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The Grenfell Tower atrocity
Gordon MacLeod
To cite this article: Gordon MacLeod (2018) The Grenfell Tower atrocity, City, 22:4, 460-489
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2018.1507099
Published online: 20 Sep 2018.
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The Grenfell Tower atrocity
Exposing urban worlds of
inequality, injustice, and an
impaired democracy
Gordon MacLeod
The fire that erupted in Grenfell Tower in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in
west London on 14 June 2017 is widely acknowledged to be the worst experienced during
UK peacetime since the nineteenth century. It is confirmed to have resulted in 72 casualties
and 70 physically injured. It has also left a community physically and emotionally scarred.
That the catastrophe occurred in the country’s wealthiest borough added to the shock while
the circumstances surrounding it also begged questions relating to political and corporate
responsibility. The UK Prime Minister swiftly established a public inquiry which is
ongoing and anticipated to stretch well into 2019. This paper offers a preliminary analysis
of what some are interpreting to be a national atrocity. It begins by describing the events
at the time of the fire while also identifying the key controversies that began to surface.
It then examines the local geography of Grenfell Tower and the surrounding Lancaster
West Estate revealing an astonishing landscape of inequality across the borough of Kensing-
ton and Chelsea. The paper then uncovers how such inequality was combined with a mal-
evolent geography of injustice whereby for several years residents raised regular warnings
about the building’s safety only to be disregarded by the very organisations which were
there ostensibly to protect and safeguard their livelihoods: the Royal Borough of Kensington
and Chelsea municipal authority and the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management
Organisation. The paper then deepens the analysis identifying how these organisations dis-
avowed the local democratic process, in doing so dishonouring so tragically the Grenfell resi-
dents. It then finds this democratic disavowal to be multiscalar: for amid an incremental
neoliberal political assault on the national welfare state, public housing across the country
has become wretchedly devalued, stigmatised, and the subject of scandalous maladministra-
tion. A final section offers some preliminary analysis of the early stages of the Grenfell
Inquiry, while also revealing the dignified resistance of Grenfell community in the face
of London’s increasingly plutocratic governance.
Key words: Inequality, injustice, the State, anti-democracy, plutocratic governance, London
‘The Grenfell Tower fire has become a
symbol of the inequality that exists in our
country. Seventy-one
1
people tragically lost
their lives, as well as the many people who
lost their homes, possessions, families and
loved ones. The first duty of the State is to
#2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
CITY, 2018
VOL. 22, NO. 4, 460–489, https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2018.1507099
protect the lives of its citizens and lessons
must be learnt to avoid this happening again’
(Press Release by the Equality and Human
Rights Commission, 11 December 2017).
The Grenfell Tower Catastrophe
At 0054 (British Summer Time) on
Wednesday 14 June, 2017, emergency
services received reports of fire in a
flat on the fourth floor of Grenfell Tower; a
24-storey residential block within the Lan-
caster West Estate located in the royal
borough of Kensington and Chelsea in West
London. Crews from the London Fire
Brigade arrived within six minutes. But
before they could extinguish it, the fire had
already spread beyond the kitchen window
of the flat to the building’s external cladding
before rising rapidly up its exterior at a ‘terri-
fying rate’ (Bulman 2017a). In response over
250 firefighters and 70 fire engines arrived
from stations across London. They were
soon joined by the London Metropolitan
Police Service, more than 100 London
Ambulance Service crew and 20 ambulances,
the special Hazardous Area Response Team,
and the city’s Air Ambulance
2
. At any one
time, over a hundred firefighters were inside
the building to rescue people, equipped with
special breathing apparatus and stretching
their professional safety protocols (Doward
2017a). The building’s own safety regulations
instructed residents to remain inside their
flats in the event of a fire – the so-called
‘stay put’ policy – advice repeated by the
emergency services. By 0400, though, flames
and thick smoke engulfed all sides of Grenfell
Tower, inhibiting visibility above the fourth
floor. With charred debris falling from the
upper floors, rescued residents and firefigh-
ters themselves were now being protected
by plastic shields held horizontally by riot
police officers who had been drafted in
(Castle, Hakim, and Yeginsu 2017). At
0414, and reversing the earlier instructions,
a senior officer from the Metropolitan
Police addressed a swelling crowd nearby
Grenfell to announce: ‘Listen, if you know
people inside, tell them to self-evacuate, do
not wait for the fire brigade. If you get a
phone-call or twitter, tell them, you tell
them to get out now’ (Whinnett and
Miranda 2017). Neighbours and friends
reported of people being trapped inside the
burning building switching torches, mobile
phones, or electric lights on and off, some
waving from windows while holding chil-
dren, some jumping from higher floors
(Weaver 2017; Weaver et al. 2017). It was
already apparent that a truly catastrophic
event was unfolding before their eyes.
As firefighters and emergency services
continued tirelessly to extinguish the fire
and save lives, residents from the surrounding
low-rise housing blocks on the Lancaster
West Estate and other local neighbourhoods
– some having just been instructed to evacu-
ate their own homes – began to congregate
around the police cordon that had been estab-
lished. All were observing in horror while
simultaneously endeavouring to voice some
hope and reassurance to those visible in the
windows of the burning building. Some
Grenfell residents had fled with merely their
clothes or nightwear as others searched fran-
tically for family and friends, many of whom
had originally been instructed to stay in their
flats but were no longer answering their
phones (Hinsliff 2017; Ross 2017). Local
institutional support emerged swiftly. The
Maxilla Social Club opened at 0200 and The
Harrow Club youth centre at 0300. And by
0330, St Clement’s church, St James’s
church, Notting Hill Methodist church, the
Rugby Portobello Trust, Westway Trust,
and Latymer Christian Centre had all
opened their doors to provide refuge, water,
food, tea, coffee and care to those affected
by the major incident (Fraser 2017; Hatten-
stone 2017). Before long volunteers were
arriving from boroughs across London and
further afield: they brought water, food,
clothes, bed-linen, blankets, toiletries, sani-
tary products, and toys in what was an extra-
ordinary nation-wide groundswell of
generosity and compassion (Kennedy
MACLEOD:THE GRENFELL TOWER ATROCITY 461
2018a). Notices also began to appear on social
media sites and at the community centres
offering beds: Westway Trust confirming its
gymnasium could provide 300 emergency
beds that evening (Sawer 2017).
Such voluntary benevolence and commu-
nity support contrasted with what seemed
to many as the palpable lack of an official
municipal presence (d’Ancona 2017;
Kennedy 2017a,2018a). Ahmed Chellat,
whose brother-in-law, wife, and three chil-
dren had not been heard from since 0230,
stated how ‘for five hours we’ve been here
with my sister-in-law and some tenants.
There’s no councillors, no TMO
3
to say
exactly what’s going on. If it wasn’t for the
local people we would be in the street’
4
(Ross 2017). Indeed it was widely reported
that no officials – either from Grenfell
Tower’s owner, the Conservative-run Royal
Borough of Kensington and Chelsea
council, or its landlord, the Kensington and
Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation
– were on hand to gather the names of survi-
vors or those missing
5
, or to advise on
whether the clumps of ash that continued to
fall onto the streets and sidewalks might be
toxic (Nadel 2017; Platt 2017). At 0930, the
London Fire Commissioner reported of fatal-
ities. By noon the Metropolitan Police
Service confirmed six people dead and more
than 70 in hospital. Hundreds of ‘missing’
posters and appeals for information on
family and friends who had not been seen
since the outbreak of the fire began to
appear on the Latymer Centre and around
nearby churches, alongside messages of love,
sympathy and support (Slawson et al. 2017).
As volunteers became overwhelmed with
donations, frustration intensified over a
vacuum of official municipal guidance. So
while lauding the efforts of Reverend Mike
Long, who was running the Notting Hill
Methodist church, local Labour councillor
Judith Bakeman underlined how ‘there’s
been so many cuts [to council budgets that],
there aren’t enough people to deal with this’
(Weaver et al. 2017). At St Clement’s
church, council officials were helping. But
their sudden announcement to survivors –
that ‘[W]e are going to close the doors at
seven o’clock. [And] ...We urge you to
find friends and family close by and stay
with them’ – generated absolute astonish-
ment among the clergy and volunteers, who
roundly rebuked their call and continued to
provide care and support (Graham-Harrison
2017, 6).
Grenfell Tower and the Lancaster West
Estate sit in the north of Kensington and
Chelsea. Much of it is social housing and
home to predominantly lower and modest
income, working class, and many black and
minority ethnic people, some of whom are
migrants: they are in essence ‘ordinary Lon-
doners’ (Alibhai-Brown 2017; Khan 2017;
Madden 2017; Obordo 2017; Watt 2017). It
is surrounded by conspicuously more afflu-
ent neighbourhoods. And questions began
to surface about whether a building which
housed wealthy people, or indeed whether
one of the more recently constructed luxury
towers enclosing the u
¨ber-rich in central
London (Graham 2015), would have caught
fire so rapidly and burned for so long. Such
sensibilities were further fuelled by local
knowledge that on numerous occasions
since 2013, Grenfell residents had raised
serious concerns about fire safety with the
Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management
Organisation (GAG 2013a;2016; Tucker
2017a; and see below). At 1100 on 15 June,
the number of confirmed deaths was
updated to 17, around which time the local
community became aware that the UK
Prime Minister, Theresa May, was just con-
ducting a private visit to the Grenfell area.
She had spoken with emergency service
crews but did not meet survivors of the fire
because of ‘security reasons’: a decision
which infuriated local residents and promptly
reverberated across all forms of media, her
taciturn detachment so obviously contrasting
with the warmth, generosity, compassion,
and courage of emergency service personnel,
volunteers, and donors (Cockburn 2017;
Pasha-Robinson 2017a). Among what were
now thousands of heartfelt messages of
462 CITY VOL. 22, NO.4
support, appeal, grief and solidarity imprinted
on the Latymer Christian Centre tribute wall
just off Bramley Road were some unequivo-
cally pointed questions about injustice; one
simply asserting ‘Justice for Grenfell. Jail
those responsible’ (Said-Moorhouse 2017). It
was becoming apparent that amid the outpour-
ing of community distress and sorrow:
‘There was a volatile sense of grievance in a
neighbourhood that felt overlooked and
neglected, whose worst fears had suddenly
attracted the world’s attention, and where in
the immediate aftermath of disaster the
authorities were nowhere to be seen’ (Ross
2017, 3).
