About 211 households were moved out of three residential blocks at Royal Gateway in Canning Town in the early hours of Friday 23 October, after engineers found a cracked transfer slab beneath the buildings. Managing agent Prime Property Management said there was an imminent risk to life associated with a transfer slab beneath the buildings.
The three blocks are Sovereign Tower, Centurion Tower and St Vincent Court on Hoy Street, E16. They are three of five blocks on the development, which was completed in 2017 for Cathedral (Moss), a joint venture between Cathedral Group and Galliard Homes.
Found during safety case work
Prime said the problem came to light while building safety cases were being prepared for the development, when structural engineers raised concerns. A site inspection on 21 October confirmed them. Construction News reported that the inspection identified a sagging and cracked transfer slab.
The London Fire Brigade was called late on Thursday 22 October and told Newham Council that the three blocks were facing serious structural problems. Crews helped council officers and the managing agent move residents to a rest centre. Newham's cabinet member for housing, John Gray, said: Around 211 private households were requested to be evacuated by the property management company alongside the LFB and council officers in the early hours of the morning.
The council said no council tenants lived in the blocks. It set up a rest centre and gave emergency accommodation to residents with nowhere else to go. Residents told the BBC they were in limbo, with no date for a return and questions over who will pay for alternative accommodation.
James Asser, Labour MP for West Ham and Beckton, said serious questions need to be asked about the safety of the building and that residents must be given comprehensive support, with a clear timeline of when they'll be able to return home.
Why a transfer slab is critical
A transfer slab is a thick reinforced concrete floor that picks up columns or walls from the floors above and carries their loads across to a different column grid below. It is common where flats sit over a podium, car park or commercial ground floor. Every storey above bears on it, so there is no alternative load path if it fails.
The main concern with these slabs is punching shear, where a heavily loaded column pushes through the slab around its base. The failure is brittle and can happen with little warning, Visible sagging and cracking in a transfer slab under occupied flats is treated as a reason to clear the building at once.
Regulator warnings since December
Royal Gateway is the second east London scheme in under a year where transfer slab problems have emptied homes. In December 2025, Notting Hill Genesis moved around 300 residents out of three blocks at the Halo development in Stratford after cracks were found in columns, which engineers linked to the reinforced concrete transfer slabs, Inside Housing reported.
The same month, the Building Safety Regulator issued advice to building owners on the risk of punching shear in transfer slabs. It said the form of construction has been used in the UK for more than 25 years and that not every building with a transfer slab will have a problem. The Institution of Structural Engineers followed with a statement on 19 December 2025, noting that it had published design guidance for new transfer slabs in November 2024 after research with CROSS found that design practice was inconsistent and not explicitly covered by design standards. It is preparing guidance on assessing existing slabs.
The IStructE statement also says engineers are reviewing transfer slabs as part of the structural assessments owners of higher-risk buildings must carry out under the Building Safety Act 2022. That is the process that turned up the defect at Royal Gateway, more than nine years after the first residents moved in. LCM looked at the liability side of this in its analysis of transfer slab defects and litigation risk.
What the investigation will involve
Before any repair design, engineers will need to know what is actually in the slab. That normally means a cover survey and ground penetrating radar to map the reinforcement against the drawings, concrete cores for compressive strength, and intrusive breakouts at the column heads where punching shear reinforcement should be. Deflection monitoring on the soffit shows whether the slab is still moving.
With the blocks occupied above, temporary propping under the slab is usually the first step, so that investigation teams can work safely beneath it. Permanent options used on other transfer slabs include new columns, steel collars or drop heads around the column tops, and fibre-reinforced polymer strengthening, each depending on what the testing finds.
Under the Building Safety Act 2022, claims under the Defective Premises Act for buildings completed before 28 June 2022 can now be brought for up to 30 years, which brings a 2017 building well within time. Prime has not said who will fund the investigation, repairs or residents' accommodation.
Prime said site visits are under way to work out how residents can return safely. No date has been given.
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