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Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen

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The lessons of the Grenfell Tower fire must be learned, especially by decision makers, and that is why campaign groups have gifted copies of Peter Apps’ book to Enfield Council. Over the chatter and aromas of the kitchen they discovered the power of cooking and eating together to create connections, restore hope and normality, and provide a sense of home. This was the start of the Hubb Community Kitchen. Apps, who has covered the inquiry daily, alternates these narrative chapters with a forensic examination of how building regulations and corporate safety standards have been watered down since Margaret Thatcher’s deregulation bonanza. Since 14 June 2017, when 72 people were killed in a fire engulfing the west London high-rise of Grenfell Tower, the story of the atrocity has turned from one of lives to one of numbers. But even if he now feels unbound, some of his own arguments are proof of those same limitations. He presents the House of Lords as the embodiment of so much of what he decries, but can only propose “an independent commission to look at what would be the best solution”. His analysis of recent political history finds him being too generous to David Cameron and George Osborne, and overly kind to post-Thatcher Conservatism more broadly (is it really true that “racist language” is not “in the tradition of the party” and that Nigel Farage sits outside the parameters of Tory politics?). In general, he hangs on to a Whiggish optimism that sometimes fails to stand up to scrutiny. He also has a habit of extending his criticisms of the media’s highest-profile elements to journalism as a whole. Before the Brexit referendum, he says, “I do not believe any part of the media appreciated the scale of the citizenry’s economic woes”. Some of us did.

Regulation codes, refurbishment cost savings, the total sum of buildings wrapped in flammable cladding. Over the course of a four-year inquiry, now finally in its closing stages, survivors and the bereaved have learned a new language of figures and acronyms relating to 30 years of neglect: three decades of political and corporate choices that took more London lives in any single event since the Blitz. In Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen, by the housing journalist Peter Apps, one number stands out early on: “seven minutes”. This is the time it would have taken, according to an expert witness at the inquiry, for all 293 residents of the tower to open their front doors, walk down the stairs and escape. If the London Fire Brigade had instructed them to do so within an hour of the fire starting at 12.54am – from a fridge-freezer on the fourth floor – they would have survived.At first, we hear birdsong as the screen lights up. The approach begins at London’s edge, passing over a mosaic of housing developments and the last fields, giving way to golf courses and playing fields and factory estates. There are traffic sounds and distant sirens, a helicopter passing over, its sound fading with it. Our approach is slow and low in the early winter afternoon, the distant horizon muffled by pollution. Here comes Wembley stadium, there on the right, just before we make a small turn and head over Willesden and Kensal Green, crossing the Westway. Gary Younge won the journalism prize for pieces including Lest We Remember: How Britain its History of Slavery for the Guardian as part of its Cotton Capital series. Soon there were women from different cultures all cooking, swapping recipes, talking and laughing. As they cooked, they began to connect, heal and look forward, and have continued to cook together twice a week. The aim of our campaign is to get Enfield Council to do the right thing and ensure that the tall buildings at Meridian Water will have more than staircase, and therefore give people multiple escape routes in the event of a fire. What emerges is a heightened sense of what we already know; the drama does not shed new light on the tragedy but does highlight the abysmal corporate and council failures and like Thomas’s words, invites us to connect these to the wider world.

But the bigger horror is the “value engineering” by the corporate bodies which is shown through contract bidding and a cost-cutting that is blind to safety aspects despite numerous warnings, and the play as a whole shows a chillingly amoral capitalism at work. Single staircases in tall buildings remain permitted under building regulations in England and the council is not breaching fire safety rules by approving them. However, it is an aspect of fire safety regulations that has received criticism from industry experts following Grenfell. At the October planning committee meeting, Sarah Parkinson from developer Vistry Partnerships told councillors: “Fire safety considerations have been front and centre of our approach to design […] Vistry has gone over and above fire safety regulations.”

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The received wisdom, on which decades’ worth of increasingly threadbare regulation and oversight relied, was that flat fires didn’t spread to other flats, and so high-rise residents were always instructed to “stay put” in the event of an emergency. The introduction of combustible insulation and cladding in flat regeneration programmes made that advice lethal.

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