Grenfell Tower

formulatrash:

suzvoy:

scorntrooper:

Haven’t seen anything on here about it so let me write a quick summary.

Grenfell Tower is a high rise block of flats in Kensington – which is a super rich borough. Grenfell Tower is a social housing complex. In other words, poor people live there.

At 1am this morning, Grenfell Tower caught fire. The fire started on the 2nd floor, and spread via the building’s cladding all the way up to the top, the 24th. The fire was still going long into the morning.

6 people are dead. 50 more are in hospital, 18 critical.

For years, residents in Grenfell Tower had been trying to get their landlord to make sure their homes weren’t a fire hazard. In a series of blog posts, they detail their struggle to get the landlord to acknowledge that the building was a fire hazard. Grenfell Tower had no internal fire alarms, no sprinklers, and only one exit. The landlord insisted this was adequate. The residents asked for an independent surveyor – they were refused. Their counsellor made 19 separate complaints – the landlord tried to have her removed from her post. The building had been refurbished, but none of the residents’ concerns were addressed. Instead, the building was covered in new plastic cladding. The contractors said that the cladding would make the 70s social housing block look more attractive from the neighbouring luxury flats. The new cladding also happened to be extremely cheap. And flammable.

Jeremy Corbyn tried to pass a bill that would force landlords to make their properties safe. The tories voted it down. The fire committee told Boris Johnson, the then-mayor of London, that they were worried about fire risks in housing – he told them to get stuffed. Literally. Theresa May’s aide sat in on a meeting about unsafe housing – nothing was done.

In one of their blog posts, the residents of Grenfell Tower say that they’re afraid that their concerns will be dismissed by their landlord until it’s too late. Until something terrible happens. Only then will their landlord think that maybe, MAYBE, the building was unsafe.

The company that built Grenfell Tower has deleted their webpage on the building.

You can donate here: http://just.ly/grenfell-tower-fire-fund

Please consider it if you can. These people have just been made homeless and have nothing now. They are unlikely to be insured.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-england-london-40239008

12 people are now confirmed dead and that number is expected to rise.

Just to clarify: Kensington is a super-rich Borough, yes but it also has – and this is where things get really frightening – some of the largest social housing estates and buildings. Some people in Kensington are very rich – and that makes private renting in the borough virtually impossible for all but the richest. However, there are large numbers of people who are very, very not rich in the area and that’s who you need to be outraged for right now.

I used to live right near Grenfell tower, in an illegally sublet room in some social housing because I was as dirt poor as it is possible to be in London without actually ending up on the street. I know that area really well and the people in it and – because shitty architecture is my other interest – how close to this so many of the other blocks are. There are multiple blocks that are halfway to condemnation even after the council has spent millions on “renovations” that are backhanders to building companies. 

The plastic cladding put on? Supposedly cost £10m – whereas it would have been £300k to put in fucking sprinklers that would have literally prevented this.

The sick thing is when they clear the rubble they will build luxury flats with an ‘affordable percentage’ which will mysteriously disappear during construction, as with the Heywood estate in Elephant.

Funnily enough, the area where Grenfell is is where social housing began, pretty much. And Notting Hill is where residents first hit back at slum landlords like Rachman, after incidents frankly uncannily like this, and forced housing law change.

It is very important to not just be shocked and grieve this – please pressure your MPs, in writing, to ensure that legal changes are made so that a disaster like Grenfell is not repeated. This was not only a man-made disaster but one that was willingly created because they thought no one would care or that it didn’t matter. Don’t say you’re happy for that to be the case with anyone’s life and home, let alone millions of people across the UK.