Acutely conscious of the widespread con-
demnation surrounding her visit the previous
day, and perhaps mindful of escalating hosti-
lity for a Conservative-led municipal auth-
ority which appeared to be failing its less
well-off constituents in a high profile
wealthy borough, Theresa May returned to
the neighbourhood on Friday 16 June. She
chose a meeting with a selected group of
families at St Clement’s church to announce
measures including £5 million to help with
immediate costs for families affected by the
fire alongside a pledge that all displaced resi-
dents would be rehoused locally within three
weeks (Stewart and Elgot 2017). But when
departing the church, Mrs May required
police protection as numerous local people
voiced their disapproval of her government’s
sluggish reaction to what was increasingly
acknowledged to be a humanitarian cata-
strophe (Addley 2017a; Farha 2017; Madden
2017). With police now reporting 30 fatalities
and 58 missing (Bulman 2017b), protesters
had gathered outside Kensington and
Chelsea Town Hall presenting a list of demo-
cratic demands, not least to confirm the
precise number of people who had been
living in Grenfell Tower and for ‘the chief
executive of the council to make public com-
mitments on what the council is going to do
for the victims of this borough, and for all
the other buildings in the borough that
[could] stand the same fate as Grenfell
Tower’ (Al Mansur, 16 June; in Learmonth
2017). Many then returned to Grenfell parti-
cipating in a series of spontaneous speeches as
candles were lit and flowers laid outside the
Latymer Centre (Humphry 2017). The
evening also saw a protest outside the
Department for Communities and Local
Government in Whitehall, where an esti-
mated 1,400 people were voicing ‘Justice for
Grenfell’ (Grierson and Gayle 2017).
In the days that followed, the sense of loss
coupled with outrage and injustice was undi-
minished as the number of fatalities was esti-
mated to be 80 and questions surfaced about
the specific type of external cladding that
had been installed on Grenfell Tower as
part of a major renovation that had taken
place during 2015–16 (Doward 2017b).
Families of victims and survivors began
posing questions as to whether friends and
relatives had perished as a result of cost-
cutting measures. The period since has
revealed the Grenfell community and repre-
sentatives to balance legitimate indignation
with gracious dignity. And at the time of
writing, the Grenfell disaster is confirmed
to have led to 72 fatalities and 70 people
injured, with 151 homes destroyed in the
tower and surrounding area leading many of
the households affected by the fire to
remain in temporary accommodation or
hotels for long after the event
6
(Gentleman
2017a; Rawlinson 2017). The remainder of
this paper aims to present a preliminary
analysis of the Grenfell catastrophe. The
next section offers detail on the geography
of Grenfell Tower and the Lancaster West
Estate revealing an astonishing landscape of
inequality in the Royal Borough of Kensing-
ton and Chelsea vis-a`-vis housing, wealth and
service provision (Dent Coad 2017a; Derby-
shire 2017). There then follows a discussion
of the circumstances preceding the fire
whereby for several years Grenfell residents
were scandalously disregarded by the organ-
isations that existed precisely to protect and
safeguard their livelihoods and interests: the
Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea
municipal authority and the Kensington and
MACLEOD:THE GRENFELL TOWER ATROCITY 463
Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation.
The following section deepens the analysis to
examine how these organisations disavowed
the local democratic process and in doing so
dishonoured so tragically the Grenfell resi-
dents. However, such democratic disavowal
has also ensued via the central state amid a
creeping neoliberal political assault on the
UK national state that has effectively led to
its ‘dismembering’ (Toynbee and Walker
2017), not least in the sphere of public
housing. In developing this analysis, the
paper takes inspiration from Deborah Orr’s
opinion piece, where she points towards the
‘complacent indifference’ of key organis-
ations, not least those of the RBKC council
and the KCTMO, and the ‘layers of apathy
and casual disregard’ which were conducive
in shaping the horror of 14 June: and how,
given these lines of causality and again follow-
ing Orr, it is valid to interpret ‘Grenfell not a
disaster or a tragedy, but an atrocity’ (Orr
2017, 34). A final section offers some analysis
of the early stages of the Grenfell Inquiry,
while also revealing the dignified resistance
of Grenfell community in the face of
London’s increasingly plutocratic governance.
‘If you go further down this road, it feels like
you have gone into a different world’: Parallel
Livelihoods in Kensington and Chelsea
‘The disparity between rich and poor in this
city is disgusting. This [the Grenfell fire]
would not have happened to the £5m flats
around the corner’ (Danny Vance, associate
pastor, Notting Hill Community Church; 15
June 2017; in Bell 2017).
Grenfell Tower and the Lancaster West
Estate are located close to where the north
end of St Ann’s Road meets Bramley
Road, and near the Latimer Road under-
ground station. The Estate and the lower-
rise buildings on nearby side streets are
majority social housing with some private
rented, and in 2015 the vicinity was among
the ‘top 10 percent most deprived areas in
England’ (Barr 2017; Snowdon et al 2017).
A seven minute walk south, down St
Ann’s Road from the Lancaster West
Estate, and one arrives at St Ann’s Villas
and on the left St James’s Gardens: in each
spot a three bedroom terraced townhouse
can fetch between £3 million and £6
million. A few minutes east of the Estate
sits Elgin Crescent: an elegant arc whose
larger properties sell for between £12
million and £30 million (Chakrabortty
2017a), feverishly inflated by virtue of
lying within the now lavishly fashionable
Notting Hill
7
. This is not unusual in
London, where affluent property owners
may live cheek by jowl with lower income
communities residing in densely packed
social housing (Addley 2017b). Indeed St
Ann’s Road perhaps offers a microcosm of
Kensington and Chelsea (Figure 1): a
borough where the average annual salary –
at £123,000 – is the highest in the UK, but
also where over one-third of workers earn
below £20,000 and 4,500 children live in
poverty (Bell 2017). Such conspicuous
inequalities are further reflected in the ser-
vices available to the different communities.
For while Kensington and Chelsea is abun-
dant with handsome parks and green
spaces, tennis courts, and other sporting
facilities, many of these are formerly public
and community assets which are now
increasingly privatised just as austerity-
induced cuts to council budgets have deci-
mated funding for primary school sports
and ended free swimming for children and
pensioners: all trends which heighten con-
cerns about sharpening health inequalities
8
(Nadel 2017; Obordo 2017). In the words
of one North Kensington resident:
‘A lot of the clubs where children used to play,
the clubs for the elderly, they have all been shut
down. If you go to different areas in
Kensington, you can see a lot of money being
invested in that area, but whatever we have here,
they cut it. And everything they build here is
private. If you go further down this [St Ann’s]
road, it feels like you have gone into a different
world’ (Soran Karami; in Addley 2017b,7).
464 CITY VOL. 22, NO.4
Amid this juxtaposition of radically diverse
livelihoods, it is important to underline how
the municipal provision of social housing pro-
tects many low and modest income house-
holds from the merciless vagaries of
London’s housing market, not least its
soaring private rents (Watt 2009;Atkinson
2017). Demand for social housing is therefore
intense across the city. Yet in 2014, just when
the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea
council (RBKC) was confronting a waiting list
of 2677 social housing applicants, the auth-
ority had no plans to build any new social
housing, agreeing only to contribute £2.9
million to a project initiated by the Peabody
Trust
9
to build 112 homes with an unspecified
number of social units (Atkinson, Parker, and
Burrows 2017). Indeed the overall stock of
social housing in Kensington and Chelsea is
declining – only ten new council-funded
homes have been built since 1990 (Boughton
2018) – as significant numbers of council
and housing association properties are
deemed ‘non-viable’ and placed on the
private market or transferred to ‘affordable
rent’. For instance, between 2014 and 2016
the Notting Hill and Genesis housing associ-
ations
10
sold 711 ‘low cost’ homes and con-
verted 1322 from ‘social’ to ‘affordable rent’
(Dent Coad, 2017b): given how the latter is
calculated at 80 per cent of the market rate,
this represents a cruel absurdity in a borough
where the average home costs £1.5 million
and whose ruling council executive would
deem rent controls a socialist abhorrence
11
.
Moreover, this disposal of municipal assets
has been running in tandem with a malevolent
geography of displacement. For the RBKC
has the second highest ‘out of borough place-
ments’
12
in England; a policy designed to relo-
cate homeless people to different boroughs
(Booth 2015a; Foster 2017a).
Figure 1. Unequal wealth in Kensington and Chelsea: author’s source Addley 2017b.
MACLEOD:THE GRENFELL TOWER ATROCITY 465
The case of Sutton Dwellings in Chelsea
helps reveal the social and economic stakes
and the political conflict that can surface in
such transformations. Under the stewardship
of philanthropist, William Sutton, Sutton
Dwellings were built in 1913 to provide
‘houses for use and occupation by the poor’
(Sutton 1894; in Booth 2015b). For decades
they offered low rent housing to Londoners.
In February 2015, the housing association
which owned the estate, Affinity Sutton,
announced plans to demolish all 462 social
housing flats, rebuilding 237 for social rent
and 106 for private sale (Batty 2017). Late in
2016, following a Save the Sutton Estate
13
cam-
paign led by residents and involving celebrities
including Eddie Izzard, Affinity Sutton found
its proposals rejected even by the RBKC on
the grounds that they failed to provide suffi-
cient levels of replacement social housing
(Booth 2016). While the campaign recorded a
notable political achievement in averting a size-
able sell-off of social housing, it was unable to
prevent Affinity Sutton ‘decanting’ numerous
residents from the neighbourhood while
employing workers to destroy the interior of
many flats so as to render them ‘uninhabitable
to squatters’ (Blower 2015; LBC 2017). Then,
in the summer of 2017, Affinity Sutton –
which had confirmed a post-tax surplus
14
of
£145 million in 2015–16 before merging with
Circle to form Clarion Housing Group
(Brown 2016) – lodged an appeal with the
UK government planning inspectorate against
the RBKC decision while simultaneously out-
lining its intention to proceed with the lucrative
development regardless (Batty 2017). Being
submitted the day before the Grenfell fire, it
appeared retrospectively as a profoundly insen-
sitive plea. And it provoked Robert Atkinson,
Labour leader within the Conservative
council, to write to Communities and Local
Government (DCLG) minister, Sajid Javid,
urging the national government to:
‘...take control of the [Sutton] estate from its
rogue owners [and further how ...] Clarion
has emptied the Sutton Estate cynically and
on purpose, so that they can cash in. ... They
see the estate as being their financial salvation.
