Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen

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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. Show Me the Bodies is a staggering achievement, both a testament to the victims, the bereaved and the community of Grenfell and a painstaking, forensic investigation into the causes of the crime itself. Yet it is also an unflinching portrait of UKplc: a divided, deregulated, privatized and neglected kingdom where profit for the few always triumphs over the health, safety and lives of the many, where the victims are always left voiceless, and where the dead never find justice or peace. And where, most damningly of all, we still choose not to act and so still let crimes such as Grenfell happen, over and over, again and again. In short, this is the most harrowing, moving, powerful and important book of the year, and one which every citizen should read. And remember. And learn from and then act upon.' - David Peace, author of the Red Riding Quartet The morning after the Grenfell Tower disaster, Jon Snow arrived at the offices of Channel 4 News, the programme he had been hosting since 1989. Initially, he and his colleagues did not have much sense of the significance of a story that was just starting to become clear. But after he arrived at the scene having impulsively cycled across London, he realised that he was about to front his channel’s coverage not just of an unimaginable tragedy, but of glaring truths about the modern United Kingdom. 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. Every dish tells a story of history, culture and family, and each has been developed to use few ingredients and easy methods so that anyone can cook these personal recipes.

after newsletter promotion Snow hangs on to a Whiggish optimism that sometimes fails to stand up to scrutinyWith poetry by Ben Okri and Tony Walsh, and photographs by Parveen Ali, Sam Boal and Yolanthe Fawehinmi. 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.”

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.

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”.

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. 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. 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. 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.