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

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Almost exactly two years ago, just after the cross examinations with the insulation companies, I wrote about how the Inquiry had revealed a construction industry devoid of morality or ethics. I wrote optimistically about how architects might form part of a solution: custodians of a new set of values that can run through every stage of a project.

Social murder is the unnatural death that occurs due to social, political, or economic oppression. A crime commited through active decisions made by political, social and business leaders that leads to the deaths of others. It was impossible to choose between the harrowing quotes from this book, but here is one, that bought angry tears to my eyes: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? House of the Year 2023 shortlist: Arts & Crafts with a conte... House of the Year 2023 shortlist: Arts & Crafts with a contemporary twist The Grenfell fire and its Inquiry deserve to be a watershed moment for how we design and deliver buildings. What happened is something all architects should try to make themselves familiar with – not least to give context to some of the legislation already coming our way which will dramatically increase our obligations in terms of competence and liabilities.

Should be mandatory reading for policymakers in this country around social housing and construction in general for high rise structures. Review: Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Time Machine offers ‘a tonic for ... Review: Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Time Machine offers ‘a tonic for our distracted minds’Apps, who has covered the inquiry daily, alternates these narrative chapters with a forensic examination of how building regulations and corporate safety standards have been watered down since Margaret Thatcher’s deregulation bonanza. 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.

Author has done a fantastic job of outlining accounts of some that made it out and others that didnt, while interspersed throughout are facts that were already in public domain prior to grenfell, along with others that were kept under wraps by various parties, but primarily the cladding suppliers of the products which weren't safe for use on such a tower under the conditions used. And with only ourselves and South Korea allowing these items on, surely it would have occurred to somebody that it's not a great idea. 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”.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. British fire safety strategies have their roots in the Great Fire of London, where fire spread between wooden buildings. The idea that arose from it was “compartmentation” — building from strong materials and partitioning dwellings from one another, with the aim of ensuring fires do not spread. Coming from these ideas is the principle of “stay in place”; if your building is on fire, you should stay put and wait for fire services rather than attempt to exit yourself, because the fire will not spread. The Grenfell inquiry chair termed this strategy “an article of faith [for firefighters] so powerful that to depart from it was to all intents and purposes unthinkable.” This is what residents of Grenfell were told when they called emergency services that night: stay in place. No fire alarm rang out across the building, because like all UK high rises, it had no central fire alarm. Show Me the Bodies is littered with accounts of incidents like these. Why did fire doors fail? Why was there no plan to evacuate disabled residents? Why did the building’s smoke control system malfunction? For every one, Apps provides a clear explanation. The explanation is always, in the end, that the people in charge were not interested in the input, and consequently in the lives, of the residents of the tower. They were only interested in costs.

Lucent’s intricate facades give Piccadilly Circus’ famous ‘l... Lucent’s intricate facades give Piccadilly Circus’ famous ‘lights’ corner new life If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. I bought this book because I read a review essay which mentioned it in tandem with another book ("The New Life," by Tom Crewe, coincidentally with a very similar cover-colour scheme, also waiting beside my bed now), and although I of course knew about the Grenfell Tower disaster I did not know what to expect. You would think that a book about fire safety standards, planning permissions, social housing management and so forth would be dry and hard to warm to; not this book. This book gets its hooks into you more or less instantly and doesn't let go until you're done. It's not merely a literary accomplishment -- it is also the sort of cautionary tale which ought to be read and absorbed by anyone responsible for risk assessment in housing, anyone responsible for urban planning or city management or fire department policy...the lessons Apps draws are so widely applicable that I cannot but describe this book as an extremely important contribution. It doesn't escape me that it is almost certain that none of the constituents who might benefit from it will read it -- here in the US because it's "not local and therefore irrelevant," in the UK because, well, "that's not the way we do things." Apps’s chief claim is that people who lived in Grenfell died because of a series of choices consciously made by political representatives who “deliberately ran down, neglected and privatised arms of the state,” something they did hand in hand with “a corporate world that evinced an almost psychopathic disregard for human life.” It is impossible to read Show Me the Bodies’ immensely moving account of the Grenfell tragedy and finish without a strong sense of moral outrage. The 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.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.

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