It’s disgusting. [Although] it’s not just
Clarion. As housing associations have got
bigger and have kept merging they seem to be
turning themselves into property developers
and quite openly say for every apartment we
sell off in central London we can construct six
in other parts of the country or further out of
London. It’s not on’ (Robert Atkinson; in
Batty 2017).
Atkinson also underlined how, just as Affi-
nity/Clarion’s debased actions left 150 flats
in the Sutton Dwellings lying empty, the
borough was confronting an acute housing
shortage following the Grenfell fire, with
158 families forced into temporary accom-
modation, many in hotels (Batty 2017,
2018). Indeed public scorn in the aftermath
of Grenfell justifiably politicised the scale of
empty properties in Kensington and
Chelsea. For while England and London
have each witnessed a fall in empty homes
over a ten year period up to 2016, the royal
borough recorded a rise, with 1652 unoccu-
pied and 603 vacant for over two years
(Batty 2017). Many are not social housing.
Instead they serve to reveal how mere
private ownership of property in the UK’s
wealthiest borough can reap astonishingly
rich reward. Granted, any homes in
England which lie empty for two years are
levied with an additional 50 per cent council
(property) tax: but the net effect is merely
to ‘punish’ owners of Kensington and Chel-
sea’s townhouses with a few hundred
pounds on properties that are worth millions
or tens of millions. Further research revealed
many vacant properties in Kensington and
Chelsea to be owned by a cabal of ‘foreign
royalty’ and overseas oligarchs including
Dmytro Firtash: a Ukrainian preoccupied
with fighting extradition to the US while
the home he purchased for £53 million back
in 2014 – the former Brompton Road tube
station – remains empty (ibid). Meanwhile
the anti-corruption agency, Transparency
International (2015), identified 5,835
15
properties in the borough to be owned by
companies registered in offshore secrecy
466 CITY VOL. 22, NO.4
jurisdictions. All of which fuels a disquieting
sense that some of the most coveted real
estate in west-central London is being utilised
entirely ‘as a safe haven ... to store capital,
safely and secretly, where its origins will
not be questioned’ (Glucksberg 2016, 244).
It is also vital to appreciate how this unpar-
donable geography of inequality which punc-
tuates the Royal Borough – where elegant
uninhabited mansions rub alongside commu-
nities enduring diminishing public services, a
housing crisis, and rising homelessness – has
not materialised innocently via some benign
hand of a feˆted market economy (Shaxson
2013). And to be sure the Grenfell disaster
has done much to stir local consciousness
about precisely who has been presiding over
the borough’s incongruous social ecology
(Barr 2017;Figure 1). One person who has
worked vigorously to question the hegemo-
nic political arrangements in the Royal
Borough is Emma Dent Coad (Adams
2017). As a Labour councillor in the RBKC
for eleven years, Dent Coad railed against
some of London’s ‘most extreme gentrifica-
tion’. Emboldened by a sense that many
across the borough were uneasy about
growing inequality, Dent Coad stood as
Labour Party candidate in the UK general
election of June 2017, and by a margin of 20
votes, became the first ever Labour MP in
Kensington
16
. Five days later, and along
with her north Kensington neighbours and
constituents, Dent Coad awoke early to the
most dreadful news. Since then she has
vowed to seek justice for Grenfell victims
(Booth 2017; Gentleman 2017b; Adams
2017; Addley 2017a).
‘They want people like us out of the area’.
Disregard, Intimidation, Social Cleansing:
Toward a Local Political Economy of
Contempt
‘When people hear about the royal borough
of Kensington and Chelsea, this [Grenfell
Tower and the Lancaster West Estate] isn’t
the part they think of. And that unfortunately
includes the council’ (Rochelle Thomas,
volunteer at Henry Dickens Centre, 17 June;
quoted in Graham-Harrison 2017, 6).
‘In an inner-London borough as rich as
Kensington and Chelsea, social housing is at
once integral – in that it forms a massive
proportion of its housing stock, and houses a
large number of its working residents and
families – and yet invisible. This means
tenants could warn, repeatedly and with
escalating fear, that the building they lived in
was a death trap; it meant they felt harassed
and intimidated by the landlord and
subcontractors during the recent renovation;
and it meant, ultimately, that they would be
the victims of possibly criminal levels of
neglect’ (Hanley 2017).
Located in the Notting Dale ward of North
Kensington, the Lancaster West Estate was
conceived in the late 1960s as part of a
wider redevelopment to replace several rows
of Victorian terraces which local authorities
had designated to have become ‘slum
housing’ (RBKC 2012). The 1968 Master-
plan, designed by architects Clifford
Wearden and Associates, promised ‘a
balance of all the essential facilities required
to create a comprehensive community’
(Boughton 2017; Gras 2016). The Estate was
completed in 1974, with Grenfell Tower its
apex and three ‘finger blocks’ of lower rise
buildings radiating south. It nonetheless
failed to incorporate certain ‘essential facili-
ties’ recommended in the original Master-
plan, such as local shops and a swimming
pool. And during the 1980s and 1990s, the
Lancaster West Estate endured funding scar-
cities, deteriorating infrastructure, declining
amenities, and deficient maintenance (Platt
2017): all characteristic of a depressingly fam-
iliar story vis-a`-vis prolonged governmental
malevolence towards public housing
(Hanley 2007; McKenzie 2015; Dorling
2015; Boughton 2018). Responding to resi-
dent concerns about its steady decline, in
1996 RBKC introduced a new body, the Ken-
sington and Chelsea Tenant Management
Organization (KCTMO), to assume
MACLEOD:THE GRENFELL TOWER ATROCITY 467
responsibility for maintenance of the Lancas-
ter West Estate while ownership remained
with the Council (ASH 2017). This arrange-
ment has overseen several ‘improvements’
to the Estate, notably the construction of
the Kensington Aldridge Academy at the
north-facing foot of Grenfell Tower, a
rebuilding of the Kensington Leisure Centre
(KALC), and the approval in 2012 of plans
for a £10 million renovation of Grenfell
Tower (Apps 2017). Designed by Studio E
Architects (RBKC 2012) and undertaken
during 2015–16 by Rydon Construction,
the internal refurbishment provided nine
additional flats alongside improvements to
energy efficiency and community facilities
while significant external fittings included
replacement windows, new over-cladding,
and curtain wall fac¸ades offering the tower
‘a fresher, modern look’ (Rydon 2016).
Nonetheless, a growing sense of estrange-
ment from the KCTMO’s decision-making
over these developments had led some Gren-
fell Tower residents to establish the Grenfell
Action Group (GAG) in 2010, not least in
opposition to the Aldridge Academy and
KALC on the grounds that they would
usurp any remaining publicly accessible
green space in the vicinity (ASH 2017). The
Group had also campaigned vigorously
about safety concerns in the Tower itself
(Noor 2017; Platt 2017; Tucker 2017a). In
January 2013, the GAG posted a blog outlin-
ing how the KALC development had elimi-
nated the Lancaster Road car park thereby
obstructing the emergency access zone
while warning how this ‘could have lethal
consequences in the event of a serious fire
or similar emergency in Grenfell Tower’
(GAG 2013a). The following month, it
revealed how a risk assessment undertaken
by one of the KCTMO’s own safety officers
had identified firefighting equipment to
have remained unchecked for four years
(GAG 2013b). The Group contacted both
the KCTMO management and the RBKC
Cabinet Member for Housing and Property
to raise these concerns, but received no
replies. Later that year, in May, residents
began experiencing distressing electrical
power surges, with smoke emerging from
appliances, some even exploding or catching
fire. Regular reports were submitted from
residents to the KCTMO over an eighteen
day period but were ignored before finally
being acknowledged on 29
th
May by which
time surges had ‘escalated out of control’
(GAG 2013c). All of which proceeded to
erode trust between the KCTMO and Gren-
fell residents (Apps 2017). And of course the
significance of these electrical surges ought
not to be under-estimated given that the cat-
astrophic blaze of June 14 was traced to a
faulty refrigerator generating the original
fire in the fourth floor flat (Dearden 2017).
Following the 2015–16 renovation, resi-
dents began voicing anxieties to the
KCTMO about the fact there was only one
fire escape route (itself oftentimes blocked
by refuse), as well as numerous exposed gas
pipes, no obvious evacuation procedure, and
the absence of a building-wide fire-alarm
and a sprinkler system (Booth, Gentleman,
and Khilali 2017; Tucker 2017a). Moreover,
in a speech to the RBKC Housing and Plan-
ning Scrutiny Committee in January 2016,
David Collins, the then Chair of the Grenfell
Tower residents’ association, presented evi-
dence that 90 per cent of residents were dissa-
tisfied with the ‘improvement works’ while
68 per cent had experienced intimidation
from the TMO, prompting him to rec-
ommend an inquiry into the KCTMO. His
call was summarily dismissed by the commit-
tee (Foster 2017b). Perhaps, though, it is a
blog posted in November 2016 that reveals
the most tragically prescient warning:
‘It is a truly terrifying thought but the
Grenfell Action Group firmly believe that
only a catastrophic event will expose the
ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord,
the KCTMO, and bring an end to the
dangerous living conditions and neglect of
health and safety legislation that they inflict
upon their tenants and leaseholders. We
believe that the KCTMO are an evil,
unprincipled, mini-mafia who have no
business to be charged with the responsibility
468 CITY VOL. 22, NO.4
of looking after the everyday management of
large scale social housing estates and that their
sordid collusion with the RBKC Council is a
recipe for a future major disaster. ...It is our
conviction that a serious fire in a tower block or
similar high density residential property is the
most likely reason that those who wield power
at the KCTMO will be found out and brought
to justice!’ (GAG 20
th
November 2016).
