Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen

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Almost exactly two years ago, just after the cross examinations with the insulation companies, I wrote about how the Inquiry had revealed a construction industry devoid of morality or ethics. I wrote optimistically about how architects might form part of a solution: custodians of a new set of values that can run through every stage of a project.

It was impossible to choose between the harrowing quotes from this book, but here is one, that bought angry tears to my eyes: Space, Rhythm & Light illuminates Kim Lim at the Hepworth Space, Rhythm & Light illuminates Kim Lim at the Hepworth 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.” Residents’ concerns about the 2015 refurbishment were purposefully ignored, despite a residents’ blog warning of a “future major disaster”.Sounes may not have had much experience, but he was all consulted up, with cladding consultants and fire consultants who never even opened reports because they thought it was another consultant’s responsibility. 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. Authors including Barbara Kingsolver, Caleb Azumah Nelson and Emily Kenway have been shortlisted for the Orwell Prizes for Political Writing and Political Fiction. A row continues to rumble over who should pay for removing the cladding from residential buildings, whether the developer, government or flat owner. It should be the developers. Over 94 percent of the 486 buildings over 18 metres in height with dangerous ACM cladding—which was used on Grenfell—have either started or completed work.

In his Observer review of Apps’ winning book, Rowan Moore wrote: “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.” Navigating the Building Safety Act's position of Principal D... Navigating the Building Safety Act's position of Principal Designer 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.

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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. 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.

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”. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. 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. 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. I first wrote about the fire three days after it occurred, outraged by the Daily Mail headline, which blamed it on "misguided climate change targets." I wrote that it was not about green targets but was "an indictment of plastic and foam in construction." I also worried about the effect it would have on wood construction:

Steve Bloomfield, the Observer’s head of news, said: “Both Shanti and Mark spent many months on incredibly difficult and groundbreaking stories that exposed wrongdoings that would otherwise have remained buried. The Observer is extremely proud of the prize that reflects the results of that hard work.” PDF / EPUB File Name: Show_Me_the_Bodies_How_We_Let_Grenfell_Happen_-_Peter_Apps.pdf, Show_Me_the_Bodies_How_We_Let_Grenfell_Happen_-_Peter_Apps.epub The fire climbed up cladding as flammable as solid petrol. Fire doors failed to self-close. No alarm rang out to warn sleeping residents. As smoke seeped into their homes, all were told to 'stay put'. Many did - and they died. A magnificent book that deftly combines vivid, compelling accounts of the victims of the fire with forensic (but no less engaging) detail on the decades of politics and policy which led up to it. Expect to find yourself crying over details of building regulations you never knew existed – and over the fact that so many of us let shifts in such regulations go unnoticed, to such devastating impact. Show Me the Bodies has the values of The Orwell Prize at its core: it is beautiful writing about a devastating subject that we should all understand. 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.