The legacy of Grenfell

Marking the sixth anniversary of the disaster, Graham Tomlin looks to what its legacy needs to be.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

Grenfell Tower, wrapped in a protective layer bearing the legend: Grenfell forever in our hearts

The Grenfell Tower protectively wrapped.

The blowup on Unsplash.

It is now six years since an electrical fault in a fridge in the kitchen of a fourth floor flat led to the fire in Grenfell Tower which killed 72 people – the worst loss of life in one single incident in London since the second world war. The rest of the country has understandably moved on, preoccupied by the COVID years, a cost of living crisis and the sheer pace of life, so that Grenfell has retreated to the back of our consciousness and conscience, yet for the bereaved and survivors, who live with the memory every day, these have been six very long years.

We are told the Public Inquiry will report early in 2024, so there is still more time to wait. Meanwhile, the remains of the creaking tower still stand by the Westway in north Kensington.

Whenever I speak to people about Grenfell, the most common question is ‘what is going to happen to the Tower?’

Yet there is the nagging fear from bereaved families and campaigners that once it is demolished, they, and their loved ones will be forgotten: ‘out of sight, out of mind.’

The Tower left to its own devices would probably have fallen long ago. A damaged building like this gradually degrades over time, with the effects of gravity, weather, water seeping into the cracks which ice up in winter, leading to widening of those cracks, concrete falls and so on. As a result, there are over 4,500 props inserted into the building, keeping the creaking infrastructure standing. A large team monitors the building constantly, and it is relatively secure for the next decade if need be, despite the ongoing cost of the operation. The Tower continues to be covered with two linings of white wrapping plastic – an inner one which remains and an outer one that is replaced every year. Some local people would want to see the building come down as it remains a constant painful memory. Yet there is the nagging fear from bereaved families and campaigners that once it is demolished, they, and their loved ones will be forgotten: ‘out of sight, out of mind.’ The ongoing presence of the building, standing alone by the Westway as a constant reminder to the thousands who travel into London each day, is one of the only ways they have to keep the memory alive.

So, looking into the future, what will the legacy of Grenfell be? Convictions of those found to be culpable may well follow and rightly so, if individuals or companies can be clearly identified as having deliberately acted in underhand ways that led to the installation of the highly flammable cladding, or carelessly caused this disaster.

Some people call Grenfell a crime. Some a tragedy. Perhaps both are right. So what do you do when a crime, or a tragedy occurs? What do we do as a society?

Grenfell was not an accident. As I said in my sermon at the fifth anniversary commemoration in Westminster Abbey a year ago, Grenfell “was not an unfortunate accident – it was the result of careless decisions taken, regulations ignored, an industry that seemed at times more interested in making profits and selling products than in the precious value of human life and keeping people safe in their own homes.” In Christian language, Grenfell was the result of sin.

When you recognise you have sinned, the way to begin to put things right is to repent. ‘Repent’ is a strong word, yet it talks about turning and going in a different direction. You recognise that you have done something wrong and you need to put it right. The last six years have revealed a pattern of cutting corners, deception and lack of care in the regulation of building safety. It has also revealed flaws in our housing stock. The government’s Levelling Up Bill gives some protection to those living in insecure blocks of flats, but does not yet protect innocent leaseholders from all the costs of remedying safety faults for which they were not responsible. Some leaseholders are in the fortunate position of having their developers agreeing to foot the bill to make things safe, but others aren’t, and are still facing high insurance premiums, remediation costs and are still waiting to see who will pay, how much will be covered and when.

The Earl of Lytton’s amendment to the bill offers protection to leaseholders by ensuring those responsible for safety defects at the time of construction pay up, or if the company no longer exists. The costs are covered by an industry levy, of money raised from those who have profited from cutting corners in the past, those on whom the Public Inquiry has shone an uncomfortable light. Passing an amendment such as this, that protects vulnerable leaseholders and places the costs on those responsible for them would be a fitting way to enact repentance, to ensure Grenfell is not repeated.