This grievous disregard for the safety of
Grenfell residents exhibited by the
KCTMO and the RBKC has a wider political
and economic context demanding brief
analysis. Firstly, papers released by the
RBKC Housing and Property Scrutiny Com-
mittee from 2013 reveal how the contractor
originally scheduled to undertake the Gren-
fell Tower renovation, Leadbitter, was
rejected because its quotation of £11.28
million exceeded the proposed £10 million
budget of the KCTMO-RBKC. It was only
after the contract went out to further com-
petitive tender that Rydon gained approval
for the project with a quote of £8.7 million
(Hills 2017). It surely begs questions about
how a building revamp originally quoted at
£11.3 million could conceivably be delivered
for £2.6 million less without some drop in
quality and standards. Second, documents
obtained by The Guardian disclose how
Leadbitter’s plans included recommendations
from Studio A architects and engineers to
deploy a zinc composite external cladding
with a fire-retardant core; notably a decision
approved by residents (RBKC 2012).
However, as part of a ‘value engineering
process’ initiated by the RBKC, £293,369
was saved from the cladding expenses by
opting for cheaper aluminium panels
17
: cru-
cially they contained a core that has since
proved more combustible in tests and been
a foremost source of concern among firefigh-
ters, safety experts and architects while also
being banned on buildings higher than
twelve metres in Germany and the USA
18
(Booth and Evans 2017; Walker 2017a;
Booth 2018b). Third, shortly after the fire
the leader of the RBKC, Nicholas Paget-
Brown, informed BBC Newsnight of how
the council had received assurances that any
fire in a high-rise ought to be contained
within the flat of origin – a process known
as ‘compartmentalization’ (Dearden 2018)–
and that there was no ‘collective view’
among residents to retrofit sprinklers given
the scope for further disruption and delay
to the renovation. However, Paget Brown’s
claims are disputed in reports which indicate
that residents actively requested sprinklers
alongside additional fire escapes (Cockburn
2017; Kentish 2017a).
These Guardian documents further reveal
the overall cost of the ‘external fac¸ade’ –
comprising the aluminium cladding,
windows, and curtain walling – to have
been £3,476,855. Again it is worth placing
this in context. For in 2016 the RBKC accu-
mulated £4.5 million from the sale of just
two three-bedroomed council houses in
Chelsea – so £1 million more than it was pre-
pared to spend on protecting 120 council
homes – one of which incidentally was
bought by a multimillionaire property inves-
tor (Booth and Evans 2017; Atkinson 2017).
More than this, though, in 2014 – just as
the RBKC-KCTMO governing bloc was
enforcing its ‘value engineering’ on the reno-
vation of Grenfell – the RBKC council
recorded usable reserves of £274 million,
rising to £300 million in 2015–16. Indeed its
finances were so buoyant it could award a
£100 rebate on those wealthier residents in
the highest council tax bracket while also
providing £1.5m towards establishing a
charity to run opera events in the affluent dis-
trict of Holland Park (Walker 2017b). The
bellicose geography of inequality uncovered
in the previous section appears to be further
‘entrenched by council decisions’ (Foster
2017c): decisions exposing an unashamed
advancement of bourgeois privilege while
simultaneously disavowing even the basic
principles of local democracy. And for
whom was the renovation of Grenfell
Tower primarily intended? The planning
approval document signals that the reason
for the ‘materials to be used on the external
MACLEOD:THE GRENFELL TOWER ATROCITY 469
faces of the building(s) ... [are about] ...
ensuring that the character and appearance
of the area are preserved and living conditions
of those living near the development suitably
protected’ (RBKC 2014, 2; emphasis added;
Bowie 2017;ASH2017). Or in the words of
one world-weary local resident:
‘I used to work for the council. Where there’s
a tower block they want to shut it down and
remove them. And you know why? Because
the rich people want to come in. So they put
the cladding up to make it look nice and
pretty for those who are coming in, to make
the property values go up’ (June 2017; cited in
Humphry 2017).
In view of such a lamentablydivisive local pol-
itical economy, it is little wonder how so many
residents from the Lancaster West and Gren-
fell community were moved to voice com-
ments such as ‘we feel like we don’t matter
as people’ (in Graham-Harrison 2017,6),and
how ‘it was not just that they ignored us, but
that they viewed us with contempt’ (Yvette
Williams, organiser of the Justice 4 Grenfell
campaign group; in Gapper 2017;seealso
Humphry 2017;Laville2017; Moore 2017a;
Orr 2017; cf. O’Hagan 2018). David Collins
further lamented how some people would
have been ‘trapped in their rooms, and ...
will have died thinking: “They didn’t care.
They didn’t listen’’ (cited in Foster 2017b).
And a local pastor publicly voiced how:
‘The people on the lowest incomes of this
parish simply do not feel listened to, either
this week or in previous years, by those in
power. Worse than that, what the whole issue
of the cladding and the lack of sprinklers may
well highlight is that some people in our
society have simply become excess and debris
on our neoliberal, unregulated,
individualistic, capitalist and consumerist
society’ (Father Robert Thompson, curate of
St Clement’s and a local Labour councillor,
delivering his sermon on 18th June, 2017;
cited in Fraser 2017).
Finally, the catastrophe of Grenfell has inten-
sified debate about the lived experience of
social cleansing and state-induced gentrifica-
tion across London (Elmer and Dening
2016; Paton and Cooper 2016; Watt and
Minton 2016; Foster 2017d; Tucker 2017a;
Vulliamy 2017). A library assistant from one
of the low-rise blocks near Grenfell put it
forthrightly: ‘They want people like us out
of the area’ (in Gentleman 2017c, 9). Beinazir
Lasharie, a Labour Councillor and resident of
the Testerton Walk finger block in the Lan-
caster West Estate who was evacuated at the
time of the fire, offered a more detailed per-
spective: ‘We are a nuisance to the council.
Their attitude is: how dare so many ethnic
minority foreigners who are not well-off
live in these ugly flats ... They don’t care
about us, they don’t listen to us. It’s as if
they want us to move out. They are socially
cleansing us across the borough’ (in ibid).
Trust in the institutions of the state, already
low amid a persistent failure to listen to the
concerns of residents, were to plummet in
the aftermath of the fire (Chakrabortty
2017b): the RBKC council and the
KCTMO in particular now forced to encoun-
ter a truly devastated community they each
had tragically dishonoured, and in the philo-
sophical language of Jacques Rancie`re (1999),
profoundly wronged.
Grenfell Tower as a National Atrocity:
Disavowing Democracy, Dismembering
the State, Dishonoring Public Housing
‘Residents at Grenfell Tower describe how, as
the local council outsourced contracts to
private companies to work on their estate,
essential elements of local democracy became
unavailable to them. Their voices weren’t
heard, information they requested wasn’t
granted, outcomes they were promised did
not transpire, complaints they made were not
answered. The outcome at Grenfell was
unique in its scale but the background is a
common enough story. Wherever
regeneration of social housing has been
outsourced to private developers,
responsiveness, transparency, oversight and
scrutiny – key elements of healthy
470 CITY VOL. 22, NO.4
democracy – are lessened for those most
directly affected’ (Tucker 2017b).
‘The Grenfell Tower fire was a national
atrocity’ (Michael Mansfield QC, lawyer for
Grenfell relatives, speaking at the Grenfell
Tower Public Inquiry in Holborn Bars,
central London, on 11 December; cited in
Bowcott and Gentleman 2017a).
Disavowing local democracy
In the days immediately after the fire, resi-
dents of the Lancaster West Estate and the
friends and relatives of those missing
became increasingly exasperated at the inepti-
tude of the RBKC council in confronting the
disaster. Particular grievances related to a lack
of visible street level staff to offer advice; a
failure to communicate information to
families about fatalities and of those still
missing; delays in finding temporary accom-
modation; and the chaotic orchestration of
the voluntary effort, including an alarming
incapacity to distribute money being
donated (cf. Blagrove 2017; Livingston 2017;
O’Hagan 2018). Residents of the finger
block flats were further distressed by con-
flicting advice from police and local state offi-
cials on whether they could return to their
homes. For instance, Nina Masroh, who
works at the Kensington Aldridge
Academy, informed journalists that while
their family home was closer to the tower
than the school and the Latimer Road tube
station, both of which had been closed due
to the risk of falling debris, complained how
‘we’ve had no one here to tell us if it is safe
[to return] ...We feel so angry’ (Gentleman
2017d, 4). Amid calls from an aggrieved and
traumatised community for the RBKC lea-
dership to resign over its calamitous response
to the disaster (Grierson and Gayle 2017;
Nadel 2017), on Sunday June 18, the Conser-
vative central government transferred key
responsibilities of the relief effort to a Gren-
fell Fire Response Team. This was to be led
by the City of London Corporation chief
executive, John Barradell, with support
from the DCLG as well as other London
local authorities, the Metropolitan Police,
the British Red Cross, and the London Fire
Brigade, all designed to provide 24-hour
support for housing, health, food, and social
care (Pasha-Robinson 2017b).
This decision cast shame on such a wealthy
borough council, and it was no surprise when
chief executive, Nicholas Holgate, resigned on
21 June. Eight days later, the RBKC did little
to help recover its legitimacy. It was the first
full meeting addressing the Grenfell disaster
and – voicing concerns about possible ‘disrup-
tion’ – Council leader Paget-Brown issued
instructions that it be held in private without
the presence of the media or local residents.
A legal challenge was lodged by The Guardian
leading to confusion and an eventual adjourn-
ment, again following orders from Paget-
Brown (Foster 2017e;WalkerandWeaver
2017). It is convention for council meetings
to be open to the public. So the RBKC’s
decision only served to further intensify dis-
trust within a community desperate for infor-
mation. It also signified a belligerent contempt
for the democratic process. And amid criti-
cism from the Prime Minister, the following
day saw Paget-Brown and his deputy Feild-
ing-Mellen resign, although calls from some
local community voices for the whole
cabinet to resign were resisted (Nadel 2017).
