveat that applies to Grenfell and Lakanal applies here too: CleanReports would not have detected the absence of fire protection on the steel structural frame. That required an invasive structural survey by specialist fire engineers. The defect was within the building's fabric, invisible from the communal areas.
What CleanReports addresses is the 21-year void that surrounded that defect on every side.
A continuous occupation-phase record from day one. Under the Building Safety Act 2022, Sundowner Court requires a Golden Thread of building information — a continuous, structured record of the building's condition throughout its occupied life. That thread should have started in 2004. It did not exist. Every CleanReports inspection visit contributes to that thread from the first service visit onwards — external condition, communal area integrity, any visible cladding deterioration, any observable change from baseline.
A building condition baseline. The absence of any historical record at Sundowner Court means there is no way to know what the building looked like in 2010, or 2015, or 2020 — no way to measure deterioration, no way to demonstrate that warning signs were absent rather than ignored. CleanReports creates that baseline from the first visit: a dated record of what the building looked like, so that any deviation over time is documentable.
The cladding removal — documented. In the 18 months before the evacuation, cladding was removed from Sundowner Court on fire safety grounds. That process — what was removed, when, what condition the underlying structure was in — should have been generating a continuous observation record. CleanReports would have captured every communal area visit during that remediation period: what operatives saw, what had changed, what was newly exposed.
The car park closure — flagged. HIWFRS ordered the closure of the underground car park in September 2024 on fire safety grounds — five months before the evacuation. That enforcement action was a visible, documented change to the building's status. CleanReports' remedial works register captures exactly this: an enforcement action logged, a timeline running, a responsible person notified and on record.
Implementing the lessons learned. The Building Safety Act 2022 exists, in part, because of buildings like Sundowner Court. The Golden Thread requirement, the mandatory registration of higher-risk buildings, the new inspection regime — all of it is designed to ensure that the next Sundowner Court is caught in months, not decades. CleanReports provides the occupation-phase layer of that thread: the weekly evidence that the building is being monitored, observed, and documented by the people physically present in it.
The most important fact about Sundowner Court is not what the fire engineers found in February 2025. It is that nobody found it in the 21 years before. CleanReports cannot guarantee that every structural defect will be caught. It can guarantee that the observation record exists — that the people walking through those communal areas every week are generating a dated, timestamped, legally standing account of what they saw. Not a promise of safety. Proof of process.