With a tragedy, however, you remember. The Grenfell Memorial Commission continues to meet and work on this very task. Conversations with the community continue and the desire is for a memorial that is peaceful, reflective, positive and respectful. A design team is to be chosen in the coming 12 months, with a view to a final plan being chosen by the end of 2024. The planning process and the building of whatever form of memorial is chosen will then start in 2025, to be finished some time later.

All this will take time and a further thing required beyond repentance and remembering - patience. A visit to the 9/11 memorial in New York recently reminded me how a memorial can help process and manage the pain of remembered tragedy and trauma. The site is comprehensive, respectful, dignified and unforgettable. The 9/11 memorial opened 10 years after the attacks, and the Museum, offering a detailed moment by moment account of the day and what led up to it, opened in 2014, 13 years after the event.

Remembering and repentance takes time and need to be done well. Repentance needs to be thoroughly thought through and enacted wisely. Remembering needs to emerge from deep reflection on what has happened and finding creative ways to being something positive and even beautiful out of tragedy. Neither need to be hurried, otherwise they will be done in a shoddy and off-hand way, which disrespects the memory of those who died.

For many, Grenfell may have dropped out of public consciousness. Yet societies, like people, are defined by the way they learn from mistakes and tragedies. Comprehensive building safety legislation and a dignified memorial that keeps the memory of Grenfell and those who died there alive for years to come will be the best legacy for Grenfell, even though it will take time. We are not there yet, but that future is worth waiting for.

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Wildness

7 November 2024

7 min read

It’s getting harder to be wild in this world

We’ve trapped and tamed wilderness into a commodity.

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Against a night sky a lit up face is blurred by the camera movement.

Under a Dartmoor night sky.

Yousef Salhamoud on Unsplash.

Some while back, my husband rearranged the books in our house, making sure that they were grouped together by theme. We have a lot of books, and there are now themes and sub-themes. It was quite an operation. Within the nature-related books, he created a separate shelf for books that have ‘wild’ in the title. We joked about it, but it made me think about how I’d noticed ideas of ‘wild’ pop up in lots of places in recent years: on clothing and stationery (with leaves or words like ‘keep growing’ printed), in shop windows (furniture displays draped in plastic greenery and fake animal skins), on social media (there are accounts that have ‘wild’ in the title connected to farming, conservation, publishing, personal development, coaching, poetry, business, and more), and in book shops (of which we apparently have only half the stock).

A quick online search on the topic of wilderness quickly leads me to conservation initiatives and statistics on the state of nature, but it also leads me to nature connection experiences, wild swimming, wild camping, soul work, and more. Wilderness becomes a pliable and hard-to-define term. It can relate to the natural world, to wildlife and natural spaces that have avoided human domination. It can also relate to the inner world, to spiritual experiences or to isolating and challenging times. But however you approach it, wilderness – inner, outer – seems to be having a hard time.

In recent months, wild camping has come under the spotlight. Dartmoor is the only place in England where wild camping is legal, and this this access helped to form me: as a teenager I hiked and camped with friends, encountered Dartmoor ponies trying to steal our food in the night, stomped through bogs and wolfed down boil-in-the-bag meals as the sun set. As an adult I’ve camped alone in a bivvy bag, my soul singing back to the Milky Way shining above me. Now, these experiences feel as much in need of protection as the nature they depend on, since a wealthy landowner decided to try and prevent people from undertaking this ancient practice of sleeping under the stars. The court case is ongoing, but it has highlighted the fragility of our access to nature here in England. Just 8 per cent of English countryside is accessible, and 3 per cent of rivers have an uncontested right to swim. Now, the last remaining right to sleep under the stars is under threat.

It is hard to know what we’re losing when it becomes harder and harder to see and touch the real thing.

We live in a time of crisis not just of the state of nature, but also of how we experience the natural world. In a recent study of nature connectedness, Britain was ranked lowest of all the countries surveyed. Our biodiversity is in crisis and so is our ability to encounter the natural world. This feels heightened by a way of being in the western world that sees us all living in our individual houses, working hard to pay for them, shuttling children and selves through schedules, spending fewer and fewer hours outside and with each other.

And this is not just a problem ‘out there’, because inner and outer landscapes are linked. It is unsurprising to me that in the UK at least, levels of good mental health, biodiversity, and access to nature have all been in decline. Disintegration of one is, I think, deeply connected to disintegration of the other.

