Show Me the Bodies: WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING 2023

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Peter Apps is an award-winning journalist and Deputy Editor at Inside Housing. He broke a story on the dangers of combustible cladding thirty-four days before the Grenfell Fire. His coverage of the public inquiry has received widespread acclaim. He lives in London. Our 2023 judging panel, chaired by Martha Lane Fox, said:

House of the Year 2023 shortlist: Cowshed reborn as living a... House of the Year 2023 shortlist: Cowshed reborn as living and work space Almost exactly two years ago, just after the cross examinations with the insulation companies, I wrote about how the Inquiry had revealed a construction industry devoid of morality or ethics. I wrote optimistically about how architects might form part of a solution: custodians of a new set of values that can run through every stage of a project. Social murder is the unnatural death that occurs due to social, political, or economic oppression. A crime commited through active decisions made by political, social and business leaders that leads to the deaths of others. It's hard to read Peter Apps book and not think that Grenfell falls into this category. It's a book that will want to make you want to scream with frustration and weep for the lives cut short and for the grief of those who survived. It also acts as a call to arms to make sure this never happens again, revealing the mistakes we continue to make despite the fire and the efforts by so ecto deflect blame. Lucent’s intricate facades give Piccadilly Circus’ famous ‘l... Lucent’s intricate facades give Piccadilly Circus’ famous ‘lights’ corner new life

Show Me The Bodies

Never before, in years of reviewing books about buildings, has one brought me to tears. This one did.’ Rowan Moore, Observer Book of the Week A harrowing account of the fire itself and a searing indictment of the society that allowed it to happen.' The Grenfell Tower fire was a tragedy; the case made in a new book by housing journalist Peter Apps is that it was also a choice. Apps, the deputy editor of Inside Housing magazine, had been reporting on the dangers of flammable cladding before the fire. He has subsequently covered the inquiry into the events at Grenfell in meticulous detail. Show Me the Bodies is the culmination of many years of reporting into what Apps calls “the worst crime committed on British soil this century.” It is the best account of the Grenfell disaster and one of the most important books about British politics to come out in recent years. Apps alternates each chapter with a running account of that dreadful night on June 14, 2017 that started with a minor kitchen fire, which normally would have been easily contained. That being said no member of any government since Thatcher did ANY bits for social housing and a deregulated housing market and the result was the loss of so many lives that could have been saved.

With moving personal stories from victims and their families, accounts from fire fighters, control room operators and extracts from the inquiry transcript, Peter Apps tells the full story of Grenfell. It would be easy for this book to have good guys and bad guys, and while it does not shy away from apportioning blame — naming companies and individuals who overlooked or deliberately deceived or simply did not care about the factors under their control that led to the fire — it is a book too interested in the truth to seek heroes and villains. Easy heroes would come in the form of the London Fire Brigade, whose firefighters saved many from the tower at great risk, but Apps is unsparing about the strategic failures of the fire service. Show Me the Bodies takes its title from the response, reported by a number of witnesses at the inquiry, given by civil servant Brian Martin when asked about dangerously permissive regulations on cladding and fire safety: he would believe the dangers when he was shown the bodies. It was the flammable cladding that most contributed to the fire’s deadly nature, and it is the cladding and the way in which it undermined the fire safety of the whole building that receives the most attention in the book. It would be easy to let the apparently dry nature of the topic (building materials regulation) undercut the outrage of what happened. Apps’s clear writing, however, ensures sight is never lost of how ideology, arrogance, and contempt came together to cause the fire. We Had Already Seen the Bodies From Knowsley Heights (1991), Lakanal House (July 2009), and multiple fires in Dubai there were warning signs way before June 14, 2017. The easy villain of the piece is Brian Martin, who failed to take action on woefully inadequate cladding safety regulation. His name comes up again and again, including during a bizarre exchange when he asserts that a former fireman with a commitment to higher standards being placed in charge of certain regulations would “bankrupt” the country and that “we would all starve to death.” But Apps rejects Brian Martin’s claim, made at the inquiry, to being a “single point of failure” in his department; clearly, this was not the case. Show Me the Bodies is committed to documenting what happened, eschewing easy narratives that detract attention from the structural causes of the Grenfell tragedy. Martin, in Apps’s account, gets neither damnation nor absolution, although it is clear which he deserves.

More books by Peter Apps

Enormously important… A painstaking chronicle of an entirely avoidable tragedy, its aftermath and its causes.' Show Me the Bodies is a clear, moving and powerful account of Britain’s worst fire since the second world war, written by someone who knows what he’s talking about… Never before, in years of reviewing books about buildings, has one brought me to tears. This one did.' In 2010, a new Conservative government came in with a new prime minister, David Cameron, promising to “wage war” on what he termed “health and safety culture.” A “ one-in, one-out” policy on new regulations was brought in; this was subsequently increased to “one-in, two-out .” Low standards got lower. It would not be Cameron and his “ Notting Hill set” that paid the price, nor any of the West London oligarchs or the upper-class types who spring to mind when the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea is mentioned. But it would, in one of the most starkly unequal places in the UK, be their neighbors: the residents of Grenfell, who were not rich and mostly not white.

It tells us something about how we are governed and the priority our political and economic system placed on human life,” writes author Peter Apps, deputy editor of Inside Housing, who has been following the tragedy from day one. Should be mandatory reading for policymakers in this country around social housing and construction in general for high rise structures. COINCIDING with last week’s closing of the 300-day inquiry into the Grenfell Tower fire comes the publication of a damning and moving account of the events leading up to the entirely preventable disaster that claimed 72 lives, 17 of them children.

RIBA Books is owned by the Royal Institute of British Architects and offers a range of the best architecture, design and construction books from around the world. The London 🔥Brigade shouldn't escape without censure, as their archaic structure that never really allowed adequate training for senior staff / call centres, proved to be decisive in the disaster, as dropping the normal "stay put" guidance and instructing people to leave their homes earlier would at worst have saved many more lives, and may even have allowed all residents to have made it out had this been enacted earlier.

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.

New Journal Enterprises

The fire climbed up cladding as flammable as solid petrol. Fire doors failed to self-close. No alarm rang out to warn sleeping residents. As smoke seeped into their homes, all were told to 'stay put'. Many did - and they died. The received wisdom, on which decades’ worth of increasingly threadbare regulation and oversight relied, was that flat fires didn’t spread to other flats, and so high-rise residents were always instructed to “stay put” in the event of an emergency. The introduction of combustible insulation and cladding in flat regeneration programmes made that advice lethal. Show Me the Bodies will never leave the mind of anyone who reads it. The tragedy is that those who should read it probably won’t.' Working from painstaking daily reporting from the inquiry, alongside extensive interviews with the bereaved and survivors of the Grenfell atrocity, Apps has written a concise, devastatingly detailed and upsetting book. It is a story of corporate structures that allowed human beings to abandon their won conscience and sense of agency and to think only about sales and profit margins, and of government institutions that place ideology above human lives at every turn.”