Grenfell Britain - by Emma Dent Coad (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

On the 10th anniversary of the Grenfell Tower fire - A searing indictment of government failure and corporate greed; and what it tells us about the wider state of Britain today.

Grenfell Britain asks the essential question: if Grenfell didn't change everything, what will?In the early morning of 14 June 2017, a fire scaled the 23 storey Grenfell Tower in Notting Dale, London, killing 72 residents. It was the worst civilian disaster since World War II. Four days before, Emma Dent Coad had been elected as the local Labour MP, and lived only three streets away. Since then she has been a tireless critic of those in power who had failed the community before the fire, and the authorities that had ignored the lessons of that morning. Grenfell Britain looks at the legacy of the fire over the following decade. A £173million government inquiry was called and has since exposed the lies, negligence and cuts that led to an atrocity some have called 'social murder'; the chair of the Inquiry stated: 'every death was avoidable'. Yet nothing seems to have changed. This is not just a brutal reckoning for the community around the Tower but the whole of Britain. And Dent Coad exposes the extent of the housing crisis. An estimated 500,000 people still live in homes with unsafe cladding, and if you add in other fire safety defects, it's one million living in unsafe homes; the luxury developments standing empty while 22,000 homes in one borough alone sit unused and 3,000 families languish on waiting lists; the facial recognition cameras installed only on council estates; the social workers forced to remove children from families because housing disrepair is so extreme.As we reach the anniversary, Grenfell Britain is both an act of witness and a call to action. It insists that housing must be at the centre of all politics and demands that we stop letting the privileged few dictate how the many must live--or die.

About the Author

Emma Dent Coad is an architectural historian and built environment campaigner. From 2006 she has worked in local government as councillor in Kensington and Chelsea as well as London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority at the GLA. She was Labour MP for Kensington (which included Notting Dale) between 2017-19. She has been a prominent critic of the local council and in-demand as a commentator on housing and the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire.