Grenfell victims will never be forgotten

JOSHUA SURTEES

Growing up in London, we visited my grandmother a lot. She lived in Surrey, across the road from Sandhurst military barracks.

The drive took us through the city, past the Telecom Tower and out along the West Way flyover with panoramic views across west London and more towers dotting the landscape.

As we flew along the raised dual carriageway, passing over Paddington and Notting Hill, approaching our turnoff to Shepherd’s Bush and the leafy suburbs, our eyes were always caught by two high-rise buildings.

The first was the Trellick Tower – a brutalist design with a separate lift shaft that must have seemed futuristic in 1972. It’s now a grade II* listed building – a work of such architectural importance that nothing can be changed, even the light bulbs, without planning permission.

The second was a building whose name nobody knew, but now will never forget. Grenfell Tower.

Completed just two years after the Trellick in 1974, it represented a different kind of modern. Enthusiasm for tower blocks had waned considerably by the mid-1970s. The “streets in the sky” idealism that post-war designers envisaged, saving urban space and economising land usage for frugal local councils, had become dystopian. The estates on which the high-rise blocks sat brought social isolation, petty crime and sometimes serious crime.

By the time I was at primary school in the 1980s, councils were dynamiting tower blocks. The demolitions became community events. I remember having a picnic in a park near two condemned buildings. After a countdown came the detonation. Panicked pigeons took flight, then after a second’s pause the flats dropped in a cloud of rubble, to cheers and applause.

Grenfell was apparently well-built, before the botched refurb, but it didn’t look it. As you came off the West Way, descending past a strangely-located travellers’ caravan site and an urban rock climbing wall, you had no choice but to stare up at the monstrosity. It had dated so badly that there was nothing funny or charming about it. It looked plasticky, claustrophobic, devoid of any sense of privacy. The thousands of cars that passed 24 hours a day could be heard from every room. It had no balconies and the windows barely seemed to open. Stranded between the millionaires of Portobello and the despair of White City, it fitted neither. It was an eyesore.

On April 19 last year, a fire broke out on the 27th floor of the Trellick Tower. The occupants escaped and the fire was put out. The concrete building stopped it spreading. The fire was quickly forgotten.

Less than two months later, on June 14, the fire that broke out on the fourth floor of Grenfell Tower spread rapidly. Cheap flammable materials had been used to clad the building. I watched the breaking news footage with a terrible feeling in my stomach. Friends and family back home were asleep. It looked bad, but I didn’t know it would become the worst thing that has happened in London in my lifetime.

The Kings Cross Fire in 1987 gave the seven-year-old me nightmares. The 7/7 bombings in 2005 stopped me taking the tube for a year. But Grenfell was different. This was indiscriminate horror consuming homes.

I’ve always romanticised tower blocks. I once wrote about being “hypnotised” by them at night.

“All those lights on in each little bedroom. All those people living on top of each other, surrounded on all four sides. The bundle of tightly-packed human life, so cosy and protected.”

I dreamed of living in one, with a view over London and chatty neighbours. Then a mortgage adviser told me they didn’t give loans on them because they had “concrete cancer.” That put me off.

“You can see right through it,” a friend told me, days after the fire, as he passed Grenfell on a train.

A charred black skeleton has replaced lives, possessions and memories. Plasticky claustrophobia wasn’t so bad after all – at least there was love.

The first anniversary of Grenfell was marked this week and the official inquiry began a few weeks ago with relatives reading out memories of their loved ones.

I read the biographies of all the 72 dead. The Italian couple who moved in two months before the fire, the 84-year-old poet called simply Sheila (she had dropped her last name), the stillborn baby delivered the next day by a woman who survived, the countless victims who came to Britain to start new lives – London will never forget you.

The victims and survivors demand justice, and more. In his first interview since the tragedy, survivor and community activist Edward Daffarn said, “People need to go to jail and companies need to be found guilty of corporate manslaughter. But people will come out of jail so we need cultural change.”

It’s a cruel world where death precedes change.