In his Observer review of Apps’ winning book, Rowan Moore wrote: “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.” The Grenfell Tower fire of June 2017 is one of the most tragic political events in British history. This book argues that preparedness for disasters has always been designed in the interests of the State and Capital rather than citizens. This was exemplified by the ‘stay put’ strategy at Grenfell Tower which has historically been used to socially control racialised working class groups in a disaster. ‘Stay put’, where fire safety is compromised along with strategic ambiguity, probabilistically eliminates these groups. Grenfell Tower is a purposive part of ‘Disaster Capitalism’, an asocial racial and class eliminationism, where populations have become unvalorisable and disposable. We have reached a point where even the ruling class are fleeing from the disasters and chaos they have inflicted on the world, retreating to their billionaire bunkers. This timely book will be of interest to sociologists, social theorists and activists in understanding the racialised, classed and capitalist nature of contemporary disasters.

Steve Bloomfield, the Observer’s head of news, said: “Both Shanti and Mark spent many months on incredibly difficult and groundbreaking stories that exposed wrongdoings that would otherwise have remained buried. The Observer is extremely proud of the prize that reflects the results of that hard work.” Yet above all else, the Grenfell fire was a “result of political choices”, concludes Apps. Months beforehand, he had been reporting on fears about combustible cladding systems for Inside Housing, where he is deputy editor. When he woke up to the news, he thought to himself: “It’s happened.”The aim of our campaign is to get Enfield Council to do the right thing and ensure that the tall buildings at Meridian Water will have more than staircase, and therefore give people multiple escape routes in the event of a fire. Lavelle, who grew up in care, won for pieces for the Guardian included Being Homeless felt Inevitable and Marshall Payne was recognised partly for her warning in the Guardian that the issue was about to get worse with the withdrawal of measures put in place during Covid.

But the bigger horror is the “value engineering” by the corporate bodies which is shown through contract bidding and a cost-cutting that is blind to safety aspects despite numerous warnings, and the play as a whole shows a chillingly amoral capitalism at work. The lessons of the Grenfell Tower fire must be learned, especially by decision makers, and that is why campaign groups have gifted copies of Peter Apps’ book to Enfield Council. Regulation codes, refurbishment cost savings, the total sum of buildings wrapped in flammable cladding. Over the course of a four-year inquiry, now finally in its closing stages, survivors and the bereaved have learned a new language of figures and acronyms relating to 30 years of neglect: three decades of political and corporate choices that took more London lives in any single event since the Blitz. In Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen, by the housing journalist Peter Apps, one number stands out early on: “seven minutes”. This is the time it would have taken, according to an expert witness at the inquiry, for all 293 residents of the tower to open their front doors, walk down the stairs and escape. If the London Fire Brigade had instructed them to do so within an hour of the fire starting at 12.54am – from a fridge-freezer on the fourth floor – they would have survived.Soon there were women from different cultures all cooking, swapping recipes, talking and laughing. As they cooked, they began to connect, heal and look forward, and have continued to cook together twice a week.

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. What emerges is a heightened sense of what we already know; the drama does not shed new light on the tragedy but does highlight the abysmal corporate and council failures and like Thomas’s words, invites us to connect these to the wider world. If they’d been listened to, they would all still be alive. A similar fire, which killed six people at Lakanal House in south London in 2009, should have been enough of a warning, but it wasn’t. Seventy-eight people were killed by a collision of forces with one common root: the broad contempt showed by people with power towards those without it. The fire brigade’s “stay put” policy is dealt with first – there are frustrating testimonies from a firefighter and a control room operator that encompass the few elements of human drama. The former, played by Daniel Betts, gives his failed account of getting to a 13-year-old alone in a flat. The latter, played by Claire Lams, tells a boy on the 19th floor to stay put despite his desperate and repeated pleas.For the last few years, Peter Apps has been writing the most important reportage on the most important disaster in this country since Hillsborough. Here, he makes clear how this atrocity was easily preventable. Show Me the Bodies also reveals just how little those responsible, from the construction industry to the government, have learned. Whatever the courts eventually decide, this book deserves to be widely read so that the rest of us can finally hold them to account.' - Owen Hatherley At first, we hear birdsong as the screen lights up. The approach begins at London’s edge, passing over a mosaic of housing developments and the last fields, giving way to golf courses and playing fields and factory estates. There are traffic sounds and distant sirens, a helicopter passing over, its sound fading with it. Our approach is slow and low in the early winter afternoon, the distant horizon muffled by pollution. Here comes Wembley stadium, there on the right, just before we make a small turn and head over Willesden and Kensal Green, crossing the Westway. Justice still seems a long way off, four years after the publication of the damning first report, and before the final report to be published later this year. A criminal investigation is still ongoing. What we have instead is this carcass, standing in the mild December sunshine. On the way out of the screening, at the Serpentine Gallery, we are confronted with a commemorative text in memory of those who lost their lives, and three long rows of the 72 names. In a passionate accompanying essay, sociologist Paul Gilroy writes of Grenfell as a “charred obscenity”. Leaving, I’m aware of what is just over the horizon to the north. Grenfell stays with me, and stays with London, however much they cover it up. The Hubb Community Kitchen is a group of women who have come together to prepare fresh food for their local community.