Show Me the Bodies: WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING 2023

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Never before, in years of reviewing books about buildings, has one brought me to tears. This one did.’ Rowan Moore, Observer Book of the Week Tenants’ complaints about shoddy workmanship and defective fire doors were ignored by high-handed officials, while a tenants’ blog – Playing with Fire – that in 2016 predicted “an incident that results in serious loss of life” was seen as “scaremongering”, with one of the authors sent a letter from council lawyers accusing it of being “defamatory”. The Building Research Establishment, an agency that examines the safety and performance of construction methods, was privatised, such that manufacturers would pay it to test their products. This arrangement would help the companies that made the insulation and cladding used on Grenfell to arrange tests where they could optimise their chances of positive results, and to suppress them when they failed.

An] essential read for everyone… [Apps’] coverage has been unmatched and he kept our attention on the astonishing revelations with compassion and persistence… Apps’ book brings together all he learnt through his detailed reporting from the trial. It is passionate and precise and admirably concise given the complexity of what he covers… It’s difficult to imagine a more informed or passionate summary than this book provides and I encourage everyone to read it.’ Well written, but not a pleasant read. This is not comfortable bedtime reading, but essential for those seeking to grasp the multiple causes of failure which culminated in the deadly Grenfell Tower fire. It is the best account of the Grenfell disaster and one of the most important books about British politics to come out in recent years… Apps’s book is a masterclass in reporting; across a wide span of highly technical detail, it never loses sight of the human story… Show Me the Bodies is a haunting indictment of contemporary Britain and all the people who claimed they could not see the harms caused by austerity, and a moving testament to those who paid the price.'

Table of Contents

Compelling, rigorous, utterly forensic and so very needed. This book has to be the moment that things change.' COINCIDING with last week’s closing of the 300-day inquiry into the Grenfell Tower fire comes the publication of a damning and moving account of the events leading up to the entirely preventable disaster that claimed 72 lives, 17 of them children. Apps, who has covered the inquiry daily, alternates these narrative chapters with a forensic examination of how building regulations and corporate safety standards have been watered down since Margaret Thatcher’s deregulation bonanza. It is a story of corporate structures that allowed human beings to abandon their won conscience and sense of agency and to think only about sales and profit margins, and of government institutions that place ideology above human lives at every turn.” Show Me the Bodies is, throughout, deeply moving. Drawing on interviews and materials presented to the inquiry, Apps follows the stories of a number of residents across the night of the fire. The book is full of details about these people’s lives and descriptions of relationships that illustrate just a few of the many vivid, meaningful lives that were being lived in Grenfell. An elderly man describes how he thought his wife was “out of his league” when they first met; a family expecting a new baby says they were feeling close as the due date neared; a mother talks about how special her relationship with her adult daughter was. As the night that the book recounts unfolds, transcripts of phone calls and social media posts are used to heartbreaking effect; in one instance, Apps reproduces the transcript of a London fire service operator on the phone with a man who has lost sight of his young daughter in the smoke-filled stairwell and is refusing to go on without her. “Anyone would like a dad like you,” the operator says.

House of the Year 2023 shortlist: Cowshed reborn as living a... House of the Year 2023 shortlist: Cowshed reborn as living and work space You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here.This book will make you cry, and it will also make you very angry. This is the story of the people who escaped and of those who died, but also, why this happened, why it didn't have to and shouldn't have, how campaigners were ignored and how the government really does value business and profit over the lives of the poor, the working classes and the disadvantaged. A bonfire, a bonfire, a bonfire. David Cameron promised one as prime minister, as did Boris Johnson, as did Liz Truss when she ran for the highest office in the land. Conservative leaders come and go, but they all want a conflagration. Always of red tape, of course, the semi-mythical substance that is said to throttle business. The trouble is that, in the case of Grenfell Tower, it was human lives that burned. The 30-year pursuit of deregulation in the building industry demonstrably contributed to the killing of 72 people in their homes. It helped lead to the moment when a two-year-old boy died coughing and crying in his mother’s arms while she was on her phone to a firefighter, shortly before she too died. Since 14 June 2017, when 72 people were killed in a fire engulfing the west London high-rise of Grenfell Tower, the story of the atrocity has turned from one of lives to one of numbers.