Grenfell tower

Thursday

Nick Cohen

Grenfell Tower and the politics of needless death

As the body count rose from the Grenfell Tower fire, sensible people warned us not to rush to judgement. Activists, mainly from the left, denounced a complacent housing bureaucracy at the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation, and a Conservative government, which had refused in its laissez-faire way to regulate rented housing. The warnings sounded sensible. At the time of writing, I still do not know for sure why the fire spread with such ghastly effectiveness. Why rush to judgement and into print? In any case, is there not something wrong with people whose first reaction to a disaster is to take cheap shots? But sensible points can be beside

Will Heaven

Why didn’t Theresa May meet Grenfell Tower survivors?

We can’t yet be sure what caused the devastating fire at Grenfell Tower. Early speculation, some of it expert, some of it not but based on eyewitness testimony, points to the cladding on the outside of the building, which was added during a recent £8.6m makeover. This, it seems, may have turned an ugly but safe concrete tower into a death trap. Nor do we have any idea how many people were killed in the blaze. Commander Stuart Cundy of the Metropolitan Police said at 11 a.m. today: ‘Sadly I can confirm the number of people that have died is now 17. We do believe that that number will increase.’ There

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

The Grenfell Tower inferno shames London

It takes a lot to make me feel ashamed of London, my beloved home city. But yesterday’s tower-block inferno did it. The raging fire at Grenfell Tower in North Kensington, the disturbing speed with which this home to hundreds was reduced to a smouldering shell of a building, heaps shame on this city. It is positively Dickensian, a hellish scene out of place in 2017, like a violent echo from an older era when safety, especially the safety of the poor, was of little moment. London needs to look in the mirror. This cannot just be chalked up to ‘tragedy’. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that it was

Hannah Lucinda Smith

The Grenfell Tower blaze was a disaster waiting to happen

Those images from the early hours of Wednesday – fire shooting up the side of a tower block, with desperate people trapped inside it – were what I have been fearing for seven years. In 2010, I spent six months working on a BBC investigation into concerns about fire safety in refurbished high rises. Our findings were conclusive. Fire chiefs and safety experts all agreed that the vogue for cladding old concrete blocks with plastic fascia, removing asbestos and replacing steel window frames with ones made of UPvC cancelled out all the fire prevention measures that had been built into the blocks. In their original form, tower blocks are stacks

Wednesday

Will Heaven

Grenfell Tower: It is far too soon for political finger-pointing

It is hard to overstate the scale and intensity of the fire that engulfed Grenfell Tower, a 24-storey west London block of flats, shortly before 1 a.m. this morning. Pictures and video from the scene look like something out of a disaster movie. ‘Inferno’ is the Evening Standard‘s headline. At this early stage, six people have been confirmed dead – but the Metropolitan Police have said that ‘we do expect that figure to rise’. At least seventy-four more are injured and have been taken to six London hospitals, with 20 ‘in critical care’. More than 100 families have been made homeless. The emergency services responded quickly and in large numbers last