The Grenfell Tower Fire: London, 2017
2017 · event
Shortly before one in the morning on 14 June 2017, a fire started in a fourth floor flat of Grenfell Tower, a twenty four storey residential block in North Kensington in west London. A kitchen fire of a kind that fire crews deal with routinely reached the outside wall and found new fuel there. Within half an hour flames were climbing the whole height of the building on the outside, and by dawn the tower stood blackened against the London sky. Seventy two people died.
Grenfell was home to a mixed and largely working class community, families from many countries who had lived there for years and knew one another by name. The block had recently been refurbished, and the new cladding fitted to the outside contained a combustible core. Residents had raised concerns about fire safety before the fire and had written about them publicly. Those concerns had not led to change.
Firefighters worked through the night in conditions no British brigade had faced in a residential tower. The standing advice for such buildings was for residents to stay in their flats until told otherwise, guidance built on the assumption that a fire would stay in the flat where it started. That assumption failed. Survivors were rehoused, and a long public inquiry examined the refurbishment, the products used, the testing regime and the regulators. Its findings described failures spread across an entire industry and the bodies meant to oversee it.
Grenfell reshaped building safety law in the United Kingdom, from the banning of combustible cladding on high rise homes to a new regulator and new duties for those who own and manage buildings. In North Kensington the memory is kept every month, when the community walks in silence. The names of the seventy two are read, and the demand that residents be listened to has become the clearest legacy of that night.