Show Me the Bodies: WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING 2023

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A strange hubris animates the way in which Britain conducts itself in this area: British buildings are sturdy, almost axiomatically so, and so our strategy is sound. This compartmentation strategy might have worked in the past. It no longer does. Show Me the Bodies" becomes tear jerking without being meretricious; the narration of a plethora of stories, deriving both from survivors and bereaved families, is scaringly pragmatic and revealing, without the addition of melodramatic elements. The narration's truthfulness aids to increase the awareness concerning the systematic mechanism failures that orchestrated the fire's extent. The Grenfell fire and its Inquiry deserve to be a watershed moment for how we design and deliver buildings. What happened is something all architects should try to make themselves familiar with – not least to give context to some of the legislation already coming our way which will dramatically increase our obligations in terms of competence and liabilities. The London 🔥Brigade shouldn't escape without censure, as their archaic structure that never really allowed adequate training for senior staff / call centres, proved to be decisive in the disaster, as dropping the normal "stay put" guidance and instructing people to leave their homes earlier would at worst have saved many more lives, and may even have allowed all residents to have made it out had this been enacted earlier.

Never before, in years of reviewing books about buildings, has one brought me to tears. This one did, with the story of a Grenfell resident struggling to escape with his young daughters and heavily pregnant wife. Those who justified the deregulating policies that led to this misery sometimes spoke of the interests of “UK plc”. But, even if you put basic humanity aside, how is it good business to create the situation we now have, where billions have to be spent correcting mistakes that should never have been made? I read this book on recommendation from a relative, and I am glad I did. It took me longer to read than my average reading pace because some parts were incredibly emotional and heavy to get through. COINCIDING with last week’s closing of the 300-day inquiry into the Grenfell Tower fire comes the publication of a damning and moving account of the events leading up to the entirely preventable disaster that claimed 72 lives, 17 of them children. This book expresses reprobation of the careless mentality and societal inequity haunting Grenfell's legacy. It is ruthlessly realistic, and aims to channel the spherical comprehension of the tragedy toward the need of a more philosophized future policy regarding fire safety, material choices and evacuation plans.I bought this book because I read a review essay which mentioned it in tandem with another book ("The New Life," by Tom Crewe, coincidentally with a very similar cover-colour scheme, also waiting beside my bed now), and although I of course knew about the Grenfell Tower disaster I did not know what to expect. You would think that a book about fire safety standards, planning permissions, social housing management and so forth would be dry and hard to warm to; not this book. This book gets its hooks into you more or less instantly and doesn't let go until you're done. It's not merely a literary accomplishment -- it is also the sort of cautionary tale which ought to be read and absorbed by anyone responsible for risk assessment in housing, anyone responsible for urban planning or city management or fire department policy...the lessons Apps draws are so widely applicable that I cannot but describe this book as an extremely important contribution. It doesn't escape me that it is almost certain that none of the constituents who might benefit from it will read it -- here in the US because it's "not local and therefore irrelevant," in the UK because, well, "that's not the way we do things." The sections of the book that recount the night itself are moving and devastating. They are told through the experiences of the people involved: some of whom survived it and many who didn’t. They put a human context to the tragedy: the lives, loves, challenges, dreams of those who died or whose lives were changed forever by what happened. 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. At their heart lies the watering down of building regulations, begun in earnest by Margaret Thatcher 30 years earlier, happily continued by Tony Blair and accelerated by David Cameron, who in a New Year’s Day speech in 2010 brazenly vowed to “wage war against the excessive health and safety culture for good” on behalf of “UK plc”. Show Me the Bodies is, throughout, deeply moving. Drawing on interviews and materials presented to the inquiry, Apps follows the stories of a number of residents across the night of the fire. The book is full of details about these people’s lives and descriptions of relationships that illustrate just a few of the many vivid, meaningful lives that were being lived in Grenfell. An elderly man describes how he thought his wife was “out of his league” when they first met; a family expecting a new baby says they were feeling close as the due date neared; a mother talks about how special her relationship with her adult daughter was. As the night that the book recounts unfolds, transcripts of phone calls and social media posts are used to heartbreaking effect; in one instance, Apps reproduces the transcript of a London fire service operator on the phone with a man who has lost sight of his young daughter in the smoke-filled stairwell and is refusing to go on without her. “Anyone would like a dad like you,” the operator says.

