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

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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. 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 You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. 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 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.

Apps’s chief claim is that people who lived in Grenfell died because of a series of choices consciously made by political representatives who “deliberately ran down, neglected and privatised arms of the state,” something they did hand in hand with “a corporate world that evinced an almost psychopathic disregard for human life.” It is impossible to read Show Me the Bodies’ immensely moving account of the Grenfell tragedy and finish without a strong sense of moral outrage. 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. 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. 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. Grenfell was not an accident, but a foretold and carefully planned tragedy, built up for decades. It was prepared through a series of decisions and political or economic games, aiming to maximize profit, thus setting the value of human life below the importance of financial interest. Peter Apps provides a multilateral understanding of the events leading up to the Grenfell disaster, through the revelation of the multitude of factors that led up to it.Peter Apps has a clarity of expression which appears to derive directly from his clarity of purpose; he's angry, and he's right to be. The interweaving of human drama and catastrophe with bureaucratic and political lethargy, incompetence, and just stupid thinking, is very well done. On the cover the single blurb says that this is the first book "on housing" which brought the reviewer to tears; I would challenge any thinking person with an ounce of empathy not to have the same reaction. I found myself pounding the bed next to me with my fist, somewhat to my wife's surprise (though she was accustomed to me reading out the odd especially egregious passage of malfeasance or heedlessness) repeatedly. 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. Should be mandatory reading for policymakers in this country around social housing and construction in general for high rise structures.

This book expresses reprobation of the careless mentality and societal inequity haunting Grenfell's legacy. It is ruthlessly realistic, and aims to channel the spherical comprehension of the tragedy toward the need of a more philosophized future policy regarding fire safety, material choices and evacuation plans. I bought this book because I read a review essay which mentioned it in tandem with another book ("The New Life," by Tom Crewe, coincidentally with a very similar cover-colour scheme, also waiting beside my bed now), and although I of course knew about the Grenfell Tower disaster I did not know what to expect. You would think that a book about fire safety standards, planning permissions, social housing management and so forth would be dry and hard to warm to; not this book. This book gets its hooks into you more or less instantly and doesn't let go until you're done. It's not merely a literary accomplishment -- it is also the sort of cautionary tale which ought to be read and absorbed by anyone responsible for risk assessment in housing, anyone responsible for urban planning or city management or fire department policy...the lessons Apps draws are so widely applicable that I cannot but describe this book as an extremely important contribution. It doesn't escape me that it is almost certain that none of the constituents who might benefit from it will read it -- here in the US because it's "not local and therefore irrelevant," in the UK because, well, "that's not the way we do things." Apps’s book is a master class in reporting; across a wide span of highly technical detail, it never loses sight of the human story. This concentration on the personal lives and experiences of the residents serves as a rebuke to the logic that brought about the disaster. It says, real value is personal, relational, reflected in care, not profits. Despite the council’s frequent neglect of its tenants, Grenfell was a place where people lived happy lives. As Daffarn told the inquiry, “I dearly miss our community.” Show Me the Bodies, with its quiet narrator and rigorous approach, is a polemic that never needs to be polemical. Its narrative is instead propelled by the lives of the individuals and families that it documents, and to whom it gives dignity. 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. Yet above all else, the Grenfell fire was a “result of political choices”, concludes Apps. Months beforehand, he had been reporting on fears about combustible cladding systems for Inside Housing, where he is deputy editor. When he woke up to the news, he thought to himself: “It’s happened.”

Show Me The Bodies

The Building Research Establishment, an agency that examines the safety and performance of construction methods, was privatised, such that manufacturers would pay it to test their products. This arrangement would help the companies that made the insulation and cladding used on Grenfell to arrange tests where they could optimise their chances of positive results, and to suppress them when they failed. Show Me the Bodies is, throughout, deeply moving. Drawing on interviews and materials presented to the inquiry, Apps follows the stories of a number of residents across the night of the fire. The book is full of details about these people’s lives and descriptions of relationships that illustrate just a few of the many vivid, meaningful lives that were being lived in Grenfell. An elderly man describes how he thought his wife was “out of his league” when they first met; a family expecting a new baby says they were feeling close as the due date neared; a mother talks about how special her relationship with her adult daughter was. As the night that the book recounts unfolds, transcripts of phone calls and social media posts are used to heartbreaking effect; in one instance, Apps reproduces the transcript of a London fire service operator on the phone with a man who has lost sight of his young daughter in the smoke-filled stairwell and is refusing to go on without her. “Anyone would like a dad like you,” the operator says.

For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.The Grenfell fire and its Inquiry deserve to be a watershed moment for how we design and deliver buildings. What happened is something all architects should try to make themselves familiar with – not least to give context to some of the legislation already coming our way which will dramatically increase our obligations in terms of competence and liabilities. Show Me the Bodies is littered with accounts of incidents like these. Why did fire doors fail? Why was there no plan to evacuate disabled residents? Why did the building’s smoke control system malfunction? For every one, Apps provides a clear explanation. The explanation is always, in the end, that the people in charge were not interested in the input, and consequently in the lives, of the residents of the tower. They were only interested in costs. Really compelling book that finished in a matter of days after seeing it suggested in an article by the editor of the builders merchants journal. Author has done a fantastic job of outlining accounts of some that made it out and others that didnt, while interspersed throughout are facts that were already in public domain prior to grenfell, along with others that were kept under wraps by various parties, but primarily the cladding suppliers of the products which weren't safe for use on such a tower under the conditions used. And with only ourselves and South Korea allowing these items on, surely it would have occurred to somebody that it's not a great idea. 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.