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

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I hope true justice is served for every single person who suffered from this dangerous deregulation and demonic craving for profit over people.

An incredible read that details the catastrophic failings of deregulation and the state on a tragedy that could have been prevented. This one did, with the story of a Grenfell resident struggling to escape with his young daughters and heavily pregnant wife.

Peter Apps’ book about the Grenfell Tower fire and the subsequent inquiry is an essential work of journalistic scrutiny. To anyone reading this, I would just warn that in his informative sections that are interspersed between the chronological retelling of the fire's spread, there are a lot of acronyms and sometimes jumping between different people/individuals/companies, so sometimes you may get mixed up.

Really compelling book that finished in a matter of days after seeing it suggested in an article by the editor of the builders merchants journal. People such as Sam Webb, the architect and tireless campaigner for tower block safety who died last month, and the Grenfell residents who repeatedly expressed their fears and pressed for accountability that never came, always knew that it came down to class. They had a “core of solid petrol”, and were fitted a year earlier for insulation and aesthetic purposes (one Kensington and Chelsea councillor is on record deciding between “Champagne” and “British Racing Green” colours). Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA ‘Britain’s worst fire since the second world war’: Grenfell Tower in west London ablaze on 14 June 2017. An ideological commitment to deregulation, lax standards, and cuts to local government enforcement and maintenance powers mean that British buildings are not presently good enough for this strategy to be the only approach.RIP to the lost 72, and wish those left behind all the luck in the world in their ongoing fight for justice and closure. Lack of equipment, faulty communication devices and the absence of any plan for an out-of-control fire meant that the LFB was wrong-footed from the beginning.

We’re not ‘clean’,” Claude Wehrle, its technical manager, told a colleague when pressed for the necessary fire certificate. Because one thing almost all of us have been guilty of since the worst disaster in the UK this century is complacency. It is a story of corporate structures that allowed human beings to abandon their won conscience and sense of agency and to think only about sales and profit margins, and of government institutions that place ideology above human lives at every turn.From Knowsley Heights (1991), Lakanal House (July 2009), and multiple fires in Dubai there were warning signs way before June 14, 2017. Peter Apps, a journalist who specialises in housing, was already investigating – before the disaster – the dangerously combustible insulation and cladding used on British apartment blocks. It is the story of a grieving community forsaken by our government, a community still waiting for change. The failings of government and of the majority of people involved in the maintenance and upgrade of Grenfell are laid bare in this book.

The warnings and lessons from the Lakanal House fire 8 years previously that were completely ignored, costing the lives of Grenfell inhabitants who would all have escaped if corners weren't cut and regulations abused and flouted.Apps alternates his narrative between the escalating events of the fire on 14 June 2017, and the decades of deregulation, isolated decisions and blantant neglect which cumulatively created to a tinder box scenario. Fucking happy days,” said an employee of the same company, after it managed to get a product to pass, on the third attempt, a safety test.