A gas explosion in a tower block in the West End of London in 1968 provided the impetus for the government of the United Kingdom to establish the Council for Registered Gas Installers (Corgi), ostensibly to increase the safety of the instillation and use of gas appliances. While Corgi continued to exist for the next 39 years, during which time it provided many benefits for homeowners and renters, the reason for its formation may have been less about safety than taking advantage of a dramatic incident. To paraphrase an American politician, "Never let a good disaster go to waste." A major accident can focus public attention on a problem, which provides politicians – of any nation – the opportunity to do something and, perhaps more importantly, be seen to be doing something to fix the problem.

At 5:45 am on 16 May, 1968 the occupant of a corner flat on the 18th storey of a tower block in Newham, East London lit a match to light the stove. Instead of starting the day with a nice cup of tea, she found herself blown across the kitchen. The gas explosion caused the walls of her flat to shift, resulting in the failure of the floor above her. Since the building was built using the large panel system (LPS) of pre-fabricated concrete parts, the floors and walls relied upon gravity to keep everything in place; with the loss of support of the 19th floor, a chain-reaction of failure caused the partial collapse of that corner of the building up to the roof of the 22-storey tower. Four people were killed immediately (although, oddly enough, not the resident of the flat where the explosion originated), with a fifth dying later, and 16 others were injured.

The tower block, called Ronan Point, had just been completed nine weeks earlier. It was built as part of a programme to provide affordable housing for the residents of the East Ham section of London, one of the hardest-hit areas of the city during the Second World War. Enemy bombing had resulted in the loss of 25% of the houses in the area, with many of the surviving buildings considered to be too damaged, or substandard, to be considered appropriate for post-war housing. By 1966, when the construction of Ronan Point began, the fast and inexpensive LPS method allowed it to be finished by early March, 1968.

Unfortunately, as the investigation into the cause of the explosion proved, other aspects of the construction were also rushed. The report on the disaster laid the blame for the gas leak on the use of a sub-standard brass nut joining the flexible connection from the gas cooker to the supply pipe. While the government did enact stricter building codes to help prevent similar disasters from occurring in the future, Ronan Point was not torn down; instead, the building was repaired with strengthened joints and continued to be used for housing for several decades.

Another result of the partial destruction of Ronan Point was the establishment of Corgi as a central registration body for companies and their employees responsible for the installation and maintenance of gas lines and appliances. Corgi supplanted the previous voluntary organization, Confederation for the Registration of Gas Installers, which had filled the role. Oddly enough, registration with Corgi was not legally required for gas businesses in the United Kingdom until 1998. What it did accomplish, however, was to introduce a semi-official, yet quasi-independent, non-profit organisation that could compete with private firms in marketing products and services to gas customers. By providing a catalogue of these offerings in the same mailing in which the certificate of installation was delivered to the customer, private firms objected that Corgi was overstepping its charter and taking advantage of its position as the central registration agency. Other marketing campaigns, using the customer information gathered in the course of its official capacity, also raised the issue of misuse of data safety regulations.

Despite these controversies, Corgi continued to operate for four decades as the sole central registry of accredited gas companies and individual installers. That this position was attained as the result of a gas explosion may be of less importance than the impetus of government regulation and centralisation.