Instead two Conservative councillors, Eliza-
beth Campbell and Kim Taylor-Smith, were
duly nominated as leader and deputy leader
respectively (Simpson 2017). Campbell’s first
statement was fulsomely apologetic: ‘The
first thing I want to do is ... apologise. This
is our community and we have failed it when
people needed us the most’ (Pasha-Robinson
2017c). Such failings were underlined in the
Independent Grenfell Recovery Taskforce
report identifying the RBKC to be a ‘distant
council that did not know its residents’, with
many citizens in the north of the borough
feeling they ‘suffered from ‘political neglect’
and that their local area was a ‘political blind
spot’ for RBKC’ (IGRT 2017,4,10).
Of course it is important to reiterate that
responsibility for the everyday governance
of Grenfell Tower and the Lancaster West
MACLEOD:THE GRENFELL TOWER ATROCITY 471
Estate lay not with the RBKC but the
KCTMO. The latter’s own mission statement
proudly proclaims the delivery of ‘excellent
housing services through resident led man-
agement’
19
. However, as revealed earlier, it
had demonstrated utter disregard for the
Grenfell residents who had persistently
articulated their anxiety about fire safety
(Morrison 2017). And on the two month
anniversary of the Grenfell fire, such con-
cerns were reflected in an open letter to the
RBKC signed by the heads of 25 local resi-
dent associations:
‘We agreed that the position of the Royal
Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Tenant
Management Organisation Ltd (KCTMO) is
no longer tenable and that there is an urgent
need to adopt a different, resident-focused
model of managing Council housing in our
borough. ... We agree that there has been a
fundamental breach of the duty of care by the
KCTMO that cannot be remedied. The police
have reasonable grounds to suspect that
KCTMO committed an offence. This should
be sufficient for RBK&C to take immediate
action to end its contract with KCTMO. It is
clear to us that KCTMO is not fit for purpose.
We have no confidence in their ability to
manage Council housing on behalf of
RBK&C or in their ability to make the
correct decisions about our safety’ (in
Snowdon 2017).
Eight days later, in a private meeting with
some survivors and relatives of the Grenfell
fire victims, the Prime Minister offered assur-
ances that the KCTMO would be relinquish-
ing responsibility for the Lancaster West
Estate (Mason and Sherwood 2017). And on
27 September, the RBKC voted unanimously
to terminate its contract, new deputy leader
Taylor-Smith indicating how ‘The TMO no
longer has the trust of residents. [And that]
...We are listening to residents and consult-
ing on how they want their homes and neigh-
bourhoods to be managed in the future’
(Sherwood 2017b). Listening is presumably
one of numerous lessons being learnt by
this thoroughly discredited local state.
Indeed when questioned on the BBC Today
programme on 20 July, Taylor-Smith con-
ceded that while serving on the RBKC
Housing Scrutiny Committee, he never
became aware of the concerns about safety
raised by Grenfell residents or of the long-
running blogging campaign waged by the
Grenfell Action Group, before conceding
quite astonishingly that ‘Personally I didn’t
get involved in the scrutiny, there’s obviously
something that has to be looked at’ (York
2017). Perhaps in identifying this ‘something
to be looked at’, it is worth analyzing more
forensically the role and the formal represen-
tation of the KCTMO alongside its relation-
ship with the RBKC. At the time of the
Grenfell fire, the KCTMO was managing
10,000 houses on behalf of the RBKC – its
entire council housing stock
20
– while also
assuming the position of an arms-length
management organization: a not-for-profit
company providing housing services on
behalf of a local authority, and an alternative
arrangement to fully independent housing
associations
21
. The KCTMO Board com-
prised fifteen members; four council-
appointed, three independent, and eight resi-
dents. Even allowing for the large scale of its
housing management, questions must be
posed about how such a purportedly ‘resi-
dent-led’ approach was to disavow Grenfell
residents so catastrophically.
Some clues are provided in a report by
Inside Housing (Apps 2017). It reveals how
just prior to completion of the Grenfell
refurbishment, Councilor Judith Blakeman
had presented a petition to the RBKC (and
signed by 51 residents) complaining of ‘intol-
erable’ living conditions and a lack of consul-
tation. The matter was delegated to the
RBKC Housing Scrutiny Committee. And
at the Committee’s next meeting, Edward
Daffarn, the Grenfell resident and Grenfell
Action Group mobiliser, called for an inde-
pendent investigation into the management
of the 2015–16 Grenfell refurbishment
work. While the RBKC acceded to this
demand, Council papers reveal a one-day
investigation conducted by six members of
the KCTMO board and a written report
472 CITY VOL. 22, NO.4
‘commending the contractor Rydon on [its]
performance and ability to deliver a
complex construction project ... [and also]
the TMO team involved in high quality man-
agement of the project over 22 months’ (Apps
2017). ‘Baffled’ by this cloistered self-scru-
tiny, Blakeman – a non-executive member
of the KCTMO – disputed these claims, indi-
cating how she had raised nineteen com-
plaints on behalf of individual Grenfell
residents about fire safety while also lodging
her frustration about the limited horizons
for resident voices to be heard. Remarkably,
the Chief Executive of KCTMO, Robert
Black, then proceeded to criticise Blakeman
for speaking out in such terms, recommend-
ing that ‘a member of the [KCTMO] board
had a duty to the board and to support the
views and conclusions they had put forward
in relation to Grenfell Tower’ (ibid). In Bla-
keman’s own words ‘I was treated like I
was a nuisance’ (in Booth and Wahlquist
2017). Daffarn too revealed how, since the
period just prior to commencement of the
refurbishment, in his position as Housing
Scrutiny Committee chair, Rock Feilding-
Mellen, had encouraged a gradual erosion of
a Tenant Consultative Committee
22
. Sub-
sequent disclosures also uncover how some
of the Grenfell residents who dared to voice
grievances (two of whom tragically were
casualties in the fire) had been threatened
with legal action for defamation by both the
KCTMO and the RBKC (Osborne 2017).
All of which is indicative of a grievous
vacuum of accountability alongside a scanda-
lously anti-democratic approach to govern-
ing public housing (Foster 2017b;Bowie
2017; Tucker 2017a; Boughton 2018). Siaˆn
Berry, the Green Party chair of the London
Assembly Housing Committee, encapsulates
much of the problem:
‘...when [residents] raise fire safety, when
they raise life-threatening issues, they need to
be listened to, and there just currently isn’t
the structure for that to happen ... There are
many, many groups, like the Grenfell Action
Group, who are getting involved in trying to
make their homes better and they are treated
with suspicion by the authorities – they are
regarded as troublemakers as this group was –
and I think we need to change that at a much
bigger level’ (in Weaver et al. 2017).
In the case of Grenfell, however, the dis-
avowal of democracy extends to the
KCTMO’s contract with Rydon and the
latter’s own deployment of at least eight
sub-contractor firms in the Grenfell refurb-
ishment
23
. The fragmentary effect of this sub-
contracting has led architectural experts to
question the levels of expertise and the
degree of oversight in the Grenfell renova-
tion, particularly in view of how the increas-
ing privatisation of the building inspection
regime encourages a cost-cutting ‘race to the
bottom’: one enabling private companies to
reap immense profits in providing publicly
necessary goods and services while also
evading the scrutiny of local democratic
control (Chakrabortty 2017a; Foster 2017f;
Tucker 2017a). For political theorist,
Wendy Brown, trends like these expose any
aspiration to deliver reliable public goods to
the vicissitudes of financial markets and the
murky world of speculative derivatives,
thereby furthering a ‘marketization and out-
sourcing of the state’ while simultaneously
undoing the demos (Brown 2015, 71).
Outsourcing, anti-Regulation, austerity:
dismembering the state
‘For years successive governments have built
what they call a bonfire of regulations. ... But
what they call red tape often consists of
essential public protections that defend our
lives’ (Monbiot 2017).
This local anti-democracy is also, nonethe-
less, traceable to the actions of central gov-
ernment. Not least in that the original
impulse to outsource erstwhile publicly
managed services – at local and national
levels – came from successive Thatcher-led
governments in the 1980s: part of a wider
endeavour to ‘roll back’ an ostensibly
unwieldy and overly-bureaucratic state
MACLEOD:THE GRENFELL TOWER ATROCITY 473
(Cochrane 1993; Peck 2010), and all guided
by a neoliberal doctrine promising that
private providers would enhance efficiency
while improving choice for ‘consumers’ of
public goods. It has tended to leave citizens
paying more for degraded services (Chakra-
bortty 2017a). But such centrally-imposed
outsourcing and privatisation have also seen
an erosion of in-house expertise in local gov-
ernment and remaining officers frustrated in
their capacity to scrutinise outsourced pro-
jects, leading, in turn, to a collapse of govern-
mental accountability (Hetherington 2017;
Raco 2013)
24
. Over three decades on and
the scale of such contracts is truly breathtak-
ing. Between 2011 and 2016, £120 billion of
government work – at least 30 per cent of
which is conducted via local government –
was awarded to private corporations whose
primary duty to maximise returns for share-
holders ultimately overrides any commit-
ment towards a public realm (Tucker
2017b), to the extent that:
‘The deployment of contractual processes as a
mechanism for capturing and re-defining
what is meant by a ‘public interest’ represents
a significant challenge to our fundamental
understandings of the modern democratic
state, where power lies, and with whom’
(Raco 2013, 49).