These linked crises feel further threatened by the trapping and taming of ideas of wilderness, wrapping it into trends and materialism, commodifying it. There are some brilliant and essential initiatives helping to re-wild our inner and outer worlds. But there are also offerings that use wilderness imagery and the freedom and adventure associated with it to sell products and services, or as backdrop to human endeavour, or as a destination or resource for our consumption. I think a commodified wild can get in the way of the actual wilderness we need both externally and internally. This commodification is, I think, affecting our understanding of what the wild is and why it matters. It is hard to know what we’re losing when it becomes harder and harder to see and touch the real thing.

If real wilderness is everywhere but where we need it right now, how might we re-find it – in the natural world, but also within ourselves and our communities? Answering that question is work that many people are focused on now in all kinds of ways, and a short essay cannot begin to offer a full response. I will write more on this topic. But the question I have in mind at the moment is, how do we invoke wildness and wonder in the landscape of the modern world? – a physical landscape that is being stripped of nature, but also a social landscape that can often diminish our humanity. Perhaps a simpler way to ask the same question is, how do we not just survive life but get excited about it? – How do we love ourselves, our neighbours, and creation enough to deeply and truly care for these things?

Time stops, something says: here, look at this, it is everything.

There are of course structures, systems, and powers that need to change so that people can move out of mere survival, and so that the wild world is restored. I am not exploring those things here. Here, I want to simply share three things that lately, have energised my ability to feel the love, the excitement, and the desire to cherish and protect our hearts, our relationships, and the generous world that hosts us all. Perhaps by reawakening these things, we might find motivation and sustenance for tackling structures and systems.

First, I have been noticing what my young daughter notices. The light shining off a puddle; the way an ant crawls on her hand; the bright silver moon in the sky. I have never struggled to access the exhilaration of the natural world, but seeing through her eyes, I am doing so again. Time stops, something says: here, look at this, it is everything. The medieval mystic Julian of Norwich saw the wonder of the world, and God’s love for it, in a single hazelnut. She recounts her visions in her book Revelations of Divine Love. Sometimes connecting with the specific can help us see and face the global.

Second, there are authors who help me summon wildness and wonder in the landscape of the modern world, and in a future Seen & Unseen piece I’ll take us on a tour of some of those I love the most. Some of the authors are ancient. In Psalm 78, I read “…they forgot what he had done, the wonders he had shown them”, and “…they kept on sinning; in spite of his wonders, they did not believe.” If sin is a kind of disconnection, perhaps our disconnection from creation might lead our gaze to turn inward, and to land on things that do not call forth the best of humanity, rather than the wonder of each other and the world around us. That we are able to forget wonder is something we must remember and work to counter.

Third, I have been thinking through the encounters that have most exposed me to wilderness of the world and of my soul and of relationship – both the uplifting and the challenging. Encountering the vastness of that shining and vertigo-inducing Dartmoor night sky; encountering others in relationships that have helped me slip my skin and enter their unknowability and fragility and beauty; encountering contexts that seem too broken for repair and yet still light enters in. It is in these encounters that I first found God dwelling, and when I followed his trail, I noticed that throughout the Bible there are many people who experience the challenges, joy, and lessons of the wilderness. Wilderness is not just beauty – it can also be unknowable, disorienting, scary. For 40 days in the wilderness, but also in the beauty of the lily of the field and birds of the air, Jesus is right there with us, showing that God can meet us in beauty and barrenness, in wonder and in despair. Again and again in the Bible I see how God loves the world, how he calls it constantly to life through resurrection, through re-creation, through that three-in-oneness of father/son/holy spirit, of self/other/world, of body/encounter/mystery.

Now, I think our souls and societies might benefit from investing in relationships first conjured in Eden: with a garden, with a human, with God and the mystery he points us to. These things feed each other; when one suffers so do the others. As we face a disintegrating and increasingly commodified natural world, a mental health crisis, and an epidemic of loneliness, I think we are being called back to that garden, and to the kinds of wildness it made possible. I’ll look forward to exploring these themes more.