On 14 June 2017, a fire broke out in Grenfell Tower – a high-rise block in West London – killing 72 occupants. Images of the fire played on a loop for weeks on British television, shocking the public. How could this have been allowed to happen? Why did the fire spread so quickly? Why weren’t more people evacuated? Now, eight years later, we have plenty of answers, but a new set of challenges. Following the delivery, last September, of Sir Martin Moore-Bick’s final report into the fire, the question being posed by campaigners, journalists, former residents, and, now, a Netflix documentary, Grenfell: Uncovered, is whether we’ve done enough to prevent the tragedy of Grenfell repeating itself.
“So much time has passed, and so little has changed,” comes the verdict of one resident, reliving the horror of that night in June. The film interweaves the story of the fire – sparked by a malfunctioning fridge on the fourth floor – with the fallout of the disaster. Much of that revolves around the use of dangerously flammable cladding, manufactured by American mega-corporation Arconic, which sandwiched a layer of polyethylene between thin sheets of aluminium. The decision to bedeck the concrete tower in this cladding was a cosmetic one (“I would’ve thought they’d put safety above prettiness,” a young survivor laments) and it turned the concrete tower into a firetrap. We know all this now, but how much did manufacturers, construction firms and legislators know at the time?
Netflix do a good line in thoughtful documentaries on disasters. Sure, there are plenty of schlocky miniseries about serial killers, but when it comes to institutional failings and social affairs, they are more sensitive, as an excellent recent film on the Titan submersible disaster proved. Olaide Sadiq, who directs Grenfell: Uncovered, has previously worked on the platform’s film about the disorder at the 2021 Euros final, and she brings accountability to the heart of this film. It is a rallying cry against the structures that facilitated the disaster. Don’t just remember the dead, Peter Apps, a housing journalist, tells an assembled crowd. Remember the companies, councils and public services that either enabled the cost cutting (it would’ve cost £5,000 more to use safer cladding, equivalent to £40 per flat) or ignored the warnings. This dynamic – the film is more interested in apportioning blame than it is in memorialising the victims – makes it feel raw, angry and urgent.
Because so much of what happened on that summer evening in North Kensington descended not from overt violence, but from the evil of complacency. A mixed, working-class community let down by people whose risk appetite was far too high – and whose lives were entirely unaffected by the risks they were taking. The film revisits many moments from the inquiry that will be familiar to news junkies – such as the genuinely jaw-dropping moment when Eric Pickles, a former housing secretary, gets the death toll wrong – as it winds towards its conclusions. The talking heads are, naturally, a little lopsided. Even a full public inquiry couldn’t compel American engineering executives to defend their record, and certainly a Netflix documentary can’t. Among those criticised, only former prime minister Theresa May provides new testimony, appearing genuinely thoughtful on her role. She reflects on how her failure to meet community leaders in the immediate aftermath “exacerbated” the sense that “authority had failed to listen to them”. It feels like a rare moment of personal accountability in British politics.
From Arconic to the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, via the London Fire Brigade and David Cameron’s war on regulations, Grenfell: Uncovered doesn’t pull its punches when identifying collaborators in the needless deaths of 72 Londoners. For those who have been plugged into the news cycle over the past eight years, the stories will be familiar and possibly too harrowing to return to. But rather than simply offering another affecting tribute, the film proves willing to play the blame game. Much of what went wrong at Grenfell, it concludes, was a failure to learn the lessons of the past, and this, therefore, is something we cannot let happen again.
