Peter Apps’ book about the Grenfell Tower fire and the subsequent inquiry is an essential work of journalistic scrutiny. The author is deputy editor at Inside Housing and has covered the story meticulously over the past five and a half years. His account is extraordinarily difficult to read, not because his writing isn’t clear and direct throughout – it is – but because Show Me the Bodies is a document not of a tragedy, but of an atrocity.
Overnight on 14 June 2017, 72 people – elderly, middle-aged, young, newborn – died terrifying, yet avoidable, deaths, after a small fire in a single flat spread rapidly to every floor of the west London block. Grenfell had been subject to an unpopular refurbishment a few years earlier which had made the building a death-trap. Its residents knew this, spending years fighting against a “regeneration” of the estate that had prioritised aesthetics and local property values over safety and community.
