Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen

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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.

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 inquiry took evidence over four and a half years, and its final hearings were in November 2022. 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.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. 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. 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.' - Guardian

The Grenfell Tower public inquiry said on Friday that the process of writing to all of those likely to be criticised in its final report “is proving time-consuming”. 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. 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.The Grenfell Tower fire of June 2017 is one of the most tragic political events in British history. This book argues that preparedness for disasters has always been designed in the interests of the State and Capital rather than citizens. This was exemplified by the ‘stay put’ strategy at Grenfell Tower which has historically been used to socially control racialised working class groups in a disaster. ‘Stay put’, where fire safety is compromised along with strategic ambiguity, probabilistically eliminates these groups. Grenfell Tower is a purposive part of ‘Disaster Capitalism’, an asocial racial and class eliminationism, where populations have become unvalorisable and disposable. We have reached a point where even the ruling class are fleeing from the disasters and chaos they have inflicted on the world, retreating to their billionaire bunkers. This timely book will be of interest to sociologists, social theorists and activists in understanding the racialised, classed and capitalist nature of contemporary disasters. Joining Tonkin on the fiction judging panel were New Scientist comment and culture editor Alison Flood, UCL professor of English Julia Jordan and New Statesman contributing editor Tomiwa Owolade. Matt Burn, from Better Homes Enfield, said: “Anyone who reads Peter Apps’ book will understand why tall buildings should have more than one staircase. 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

As things stand, the report will not be published before April next year but the [inquiry] panel hopes to be able to send it to the prime minister before the next anniversary of the fire with publication soon thereafter,” the inquiry said in an update on Friday. All profits from the sales of this book will help the Hubb Community Kitchen to strengthen lives and communities through cooking. 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. 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.In September, two towers of 24 and 30 storeys were approved with single staircases at Meridian Water. In October another four towers, up to 16 storeys, were also given the go-ahead despite having only single staircases. The Building Research Establishment, an agency that examines the safety and performance of construction methods, was privatised, such that manufacturers would pay it to test their products. This arrangement would help the companies that made the insulation and cladding used on Grenfell to arrange tests where they could optimise their chances of positive results, and to suppress them when they failed.