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

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

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

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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. 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 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.

The book is structured chronologically, taking us through the night of the fire minute by minute. As this timeline progresses, Apps explains the choices that lead to each failure. Why were the first firefighters who reached the tower delayed in getting to the fire? It was because of issues with the system used to override the elevators, which was more complex than necessary. The more complex system was chosen “because of a perceived risk of anti-social behaviour”; there were fears a simpler system might be misused. “Prejudice against social housing residents appears to have actively undermined the safety features of the building,” Apps writes. Prejudice against social housing residents appears to have actively undermined the safety features of the building. 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.I read this book on recommendation from a relative, and I am glad I did. It took me longer to read than my average reading pace because some parts were incredibly emotional and heavy to get through. 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. 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.

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. 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. Review: Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Time Machine offers ‘a tonic for ... Review: Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Time Machine offers ‘a tonic for our distracted minds’ If they’d been listened to, they would all still be alive. A similar fire, which killed six people at Lakanal House in south London in 2009, should have been enough of a warning, but it wasn’t. Seventy-eight people were killed by a collision of forces with one common root: the broad contempt showed by people with power towards those without it. Lucent’s intricate facades give Piccadilly Circus’ famous ‘l... Lucent’s intricate facades give Piccadilly Circus’ famous ‘lights’ corner new lifeThe 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. In an official culture of cost-cutting and eliminating as much red tape as possible, this sort of attitude was par for the course, and meant that the use of ACM cladding, which contained petroleum-derived plastic, went ahead in the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower. 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. House of the Year 2023 shortlist: Arts & Crafts with a conte... House of the Year 2023 shortlist: Arts & Crafts with a contemporary twist

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.

House of the Year 2023 shortlist: Cowshed reborn as living a... House of the Year 2023 shortlist: Cowshed reborn as living and work space If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. 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. It was impossible to choose between the harrowing quotes from this book, but here is one, that bought angry tears to my eyes: Perhaps the most powerful takeaway is the critical importance of what we do to the lives of people who will use our buildings. It would be impossible to read the accounts of the night of the fire without reflecting on what and who we consider when we design.

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. 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. Tenants’ complaints about shoddy workmanship and defective fire doors were ignored by high-handed officials, while a tenants’ blog – Playing with Fire – that in 2016 predicted “an incident that results in serious loss of life” was seen as “scaremongering”, with one of the authors sent a letter from council lawyers accusing it of being “defamatory”.

Never before, in years of reviewing books about buildings, has one brought me to tears. This one did, with the story of a Grenfell resident struggling to escape with his young daughters and heavily pregnant wife. Those who justified the deregulating policies that led to this misery sometimes spoke of the interests of “UK plc”. But, even if you put basic humanity aside, how is it good business to create the situation we now have, where billions have to be spent correcting mistakes that should never have been made? 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. 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.



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