Alongside this, and as part of the deeper
embedding of a neoliberal canon within the
UK central state, successive governments –
including those of New Labour (Hall 2011;
Travis 2017) – have endeavoured to strip
away layers of ‘red tape’ purported to
hinder the free operation of business, not
least in construction. Peter Hetherington
(2017) cites the ‘relaxation’ of building regu-
lations in 1986, which subsequently per-
mitted high-rise blocks to be refurbished
with exteriors less resistant to fire: a decision
which was to impact fatally on Grenfell
Tower thirty-one years later (Knapton and
Dixon 2017). In the intervening years, gov-
ernment ministers channelled considerable
ire in the direction of bureaucracy and enter-
prise-inhibiting ‘statism’ (Du Gay 2000;
Freedland 2017): a convention that assumed
new heights in 2014 when Housing Minister,
Brandon Lewis, heralded a new governmen-
tal rule which insisted upon two existing
regulations being removed for every new
one introduced (Monbiot 2017). He did so
in response to opposition party calls to
certify that all construction companies fit
sprinklers in new homes, before deploying
the archetypal neoliberal rationale that ‘it is
the responsibility of the fire industry to
market sprinkler systems effectively [and
that] the cost of fitting sprinklers may affect
housebuilding, something we want to encou-
rage’ (Moore 2017). The Grenfell atrocity
was to reveal the absurdity of Lewis’s hubris-
tic reasoning. It also transpires he is one of
four successive Conservative Housing Minis-
ters who failed to act on the intelligence of a
2013 report into a fire in Lakanal House,
Southwark, back in 2009 where six people
died (Foster 2017d; Walker 2013). Had the
recommendations to introduce fire safety
regulations been implemented – and, more-
over, had DCLG Secretary, Eric Pickles,
not repealed Section 20 of the London Build-
ing Act one year earlier – then Grenfell
Tower would have been more rigorously
assessed (Watts 2017). This wilful neglect by
Conservative Ministers has also left thou-
sands of people in the UK continuing to
reside in towers clad with combustible
materials
25
. That those responsible have not
been called to account therefore casts shame
on the democratic process in Westminster as
well as Kensington and Chelsea (Lammy
2017).
It is also impossible to view Grenfell in iso-
lation from austerity. For as part of its politi-
cal response to the financial crisis of 2008–09
(Blyth 2013), the 2010 Conservative-Liberal
Democrat Coalition government savaged
the DCLG Communities Budget, with 50
per cent cuts to social housing and 40 per
cent cuts to local government impacting dis-
proportionately on vulnerable communities
(O’Hara 2015; Toynbee 2017). If economist
Paul Krugman (2012) was justified in inter-
preting the UK government’s original
474 CITY VOL. 22, NO.4
political austerity drive as ‘an excuse to dis-
mantle social programmes’, then the zeal-
ously unrelenting deployment of austerity as
ideology has left local authorities believing it
their job to spend as little as possible
(Hanley 2017; Foster 2017g). In which
context it is worth considering the firefighters
at Grenfell risking their lives in a borough
where fire cover had been cut by 50 per
cent (Gentleman et al. 2017); nurses treating
the injured on lower real rates of pay than
in 2009; mental health experts facing an out-
break of post-trauma among residents and
emergency services staff and numerous
suicide attempts following the fire amid
reductions in mental health services (Crew
2017; Pasha-Robinson 2017d); and further
how the post-2010 political strategy to con-
front a financial crisis effectively positioned
the low and modest income residents of
neighbourhoods like the Lancaster West
Estate to pay for the reckless venality of
rich bankers, many of whom reside in luxur-
ious mansions only streets away (Chakra-
bortty 2017a).
In the immediate aftermath, Polly Toynbee
(2017) interpreted the burnt shell of Grenfell
Tower to be symbolic of ‘austerity in ruins’.
It is also of course a catastrophic outcome
of what she and David Walker term the ‘dis-
membered state’: one increasingly stripped of
social and physical protections for citizens,
and which – in the wake of outsourcing,
deregulation, privatisation, and a fostering
of miscellaneous public-private and arms-
length agencies – has been so ‘confusingly
branded’ as to instil bewilderment over who
or which organisation might actually be
responsible for what and where (Toynbee
and Walker 2017; Hinsliff 2017). And as
cogently argued in a passionate editorial the
weekend after the Grenfell fire:
‘...this is more than a story of a benign state
being hacked at by funding cuts and
deregulation. [For] Grenfell has peeled away
the layers, to reveal an unaccountable, distant
state, sheltering behind arms-length bodies to
which it has subcontracted its most
fundamental responsibilities for keeping
people safe ... In this fragmented state, where
the buck gets passed on by those who are
democratically elected, what recourse do local
people have when they are failed so dismally
by their local services?’ (Observer, 18 June
2017, 34).
German political theorist Claus Offe offers
an analogous critique of how societies are
increasingly exhibiting a ‘democratic inequal-
ity’; many citizens living through and experi-
encing a somewhat disempowered state, or
more precisely ‘one that is overpowered by
the poderes facticos [the powers that be] of
corporate market forces’ (Offe 2013, 181).
De-Municipalized, dishonoured, devalued:
public housing in England
‘We’re seeing the biggest challenge to this 40-
year drive to marginalize or discredit the state
and its role in the economy and society.
Grenfell Tower had such impact because it
symbolizes for many in Britain the retreat of
the state, visible in badly maintained social
housing and the failure to build more social
housing’ (Simon Tilford, deputy director
Centre for European Reform; in Erlanger
2017,9)
‘...the [Grenfell] fire was fed by the broken
housing system; the privatisation of local
government services; the drive for
deregulation no matter the human cost; the
racism that perpetuates inferior infrastructure
and safety standards for people of colour; and
the erasure of the voices and interests of
working class and poor people from the
concerns of the state’ (Madden 2017, 2).
The tragic lack of recourse that faced Grenfell
residents is undoubtedly related to the way in
which social housing has been a primary
target of state dismemberment. What was
once termed council housing reached a peak
of 32 per cent in 1978 (Ginsburg 2005).
However, as part of its endeavour to foster
a ‘property-owning democracy’, the 1979
Thatcher government introduced legislation
obliging municipal authorities to sell council
houses to sitting tenants at significant
MACLEOD:THE GRENFELL TOWER ATROCITY 475
discounts while denying them permission to
reinvest in new housing or improving existing
stock, just as their funding from central gov-
ernment was being eroded
26
(Meek 2015).
Council housing was further de-municipa-
lized from the late 1980s via the transfer of
ownership and oversight to housing associ-
ations
27
or arms-length tenant management
organisations such as the KCTMO (Watt
2009; Bowie 2017; Tucker 2017a). The cumu-
lative impact of which is that many former
council properties have been sold on to
private landlords often charging double or
triple the social rent to households unable
to gain a council house due to the acute short-
age
28
(Meek 2015). This situation is especially
pervasive in London. Here, many councils
have been facilitating housing projects by
selling premium sites to private developers
on condition that ‘planning gain’
29
enables
inclusion of a certain proportion of ‘afford-
able’ units (Graham 2015). Consequently
many councils – including Labour-con-
trolled Camden, Hackney, Haringey,
Lambeth, Newham, and Southwark – have
overseen a forcible eviction of thousands of
people across London, many making way
for luxury redevelopments way beyond the
means of local communities (Lees 2014;
Elmer and Dening 2016; Flynn 2016). Such
trends are prompting concern that as munici-
pal government becomes distanced from
direct housing provision and private develo-
pers assume greater sway, lines of account-
ability are blurred and housing becomes
ever more defined in terms of market
exchange rather than human use value, ren-
dering social housing tenants to be deemed
‘a ‘necessary evil’, tolerated by the private
sector only because they allow lucrative
private market housing to be built’ (Tucker
2017a; Watt and Minton 2016; Foster 2017a).
Nonetheless, analysis of these trends
demands a historical geographical appreci-
ation of the internal politics of the state
(Duncan and Goodwin 1988; Jessop 2016).
For since the era of Thatcherism – character-
ised by a central government as determined to
‘bury’ municipal socialism and radical left
local initiatives as it was to privatise housing
and public services (Gyford 1985)–
England has generally experienced a centra-
lising mode of authority. Allied to serial
budget cuts, this has curtailed the scope for
local governments to nurture relatively
autonomous paths for development, housing
and service provision: New Labour’s consti-
tutional and devolution reforms belying its
controlling approach towards local govern-
ment and local democracy (Davies 2008).
The upshot of which is that any locally chor-
eographed gentrification of formerly social
housing in Southwark, Southampton,
Newham or Newcastle bears a discernible
imprint of the central state. This imprint is
even more pronounced since 2010 as Conser-
vative-led governments have been channel-
ling ever more public subsidy towards ‘right
to buy’ while simultaneously framing social
housing as ‘lavish public expenditure’ (Atkin-
son 2017; Edwards 2016; Paton and Cooper
2016). Such political economic sensibilities
are writ large in the 2016 Housing and Plan-
ning Act: for it effectively compels local auth-
orities to sell-off high-value land and
property without the messy trouble of enga-
ging consultation with residents. As a
cynical post-political endeavour to ‘destroy
any form of democratic control of planning
and land use’ (Minton 2017, 47), the Act is
also viewed to signal ‘the end of council
housing’ in the UK (Harris 2016). Indeed it
prompted the former head of the UK Civil
Service, Sir Bob Kerslake (2016), to conclude
that ‘I have reluctantly come to the con-
clusion that for the leading figures in this gov-
ernment, publicly provided, social rented
housing is now seen as toxic. This is some-
thing I deeply regret’.
Nonetheless, and even for a government as
merciless as the current one, it is surely a
source of painful discomfort that the Grenfell
atrocity occurred amid what has been a gen-
eration-spanning stigmatising offensive
waged by hegemonic bourgeois forces
against the people, the places, and indeed
the very values of municipally provided
housing (Forbes 2017; Hanley 2007;
476 CITY VOL. 22, NO.4
McKenzie 2015; Slater 2016; Tucker 2017c;
Watt 2017; Boughton 2018). It is in this
regard that, as outlined by London’s
Radical Housing Network on the day of the
Grenfell atrocity:
‘The fire at Grenfell is a horrific, preventable
tragedy for which authorities and politicians
must be held to account. Grenfell’s council
tenants are not second-class citizens – yet
they are facing a disaster unimaginable in
Kensington’s richer neighbourhoods. This
government, and many before it, have
neglected council housing and disregarded its
tenants as if they were second class.
Nationally and locally, politicians have
subjected public housing to decades of
systematic disinvestment – leaving properties
in a state of disrepair, and open to
privatisation. Regeneration, when it has come,
has been for the benefit of developers and
buy-to-let landlords, who profit from the new
luxury flats built in place of affordable homes.
