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I’d been at the pub the night before. It was a Tuesday night, but I was in my 20s, not yet a parent and that sort of thing was still possible.
I was catching up with a friend I hadn’t seen in a while about the work I’d been doing recently. I said I was most proud of a recent investigative piece into fire safety that had paid dividends.
There’d been a fire in Shepherd’s Bush which had spread over four storeys, and our reporting had revealed the building was fitted with combustible materials - panels beneath the windows made of plywood and polystyrene which ignited when fire broke out of the kitchen window. Since the residents were typically told to stay put in a fire, this had been a very near miss.
It’s ridiculous to put something like that on the walls of a building, my friend said.
It’s more common than you think, I replied.
On my way home from the pub to my mum’s house - where I lived at the time - I walked past a tower block. I remember thinking about fire. Would people be able to get out quickly enough if they needed to, would fire engines be able to park in the narrow space at its base, was the building in a good enough condition to justify the stay put strategy it almost certainly adopted?
I don’t really know now whether I actually had these thoughts. Maybe they are a trick of my memory, casting back and finding foreshadowing where none actually existed. Maybe I walked straight past the tower block and thought nothing of fire ripping up the outside and people being trapped in their homes as a result. But if this was the case, it was the last time I would walk past a tower block without that thought flashing through my mind.
I got to bed before midnight. The next day was press day at Inside Housing, where I worked as news editor. The magazine was pretty much ready to go: our front page was already written and filed. It would be a straightforward press day - unless any big news broke.
When I woke up in the morning and looked at my phone, I saw a text from the reporter who was on the early shift.
“This fire in west London looks pretty big. I’ll get something up straight away.”
I felt a rush of adrenaline immediately. Writing the previous story about Shepherd’s Bush, I’d spoken to contacts who told me of buildings completely covered in combustible materials for the purposes of insulation. As I’d spoken to them, images had floated through my mind of tower blocks completely engulfed in burning plastic. Surely, it couldn’t be that bad, I’d thought. There must be rules against that sort of thing.
We can all remember the first time we saw the pictures from Grenfell - a black, blue sky, and a glowing orange torch of a building, flames extending from top to bottom, empty black holes for windows and a plume of smoke curling off into the night. I remember feeling cold and sick as the images loaded on the BBC live blog. This was the exact image I’d told myself had to be impossible.
I cycled straight to work. In the lobby, the big plasma screen TV showed close-up footage of the tower: the smoke now grey, the building caked in ash. Deaths were already confirmed, the news ticker at the bottom of the screen said. But how many?
The grim, dark, sickening thought that had entered my mind as soon as I saw the first pictures of the burning building returned. I could still remember the 999 calls which played at the inquest into the six deaths during the 2009 Lakanal House fire, having covered it as a junior reporter in 2013. I knew we hadn’t done much to change the status quo since then. The residents would have been told to stay put.
That wrecked shell of a building was still full of people.
*
Seven years on, we know a good deal more than we did then about why Grenfell Tower burned in the way that it did.
We know about the fridge-freezer with its combustible plastic backing - a well-known fault which had been raised by coroner’s inquests previously and really ought to have been dealt with by manufacturers and regulators. It hadn’t been. Dangerous products stayed on the market.
We know about the kitchen window in Flat 16 - and replicated throughout the tower by the botched refurbishment. Surrounded by gaps, packed with combustible plastic and glued to the old wooden frame of the window it offered an easy route for the flames from a routine kitchen fire to reach the external wall of the building.
We know about the tonnes and tonnes of combustible foam insulation boards, and their propensity to produce toxic, irritant smoke, including cyanide, when burned. We know about the advertising of this product as “limited combustibility” when it was not, advertising which staff at the firm that made it would later call “intentional, deliberate, dishonest”.
We know about the aluminium composite material (ACM) cladding - two thin skins of aluminium bonded together by a plastic chemically similar to petrol.
We know about the many years of tests on this product and warnings of a disaster involving it. We know that nothing was done.
We know that successive governments had had the opportunity to ban this material and others like it since at least 1991, but had routinely elected not to, despite increasingly dire warnings of a disaster.
We know that when the fire ripped up and entered other flats, malfunctioning closing devices on the front doors meant they stood open and the smoke billowed out into communal lobbies.
We know that the local council was well aware of this issue with the doors, due to a previous fire in another tower block, and had been repeatedly warned to fix it by the London Fire Brigade but had not done so due to save money. A deficiency notice covering Grenfell Tower directly had raised the issue eight months previously. Nothing had been done.
We know that when the residents of other flats opened their front doors and were confronted by this hot, choking, toxic smoke they elected to shut the door again and phone 999 - especially if they had children or disabilities.
We know that when this happened, the LFB blundered - advising residents to stay in their flats for far, far too long, robbing them of the opportunity to escape alive and botching the improvised effort to coordinate reaching them in time.
Does this sound unfair on the brave firefighters, confronted with a horrendous building fire which they had never been trained to deal with?
