Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen

Product Information

Authors including Barbara Kingsolver, Caleb Azumah Nelson and Emily Kenway have been shortlisted for the Orwell Prizes for Political Writing and Political Fiction. I also wrote about the principle of compartmentalization, where people are advised to stay in their apartments until the fire is put out. That's why single-stair designs were permitted in tall buildings. It usually works, but as Mark Coles, head of Technical Regulations at the Institution of Engineering and Technology, explained in the Engineer: If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.

Social murder is the unnatural death that occurs due to social, political, or economic oppression. A crime commited through active decisions made by political, social and business leaders that leads to the deaths of others.

The Grenfell Tower Inquiry Podcast

In 2001 a 30-minute government funded test of ACM cladding had to be stopped after nine minutes because the flames reached 20 metres high. Sixteen years later it was burning on the walls of Grenfell. And the book looks at how companies knew their cladding was deadly. “They knew what they were doing, but they were able to manipulate the regulatory regime,” Apps said. Show Me The Bodies is important reading to understand the failures and to remember the victims. The book also details how the council and its tenant management organisation ignored tenants’ warnings. Instead they labelled them “troublemakers” when they raised concerns about the refurbishment of the tower from 2015. How architects can put together a business continuity plan How architects can put together a business continuity plan 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.

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. Instead, flames escaped through a gap between the wall and a poorly fitted window and ignited the cladding. It was impossible to choose between the harrowing quotes from this book, but here is one, that bought angry tears to my eyes:

Grenfell: in the words of survivors

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. Deputy editor of Inside Housing, Peter Apps said at a book launch recently, “Grenfell can feel like a past story—it’s not. It’s something that needs to be kept in the public eye if we want to see the companies responsible held to account.”

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. The intent at the design stage of this building was such that the staircases were not intended to be used as a mass escape route. The advice given to residents was that, in the event of a fire, the occupants should remain in their properties. The speed at which this fire spread would suggest that there has been a serious failure in the design and installation techniques employed." Navigating the Building Safety Act's position of Principal D... Navigating the Building Safety Act's position of Principal DesignerWhat 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. Apps, who lives in London, is a journalist and deputy editor at Inside Housing. Just over a month before the Grenfell fire killed 72 people, he broke a story on the dangers of combustible cladding, and has since followed Grenfell’s public inquiry, which ended in November 2022. The inquiry’s final report has not yet been published.

Residents’ concerns about the 2015 refurbishment were purposefully ignored, despite a residents’ blog warning of a “future major disaster”.I thought I had a pretty good idea of what went wrong; I chose the same cladding for the last project I did as an architect – a job that was too big for me to handle, which I got because I proposed a fee too low to do it properly, that had too many consultants working at cross-purposes, for a client who kept changing everything as it went along.” 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. If you ask most people in the building world why 72 died in the fire at the Grenfell Tower on 14 June 2017, the answer will likely be either "combustible cladding" or the "single stair." Most people in North America will not pay much attention because "it can't happen here." But the story is far more complicated. It can happen here because it was due to failures by people who were corrupt, greedy, incompetent and in over their heads, and that happens everywhere. But, unfortunately, it also appears that the wrong lessons are being learned from it. Then there is the construction phase, which doesn’t go much better than the design phase. Fire stops and barriers, poorly designed, to begin with, are then poorly installed.