Across London, regeneration has meant
evictions, poor quality building work, and has
given tenants little meaningful influence over
the future of their estates. The chronic under-
investment in council housing and contempt
for tenants must stop. It is an outrage that in
21st-century Britain, authorities cannot be
trusted to provide safe housing, and that
people in council properties cannot put
children safely to bed at night’ (Radical
Housing Network, June 14 2017).
Justice for Grenfell: renouncing plutocratic
urban governance
‘Today, we ask why warnings were not
heeded; why a community was left feeling
neglected, uncared for, not listened to. Today
we hold out hope that the public inquiry will
get to the truth of all that led up to the fire at
Grenfell Tower ... and we trust that the truth
will bring justice’ (Graham Tomlin, Bishop of
Kensington, Memorial Service for Grenfell six
months on, St Paul’s Cathedral, 14 December
2017).
‘Financial interests have increasingly set the
agenda of public bodies in the UK. The worst
fire in the UK in recent history is a lethal
catastrophe [...] and it has taken place in one
of the wealthiest boroughs in one of the
wealthiest cities in the world. The borough is
home to many globalised commercial
interests, with huge influence and enormous
wealth. Around the world lethal and
reprehensible conditions are permitted by
wealthy elites operating from protected
positions of financial privilege or
bureaucracy’ (Ishmahil Blagrove, former
coordinator for Justice4Grenfell 2017).
‘The rich [...] are able to control much of
economic life and the media and dominate
politics, so their special interests and view of
the world comes to restrict what democracies
can do’ (Sayer 2015, 2).
The dominant narrative of London is that of a
world class city: one that for several years has
topped PricewaterhouseCoopers’ global
rankings for business opportunities, edu-
cation, and quality of life
30
(PwC 2016).
Less prominently featured in the consultancy
firm’s reports is the fact that no city in the
global north internalises such a gulf between
rich and poor: conditions which render
housing to be extraordinarily expensive in
relative terms for virtually everyone
(Dorling 2015). In Big Capital: Who is
London For?, published just prior to the
Grenfell atrocity, Anna Minton offers pres-
cient analysis of London’s unequal social
ecology: in particular how escalating finan-
cialization is facilitating a mushrooming of
glitzy often vertical corporate-residential
citadels across London’s inner core alongside
the afore-mentioned municipally-guided
gentrification of social housing throughout
the inner suburbs (Beswick and Penny
2018): processes which leave many Lon-
doners struggling to gain or retain a home.
One example that encapsulates Minton’s con-
cerns is the Vauxhall Nine Elms Develop-
ment on London’s South Bank.
Incorporating the iconic Battersea Power
Station and a new US Embassy, it features
numerous seemingly open public squares
which are de facto privately owned: such a
routine trend nowadays that ‘every new
MACLEOD:THE GRENFELL TOWER ATROCITY 477
‘piece of the city’ is privately owned and
removed from a democratically accountable,
genuinely public realm’ (Minton 2017, 23;
also Sassen 2015). At least approval for the
development was on condition that in
accordance with Section 106 (see note 29), a
proportion of housing units would be ren-
dered ‘affordable’. Yet the Malaysian-
backed Battersea Power Station Develop-
ment Company has since reneged on this
commitment, following an agreement with
the Wandsworth council planning committee
permitting the number of affordable flats to
be reduced from 636 to 386. Mayor Sadiq
Khan was reported to have been ‘furious’ at
the decision. For Minton these events and
the way in which housing has moved ‘from
democratically accountable control into the
hands of opaque companies has a big part to
play in the Grenfell atrocity’ (in Bignell
2017).
The power ostensibly exercised by the
Malaysian-backed company in influencing
the planning committee of Wandsworth
council coupled with Mayor Khan’s fury
raises another nontrivial question pertaining
to Grenfell: who now governs London?
Taking inspiration from Freeland’s (2012)
glimpse into contemporary ‘plutocrats’ and
the new global super-rich, Atkinson, Parker,
and Burrows (2017) define London as the
archetypal plutocratic city: one where the
sheer money-power of super-rich individuals
and corporate dynasties is not only trans-
forming London’s built environment and
social and cultural landscapes, but also exert-
ing influence over political decision-making
in distinctly pronounced ways. Indeed
fuelled by feverishly high-pitched corpor-
ate-speak and ever under the influence of
The City, democratically representative insti-
tutions from national government to the
Mayor and inner city borough authorities
now seem to perform akin to a ‘chamber
orchestra’, harmonising conditions which
are conducive for attracting plutocratic
capital and the conservation of late capitalism
(Atkinson, Parker, and Burrows 2017). The
result is that London’s political regime
appears to veer between neurosis and awe-
inspired seduction in legitimising a seemingly
unrestricted access of plutocratic wealth as
the ‘objectives of city success have come to
be identified and aligned with the presence
of wealth elites while wider goals, of access
to essential resources for citizens, have with-
ered’ (ibid, 179)
31
. Joe Delaney, a resident
from the Barandon Walk finger block adja-
cent to Grenfell Tower, seemed acutely con-
scious of such priorities when describing
how, just as the streets nearby began to
witness investment, socioeconomic con-
ditions in the Lancaster West Estate wor-
sened revealing ‘a direct relationship
between gentrification and the level of ser-
vices the council provides to social housing
tenants’ (Delaney; in Platt 2017).
Nevertheless, surely there are limits to how
far plutocratic modes of ‘representative gov-
ernment’ can insulate elected politicians
from scrutiny and public ire. Grenfell may
well be one significant moment in revealing
these restrictions. Recall a back-footed
Prime Minister after her first visit; her
fulsome apology in Parliament a week later
for ‘a failure of the state, local and national,
when people needed it the most’ in the
hours immediately after the fire (Kentish
2017b); and the eventual resignations of the
RBKC leadership. The gravity of the fire
and obvious shortcomings in the institutional
response prompted Mrs May on 22 June to
announce in Parliament a judge-led public
inquiry into the fire. A week later she
revealed that this Grenfell Tower Inquiry
would be Chaired by Sir Martin Moore-
Bick, a retired commercial court judge.
While surely respected within the legal pro-
fession, many within the Grenfell local com-
munity became alarmed by his early
admission that the inquiry would be limited
to the technical causes of the fire and not con-
sider wider contextual questions such as
social housing maintenance (Sherwood
2017a). Prior to commencement of the
inquiry, 330 submissions were sent by a
variety of individuals, community groups,
campaigners, professional bodies, politicians
478 CITY VOL. 22, NO.4
and faith leaders. Notable among these was
Justice4Grenfell registering apprehension
about the panel’s ‘unrepresentative and non-
diverse make-up’ and that ‘the causes of the
disaster need to be tracked to those at the
highest level of central government, and not
restricted to those at local authority level,
the KCTMO, the contractors and the sub-
contractors’ (Pasha-Robinson 2017b). Justi-
ce4Grenfell was also anxious about how Sir
Martin had earlier presided over a social
housing case whose decision, in the words
of the victim’s solicitor, set ‘a terrible pre-
cedent for local authorities to engage in
social cleansing on a mass scale’: a decision
later overturned by the Supreme Court (Bla-
grove 2017).
In view of which the Prime Minister may
be forced to acknowledge that ‘state failure’
has not been strictly limited to the hours
immediately after the fire. For Grenfell is
proving to become a deeply politicising
moment (Moore 2017b). The inquiry itself
opened on 14 September 2017 in the Grand
Connaught Rooms, central London. Many
Grenfell residents and representatives gath-
ered outside while Chair Moore-Bick was
accused of displaying disrespect to the survi-
vors by refusing to answer a question from
their legal representative, Michael Mansfield,
QC (Adjoa Parker 2017). At the Inquiry’s
initial procedural hearing in December,
justice campaign group, Inquest, urged that
a panel representative of the community
join Moore-Bick ‘without which the inquiry
will be flawed and will fail those seeking the
truth and justice they deserve’ (Bowcott and
Gentleman 2017b). Replying two weeks
later, Mrs May insisted that the ‘probe’
already had ‘the necessary expertise to under-
take its work’; a decision described by
Inquest director, Deborah Coles, as ‘disgra-
ceful and wrong-headed [and] which sends a
message out to the bereaved and survivors
that their voices have still not been listened
to’ (Roberts 2017). And early in 2018 it was
revealed that KPMG – that standard bearer
for plutocratic ‘accountancy governance’
(Merrifield 2014) – had been contracted to
audit the Grenfell Tower Inquiry: this while
simultaneously auditing the RBKC council,
the Rydon Group which undertook the
Grenfell Tower renovation, and Celotex
which provided the defective cladding.
Given these very particular circumstances, it
is truly staggering that those holding the
highest office saw it befitting that the
Inquiry be audited by this global corporate
giant, which itself at least had the politesse
to step down from its role before a petition
which was on its way to Theresa May
would force her hand on a decision (Taylor
2018).
In May 2018, just prior to the Commem-
orative Hearings
32
and the evidential hearings
of Phase One of the Inquiry – which began in
June 2018 and is scheduled to examine the
night of the fire and the emergency response
– the Prime Minister finally acquiesced to
concerted community pressure. Following
several meetings with bereaved relatives and
a petition signed by over 156,000 people
and backed by grime artist Stormzy, Mrs
May agreed for two additional panel
members with the requisite local cultural
and community expertise to join Sir Moore-
Bick for Phase Two of the Inquiry, which is
scheduled for December 2018 and will
examine the period leading up to the fire
and decisions relating to the refurbishment
of Grenfell Tower (Booth 2018c). To have
secured local representation is a significant
democratic achievement by the Grenfell
community. That it required to be fought
for so doggedly only serves to cast further
shame on the plutocratic state. Moreover, as
outlined by Deborah Coles of Inquest, ‘it is
disappointing that it is not for both phases
of the inquiry ... [for] a diverse panel can
help to provide some legitimacy that the
inquiry has lacked’ (cited in Kennedy
2018b). The early stages of the Inquiry
revealed several crucial issues which demand
clarification and perhaps a corporate or insti-
tutional response, including: a charge that the
smoke ventilation system at Grenfell Tower
was reported to have failed eight days
before the fatal blaze and that a proposal to
MACLEOD:THE GRENFELL TOWER ATROCITY 479
repair it for £1,800 was ignored (Booth
2018d); that while the RBKC and the
KCTMO undertook a refurbishment to
install highly inflammable cladding ‘with
public funds paid to an array of contractors
and sub-contractors’, none of these bodies
has ‘yet to take any responsibility for what
happened’ (Danny Friedman, QC, represent-
ing survivors and the bereaved; cited in
Bowcott 2018); and controversies relating to
the decision by fire-fighters to retain the
‘stay put’ policy well after control over the
blaze appeared to have been lost: firefighters
rescued all remaining residents up to the
10
th
floor, but none got higher than the 20
th
floor while only two people escaped from
the highest two floors
33
(Mendick, Maid-
ment, and Ingle 2018; Dearden 2018;
Doward 2018; O’Hagan 2018
34
).