Maybe, but it isn’t at all unfair on the institution they worked for - which knew a large cladding fire was a possibility, but simply failed to plan for one happening in London. Which failed to even adopt the lessons from Lakanal House into its training of incident commanders and call handlers. The result was that it repeated its mistakes on a much greater scale, with far greater consequences.
And we know that those residents who did manage to flee the building - traumatised, confused and desperate for information about loved ones - were met with a state response which first treated them like criminals and then abandoned them to solitary hotel rooms, without proper food, information or support.
*
What is the use of all this knowledge? People seek the truth after events like this because it is supposed to lead somewhere. But the truth feels like it has little value when the perpetrators have escaped justice and society has not changed.
Because while we know the names of the companies, organisations and individuals responsible for all of the failings listed above, all of them remain free. Free to advance their professional careers, free to move on in the same industries which gave us this globally unique disaster, free to repeat their mistakes.
The police investigation is progressing, but progressing so slowly that a two-year-old boy carried sobbing out of Grenfell Tower may well attend the final trials (if we even get that far) as an adult.
And while we know the causes of the Grenfell Tower fire, we still haven’t fixed them in the many other buildings which are impacted.
Fixing combustible facades has become a bunfight between building owners, developers and insurers. It feels more concerned with liability, legal duties and apportioning or avoiding responsibility than it is about safety. And it has at least a decade left to run before we can confidently say buildings are safe.
Meanwhile, internal fire safety defects, especially in older social housing blocks, remain legion and oversight of them sporadic.
And, agonisingly, we still don’t have a proper plan for how to evacuate a building if a fire like Grenfell happens again. The Grenfell Tower Inquiry’s recommendation that all building owners develop evacuation plans taking into account the needs of residents with disabilities lie forgotten on a dusty shelf somewhere in Whitehall.
And still most social housing tower blocks don’t have sprinklers. Most don’t have communal fire alarms. Most still rely on telling the residents to stay put and simply crossing fingers and hoping things don’t take an unexpected turn.
We still pack our homeless families into ramshackle converted office blocks, lacking the most basic fire protections, and our older people into care homes made of timber structures which will burn to rubble if a spark gets into the cavity.
We still tell ourselves that because it hasn’t happened again in the years since, because it doesn’t happen much, there really can’t be that much to worry about. We are a sophisticated country, with sophisticated building regulations. It couldn’t happen here, not again, that was a one-off, a once in a million event. There is no point uprooting everything to fix it. That would not be proportionate.
This attitude increasingly takes over as our memories fade. We forget that the infrequent nature of residential fires and the low probability of all the failures lining up to create a disaster, mean years can pass between events like this just due to chance. That gives false confidence to everyone except the handful of us who are still counting the near misses. But the world is getting hotter. There will be more fires. And if we leave the conditions which gave us Grenfell in place, we roll the dice every time. We will lose eventually.
*
Think back seven years. Not to the day of the fire, but the day after. The sick feeling you had looking at the news. The cold, clammy feelings that came with wondering what people had suffered in those last hours, wondering what it might have been like for you.
And now imagine telling that yourself back then that so little would have changed. What would that you from 2017 have felt hearing this? Disbelief? Anger? Or a grim, weary cynicism? Any answer should tell you a lot about the sort of society you live in.
I hate the week of the anniversary. I hate saying the same things I said last year, and the year before that, and the year before that. I hate the end of this remaining so far away - always on the horizon, never getting closer, another year ticked off with so little to show in terms of progress towards justice and change.
And if this is how I feel, as a journalist with no pre-existing personal ties to Grenfell and no trauma from the night of the fire, I can’t even begin to imagine how horrible this week feels for someone who lost their home, their parents, their children to this utterly avoidable disaster.
The Grenfell Tower community is gathering on Friday in west London to mark the anniversary and to repeat their calls for justice and change.
If you feel like more should have been done in the years that have passed to make sure their suffering is not replicated elsewhere, join them.
This content is not behind a paywall, but since it takes time to create and upload each piece, do please consider becoming a paid subscriber (especially if this project is something that you value, and you have the means to do so), which is either billed monthly at £3.50 or annually at £35. A paid subscriber has full access to the back catalogue of posts.
If you pay £40 or more for an annual subscription, I will send you a signed copy of my book. Or you can buy a copy here.
Twitter’s algorithm downplays Substack links, so I also always really appreciate reader sharing:
Great work Peter! Thank you for your continued spotlighting of this... It hasn't gone away!
I woke up at 6 am in Leicester to see an old tweet of mine had been retweeted and that Grenfell was trending. Dawn Foster exclaiming that she could see the red sky from Clapham. The next hours were sheer horror. I took the grandchildren to school and fortunately met a friend, now a colleague, who understood my grief. I realised after a few days that I had held meetings in some of the flats in the early 1990s, including one where sadly a man died. I just sat and wept in my local park. The community response has been so dignified, so moving, I will try to join you on Friday.