On 14 June 2017, London was rocked by tragedy when Grenfell Tower, a high-rise apartment building in North Kensington, caught fire. The resulting blaze burned for more than sixty hours, claiming the lives of seventy people.
In the aftermath, the community was in shock: as months and years rolled by, anger towards the government remained palpable. Stormzy memorably took to the stage at the BRIT Awards to ask the then-prime minister: “Theresa May, where’s the money for Grenfell?”
Six years later, that question remains unanswered – but as the devastating event reaches another anniversary, here are eight ways that the cultural community have remembered those who lost their lives, and explored the case of the Grenfell Fire and its aftermath.
Grenfell: Value Engineering and System Failure
These plays, staged across West London, took place only a few hundred metres from the site of the fire itself. Created by Richard Norton-Taylor and directed by Nicolas Kent (both of whom have form in creating tribunal plays), Grenfell: System Failure is a follow up to their first 2021 play, Grenfell: Value Engineering.
Where Value Engineering examined the first phase of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry (in particular the cost-cutting measures enacted by building authorities at the expense of safety), System Failure details the arguably more harrowing second phase: watching regulators, research bodies and the government all attempt to duck blame for what happened, using words pulled verbatim from real-life testimony.
It’s a sickening spectacle, and a deeply sad one. “These crooks are still hiding,” Hisam Choucair (Shahzad Ali) says toward the end of the play, and you have to agree with him. Though the play finished its run in March, keep your eyes peeled for future performances.
Lowkey ft. Mai Khalil – Ghosts of Grenfell
British rapper and activist Lowkey recorded this furious response to the Grenfell tragedy. In this track, he describes how he watched the whole thing unfold, on “the night our eyes changed.”
Lowkey goes onto name the victims and tells the stories of the survivors – juxtaposing the “rooms where both the extraordinary and the mundane were lived” with “flowers for the dead and printing posters for the missing”. With backing vocals from Mai Khalil, he warns: “the blood is on your hands … Like a phoenix we will rise.”
Big Zuu – Grenfell Tower Tribute
Big Zuu might be better known these days for his cooking show, but the West London artist was personally affected by the fire.
“Because they couldn’t do anything else, a lot of people there were recording what was happening on their phones – they didn’t realise they were actually recording [people] dying,” he told the Guardian in 2018, adding that one of his friends – and that friend’s entire family – died in the tragedy.
“That whole week was just unreal, people were distraught – I remember a lot of anger, just a crazy atmosphere. If you’re from the area, you definitely lost someone you know.”
The rapper’s resulting tribute track was released soon after.
Grenfell by Steve McQueen
In December 2017, Steve McQueen went to Grenfell Tower with the aim of making an artwork. Filming the tower before it was covered up with canvas and boarding, he sought to create a record that would ensure the tragedy was never forgotten. The resulting 24-minute film is almost silent as it swoops around and pans in on the destroyed building; what results is something horrible yet impossible to turn away from.
The entire endeavour was self-funded by McQueen and was put on display at the Serpentine Gallery between April and May this year. Though the film is no longer being displayed at the Serpentine, it has now been placed into the care of the Tate and the Museum of London’s collection.
Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen
Peter Apps, the journalist who wrote Show Me the Bodies, was already investigating the cladding being used in apartment blocks around the country when the fire happened.
“On the morning of the 14th June 2017, when I woke up to the images of Grenfell Tower on fire, my first thought was ‘it’s happened’,” he writes. What follows is Apps’ account of the inquiry – but also of the shocking state of housing the UK, where thousands more buildings pose serious fire risks and years of austerity has made them into tinder boxes.
As Apps explains, Grenfell was a tragedy that could easily have been avoided: lessons from the tragic 2009 Lakanal House fire in Southwark went unlearned, deregulation was embraced by successive governments, and builders were allowed to get away with shoddy workmanship. Even now, there are few signs that things are changing: this is a sobering read indeed.
The Grenfell Tower Inquiry Podcast
Need a handy guide through the minutiae of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry? This BBC podcast is your best friend. Running hundreds of episodes long (203 in fact), the show takes its listeners through every step of the inquiry, cataloguing the evidence, the legal know-how and the context of a legal process that spanned years. They even make time to interview witnesses of their own – such as Aldo Diana, a firefighter who rescued nine people on the night in question. A worthwhile listen, every episode of it.
Grenfell
So far, TV has steered clear of dramatising the events that took place in June 2017, but that’s about to change: in February this year, the BBC announced that it had commissioned writer and director Peter Kosminsky to create a three-part show about the incident.
Drawing on over five years of research – including public sources, the inquiry hearings, and extensive interviews – the drama promises to give a “comprehensive account” of the events that led up to, during and after the fire. Told from multiple perspectives, it will focus not only on the survivors and families of those affected but the firefighters who arrived at the scene that night and bravely battled to save lives for hours.
Talking about the show, Kosminsky said, “Occasionally, events occur in our national story which touch us all. The fire at Grenfell Tower is such an event… in our drama, we attempt to pick our way through hours of public testimony, as well as original interviews conducted by our team, to reach the heart of this catastrophe: how such a thing can have happened; how we can avoid it ever happening again.”
This has also been the subject of some pushback from Grenfell’s survivors and members of the local community, with a Change.org petition accusing the BBC of using “the brutal events for their own entertainment purposes” and calling on them to cancel the show.
Grenfell: in the words of survivors
This summer, it’s the National Theatre’s turn to examine the catastrophic failings around Grenfell, in new production Grenfell: in the words of survivors.
Years after it happened, a series of interviews with eyewitnesses has been turned into a play by Gillian Slovo, which will run between July 13 and August 26 and will be directed by Phyllida Lloyd and Anthony Simpson-Pike. This promises to be a powerful new production that will explore the courage and resilience of one community and their ongoing fight for justice.
