Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen

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Lavelle, who grew up in care, won for pieces for the Guardian included Being Homeless felt Inevitable and Marshall Payne was recognised partly for her warning in the Guardian that the issue was about to get worse with the withdrawal of measures put in place during Covid. The fire brigade’s “stay put” policy is dealt with first – there are frustrating testimonies from a firefighter and a control room operator that encompass the few elements of human drama. The former, played by Daniel Betts, gives his failed account of getting to a 13-year-old alone in a flat. The latter, played by Claire Lams, tells a boy on the 19th floor to stay put despite his desperate and repeated pleas. Compelling, rigorous, utterly forensic and so very needed. This book has to be the moment that things change.' - Lucy Easthope, author of When the Dust Settles Grenfell is painful to watch. The approach is almost beautiful and mesmerising, just as any view of a city is at the end of a flight. And then the horror, which is itself palpable, even as the work crews labour to clean up and make the structure safe. McQueen filmed Grenfell six months after the fire. They had already begun hoarding the lower floors in white panels, a task that would eventually see all 24 storeys wrapped and hidden from view.

While chapters on the history of the disastrous refurbishment with combustible cladding panels, the response of central and local government and the preparedness of the London Fire Brigade are complete and warning letters have been sent to those criticised, chapters on the roles of the product manufacturers, the bodies which certified the combustible materials as safe and the conduct of the Kensington and Chelsea Tenants Management Organisation, which operated the tower for the west London borough, are among those yet to be finished. Show Me the Bodies will never leave the mind of anyone who reads it. The tragedy is that those who should read it probably won't.' - GuardianAfter being displaced following the Grenfell tower fire, some of the local women needed a place to cook fresh food for their families. They began to use the kitchen at the Al-Manaar Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre, where the women who worked there had been using the facilities to cook for the community. They all shared the kitchen for two days every week, preparing food and eating together. Word spread and more local women began to join in, embracing community and supporting their neighbours in their time of need. A jaw-dropping account of a callous system that swept individual conscience aside in favour of profit and politics. It is hard to convey how moving and enraging the book is - I urge you to read it for yourself. Because one thing almost all of us have been guilty of since the worst disaster in the UK this century is complacency.' - Evening Standard 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. 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.

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.Together is a storybook of this West London community, showcasing over 50 delicious recipes from the women of the Hubb Community Kitchen and including a foreword by HRH The Duchess of Sussex. If they’d been listened to, they would all still be alive. A similar fire, which killed six people at Lakanal House in south London in 2009, should have been enough of a warning, but it wasn’t. Seventy-eight people were killed by a collision of forces with one common root: the broad contempt showed by people with power towards those without it. Yet above all else, the Grenfell fire was a “result of political choices”, concludes Apps. Months beforehand, he had been reporting on fears about combustible cladding systems for Inside Housing, where he is deputy editor. When he woke up to the news, he thought to himself: “It’s happened.” Justice still seems a long way off, four years after the publication of the damning first report, and before the final report to be published later this year. A criminal investigation is still ongoing. What we have instead is this carcass, standing in the mild December sunshine. On the way out of the screening, at the Serpentine Gallery, we are confronted with a commemorative text in memory of those who lost their lives, and three long rows of the 72 names. In a passionate accompanying essay, sociologist Paul Gilroy writes of Grenfell as a “charred obscenity”. Leaving, I’m aware of what is just over the horizon to the north. Grenfell stays with me, and stays with London, however much they cover it up. 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.