News and Blog
Comment: ‘We’re all at risk if we ignore important lessons from Grenfell’
Thursday 10th November 2022
Lost letters, confusing regulations, penny pinching, outdated IT and sloppy building work are among the chillingly mundane failures that culminated in the devastating fire at Grenfell Tower.
This litany of avoidable mistakes is forensically detailed in housing journalist Peter Apps’ remarkable new book, Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen. It is a jaw-dropping account of a callous system that swept individual conscience aside in favour of profit and politics.
Even if you’ve followed Apps’ excellent reporting from the public inquiry since 2018, nothing has yet so damningly exposed the gradual accumulation of blunders that led to 72 deaths and the destruction of 129 homes in one night.
It is hard to convey how moving and enraging the book is — I urge you to read it for yourself. Because one thing almost all of us have been guilty of since the worst disaster in the UK this century is complacency