Apps’ story will leave you both devastated and angry. “The world that gave us the Grenfell Tower fire looks irredeemably dishonest,” he writes in conclusion. “Thirty years of deregulation had exacted its tragic and, ultimately avoidable, price.” Grenfell was not an accident, but a foretold and carefully planned tragedy, built up for decades. It was prepared through a series of decisions and political or economic games, aiming to maximize profit, thus setting the value of human life below the importance of financial interest. Peter Apps provides a multilateral understanding of the events leading up to the Grenfell disaster, through the revelation of the multitude of factors that led up to it. Toughened standard for government-funded whole house retrofi... Toughened standard for government-funded whole house retrofits 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. Lucent’s intricate facades give Piccadilly Circus’ famous ‘l... Lucent’s intricate facades give Piccadilly Circus’ famous ‘lights’ corner new lifeFor cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. 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. Author has done a fantastic job of outlining accounts of some that made it out and others that didnt, while interspersed throughout are facts that were already in public domain prior to grenfell, along with others that were kept under wraps by various parties, but primarily the cladding suppliers of the products which weren't safe for use on such a tower under the conditions used. And with only ourselves and South Korea allowing these items on, surely it would have occurred to somebody that it's not a great idea.

A bonfire, a bonfire, a bonfire. David Cameron promised one as prime minister, as did Boris Johnson, as did Liz Truss when she ran for the highest office in the land. Conservative leaders come and go, but they all want a conflagration. Always of red tape, of course, the semi-mythical substance that is said to throttle business. The trouble is that, in the case of Grenfell Tower, it was human lives that burned. The 30-year pursuit of deregulation in the building industry demonstrably contributed to the killing of 72 people in their homes. It helped lead to the moment when a two-year-old boy died coughing and crying in his mother’s arms while she was on her phone to a firefighter, shortly before she too died. The easy villain of the piece is Brian Martin, who failed to take action on woefully inadequate cladding safety regulation. His name comes up again and again, including during a bizarre exchange when he asserts that a former fireman with a commitment to higher standards being placed in charge of certain regulations would “bankrupt” the country and that “we would all starve to death.” But Apps rejects Brian Martin’s claim, made at the inquiry, to being a “single point of failure” in his department; clearly, this was not the case. Show Me the Bodies is committed to documenting what happened, eschewing easy narratives that detract attention from the structural causes of the Grenfell tragedy. Martin, in Apps’s account, gets neither damnation nor absolution, although it is clear which he deserves.House of the Year 2023 shortlist: Arts & Crafts with a conte... House of the Year 2023 shortlist: Arts & Crafts with a contemporary twist Apps’s chief claim is that people who lived in Grenfell died because of a series of choices consciously made by political representatives who “deliberately ran down, neglected and privatised arms of the state,” something they did hand in hand with “a corporate world that evinced an almost psychopathic disregard for human life.” It is impossible to read Show Me the Bodies’ immensely moving account of the Grenfell tragedy and finish without a strong sense of moral outrage. Review: Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Time Machine offers ‘a tonic for ... Review: Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Time Machine offers ‘a tonic for our distracted minds’ Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial?

The book’s title, Show Me the Bodies, is taken from remarks said to have been made by Brian Martin, the civil servant responsible for fire safety guidance at the privatised national research laboratory, BRE, to justify not tightening up regulations in response to a series of devastating fires at home and abroad, including Lakanal House in Southwark in 2009 in which six people had perished. Perhaps the most powerful takeaway is the critical importance of what we do to the lives of people who will use our buildings. It would be impossible to read the accounts of the night of the fire without reflecting on what and who we consider when we design. The book is structured chronologically, taking us through the night of the fire minute by minute. As this timeline progresses, Apps explains the choices that lead to each failure. Why were the first firefighters who reached the tower delayed in getting to the fire? It was because of issues with the system used to override the elevators, which was more complex than necessary. The more complex system was chosen “because of a perceived risk of anti-social behaviour”; there were fears a simpler system might be misused. “Prejudice against social housing residents appears to have actively undermined the safety features of the building,” Apps writes. Prejudice against social housing residents appears to have actively undermined the safety features of the building. 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. It’s difficult to imagine a more informed or passionate summary than this book provides and I encourage everyone to read it. Then, if you teach, add it your students’ reading list, if you work in an office, lend it to your colleagues.It was impossible to choose between the harrowing quotes from this book, but here is one, that bought angry tears to my eyes: House of the Year 2023 shortlist: Cowshed reborn as living a... House of the Year 2023 shortlist: Cowshed reborn as living and work space What we learned in the cross examinations that followed revealed that the problems extend beyond the construction industry to the heart of our state. How countless opportunities to learn from other fires here and in other parts of the world were lost and how government inaction led to fire regulations that made us an outlier in Europe, allowing the UK to become a dumping ground for sub-standard insulation. 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. Show Me the Bodies is littered with accounts of incidents like these. Why did fire doors fail? Why was there no plan to evacuate disabled residents? Why did the building’s smoke control system malfunction? For every one, Apps provides a clear explanation. The explanation is always, in the end, that the people in charge were not interested in the input, and consequently in the lives, of the residents of the tower. They were only interested in costs.