Grenfell is an atrocity for which the insti-
tutions of government in Parliament and in
Kensington and Chelsea alongside certain
private contractors must be held to account.
It is imperative that the Grenfell Tower
Inquiry be unrestricted and forensic. To be
sure it will be a long and arduous process
for many people who are forced to recall
unimaginably painful experiences. But it is
also to be hoped that the Inquiry is one
where the conventionally ascetic disposition
of an English legal establishment can reveal
the due diligence alongside the emotional
intelligence to deliver justice: it cannot
resort to protecting itself or the national-
London plutocratic elite (Adjoa Parker
2017). The Grenfell and Lancaster West com-
munity have shown remarkable grace in
articulating their righteous indignation
while campaigning for justice amid a succes-
sion of crass decisions that have been deliv-
ered at them by the plutocracy: here we can
cite the initial demonstrations which con-
cluded with impromptu speeches and conver-
sations; the silent marches on the 14
th
of
every month; and their dignified presence at
the six month commemoration in St Paul’s
Cathedral; and further dignity in being the
target of deeply shameful vilification that
has been placed on social media and which
is surely fuelled by the hate-speech of ‘nati-
vist politicians’ and England’s thoroughly
degraded right-wing press (Madden 2017).
It is time the people of Grenfell and the Lan-
caster West Estate and their friends are
treated with the honour that befits them and
the memory of their lost loved ones. Recal-
ling the quotation from Andrew Sayer at
the beginning of this final section, is also
high time to renounce the current restrictions
placed upon democracy and the provision of
decent housing by a plutocratic mode of local
and national level government.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Harriet Bulkeley, Geoff DeVerteuil,
Tim Edensor, Martin Jones, Rhoda MacDonald, DK
MacLeod, Jon May, Colin McFarlane, Emma Ormerod,
Rachel Pain, Dave Roberts, Paul Watt, Helen Wilson,
Felicity Wray, an anonymous referee, and the City
editors, Mark Davidson and Dan Swanton, for reading
and commenting on the paper. Responsibility for errors
of fact and interpretation remain with the author.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the
author.
Notes
1 This was subsequently confirmed to be 72.
2 “Statement Re Grenfell Tower”, London’s Air
Ambulance on 15 June 2017. https://
londonsairambulance.co.uk/our-service/news/
2017/06/statement-re-grenfell-tower
3 TMO here refers to the Kensington and Chelsea
Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO).
4 Tragically, subsequent reports confirmed that Mr
Chellat’s family died in the fire (Kennedy 2017b).
5 The claims about the lack of a council ‘presence’ are
disputed in a lengthy essay by Andrew O’Hagan
(2018) in the London Review of Books, which also
reports that at 1100, the Kensington and Chelsea
Council sent ten housing officers to begin the search
for accommodation.
6 At the time of writing, a spokesman for RBKC
claimed it had spent £235m on securing 307
properties to help rehouse people affected by the
fire; and that, of the 203 households requiring
480 CITY VOL. 22, NO.4
rehousing, 134 have a new permanent home, while
52 are in temporary and 15 in emergency
accommodation (Batty 2018).
7 The ex-footballer, David Beckham, and a host of
hedge fund billionaires live in the stucco mansions
of Notting Hill, while Roman Abramovich, the
current Chairman of Chelsea FC who pocketed
billions of dollars following the privatization of
Russia’s state assets, owns a £125m house in
Kensington Palace Gardens.
8 While life expectancy in Kensington and Chelsea is
the highest in the UK it is extremely uneven. In the
Hans Town ward, near the world-renowned Harrods
store, a man can expect to live up to 94; in
Golborne ward (just north of Grenfell) the average
life-span for a man is 72, a reduction of six years
since 2010 (Dent Coad, 2017b).
9 As one of the first benevolent housing associations,
The Peabody Trust was established in the 1860s by
philanthropist George Peabody, and currently rents
about 20,000 homes across London (Meek 2015).
10 The two have since merged.
11 In Kensington and Chelsea the average rent is 96
per cent of the average income (Gapper 2017)
thereby coming in at £9,840 per month.
12 The highest rate is in Labour-controlled Newham
with 1,706 in September 2017, Kensington and
Chelsea having 1,619 (Watt 2018). And thanks to
Paul Watt for highlighting this to me.
13 http://www.savethesuttonestate.co.uk/
14 Housing associations never call it ‘profit’.
15 The second highest in London after Westminster
with 11,457 or 9.3 per cent, and all part of over
£122 billion worth of property in England and
Wales held via companies registered in secrecy
jurisdictions (Transparency International 2015).
16 The national political map sees the Royal Borough
divided: with Kensington forming one full
constituency, while Chelsea is included in the
Chelsea and Fulham constituency, where the
Conservative, Greg Hands, was re-elected.
17 These savings are believed to have emerged
following an ‘urgent nudge email’ sent by the
KCTMO project manager to Artelia, its French-
based consultancy firm, which outlined how, with
respect to cladding, ‘We need good costs for
Councillor Feilding-Mellen and the planner
tomorrow at 8.45am!’: Rock Feilding-Mellen being
the ex-chair of the RBKC housing committee and
former Deputy Leader (Booth and Grierson 2017).
18 It is worth noting that, during its refurbishment,
building inspectors visited Grenfell Tower sixteen
times, signing it off as ‘compliant with government
fire safety guidance despite it being fitted with
combustible plastic core cladding panels’ (Booth
2018a).
19 http://www.kctmo.org.uk/sub/about-us/38/our-
mission
20 Thereby rendering it the largest TMO in the UK.
21 The KCTMO is the only TMO that is also an arm’s
length management organization (ALMO). And
although it was created in 1994 under the then
Conservative Government’s Housing (Right to
Manage) Regulations, it was done so under
corporate law and, as an ALMO is thereby exempt
from Freedom of Information requests (ASH 2017).
22 Daffarn revealed this in a film by Anthony Wilks,
entitled Grenfell: The End of an Experiment?, which
accompanied the online publication of O’Hagan’s
paper in London Review of Books: see: https://
www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n11/andrew-ohagan/the-
tower#group-view-film-dBLTvrFj7z
23 It is notable how Grenfell Tower was deleted from
the websites of several companies involved, many
of which list the other projects they have worked on
as case studies intended to demonstrate excellence
(Davies 2017).
24 Furthermore, The Audit Commission, which had
responsibility for scrutinizing local authority
contracts, was abolished in 2015, its functions
transferred to the voluntary and private sectors
(Tucker 2017b).
25 In the ten weeks after Grenfell, it was identified that
262 tall residential towers across England had
similar combustible cladding panels, including 161
social housing blocks and 26 student halls of
residence (Booth et al 2017).
26 Of all the spending cuts introduced by the Thatcher
government in its first term, three-quarters came
from the housing budget (Meek 2015).
27 A process dependent upon a majority of council
tenants voting in favour but one which also saw
considerable deception in terms of misinformation
alongside outright threat and coercion waged upon
tenants who favoured continued council ownership
(Meek 2015).
28 By 2011, for the first time since 1971, more London
households were living in the private rented sector
(25 per cent), and Shelter has estimated that private
renting will swell to 41 per cent by 2025 (London
Assembly Housing and Regeneration Committee
2013, 13; in Watt and Minton 2016).
29 Relating to arrangements between planning
authorities and private developers under ‘Section
106’ to secure agreed proportions of units in new
developments as social or ‘affordable’ housing
(Edwards 2016).
30 This PwC rating on London’s quality of life is
bafflingly at odds with other studies identifying
quality of life to be high in cities quite different from
London, such as Vancouver and Sydney as well as
European cities like Amsterdam and Stockholm:
ones which are less dependent on finance, more
equal and frankly more ‘public’.
31 While it might be expected for Boris Johnson,
Conservative Mayor from 2008 to 2016, to be an
MACLEOD:THE GRENFELL TOWER ATROCITY 481
unabashed cheerleader for the ‘heroic contribution’
made to London by the super-rich (Atkinson et al.
2017, 187), his predecessor, the left-leaning Ken
Livingstone, is also reported to have been ‘in thrall
to the titans of London’s property world’ (Jenkins
2016; Massey 2007).
32 This was a highly emotive week of hearings where
friends and relatives paid tribute to the 72 people
who died in the fire.
33 Amid claims that senior firefighters were under-
prepared for the events of June 14 2017, it is worth
noting that while all fire authorities were officially
advised to train key staff to determine when they
should abandon the ‘stay-put’ policy for residents in
burning tower blocks three years before the Grenfell
tragedy, the training of the London fire brigade has
been outsourced since 2012 to a private contractor,
Babcock International: a process that itself is under
scrutiny vis-a-vis the Grenfell Tower Inquiry (Doward
2018).
34 Andrew O’Hagan’s essay has itself generated
considerable controversy, not least for its
purported misrepresentation of details provided to
him by Grenfell survivors and families, his
sympathetic account of the RBKC leadership,
including Paget-Brown and Feilding-Mellen (Rustin
2018), and also his claim that ‘the firefighting
operation at Grenfell was a huge and dramatic
failure, though nobody wanted to say so’
(O’Hagan 2018, 16).
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Gordon MacLeod is at the Department of
Geography, Durham University, Durham,
UK. Email: gordon.macleod@durham.ac.uk
MACLEOD:THE GRENFELL TOWER ATROCITY 489
