Netflix is on quite a run of wrenching documentary films exposing avoidable tragedies, and there is perhaps no tragedy more flagrantly avoidable than the one which befell London’s Grenfell Tower in 2017. Like Trainwreck: The Astroworld Tragedy and Titan: The OceanGate Disaster, Grenfell: Uncovered is a vital and often enraging catalogue of greed, incompetence, systemic failure, and disinterest over the lives of everyday people. Given that no criminal proceedings or class-action lawsuits have yet emerged in the aftermath of Grenfell, despite how obvious it is that multiple people and companies were directly responsible for 72 lost lives, the value of Olaide Sadiq’s film is self-evident.
Through testimony of survivors and first responders and the families of the victims, as well as a welcome steering hand from housing journalist Peter Apps, Grenfell: Uncovered lays out the precise sequence of events that led to the tragedy, which saw a high-rise apartment block in North Kensington become the worst residential fire in the U.K. since the Blitz. And none of it should have happened, nor would it have, if it weren’t for knowingly dangerous decisions made to make the “poor cousin” of a nearby glossy development less of an eyesore for more well-off Londoners.
The word of the day is “cladding”. Since Grenfell had mostly been left to rot by the local council, with many of the residents in a seemingly endless battle with the consistently uninterested Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (TMO), its outward appearance was deemed unsatisfactory. The solution was to spruce up the exterior with cladding to preserve nearby property values. This cladding, bought from the French division of a U.S. aluminium firm, was extremely flammable. Public inquiries have since determined that the three companies involved in providing the cladding and insulation – Arconic, Kingspan, and Celotex – almost certainly knew about this and deliberately obscured the results of their own safety testing to sell it anyway.
Nobody cared. The Grenfell makeover was intended to be as cheap as possible, and for the sake of a saving of £40 per flat, materials were chosen that were provably dangerous. And the writing was very much on the wall. A similar fire, the Lakanal House fire in 2009, had set a precedent. Numerous similar cladding-related fires in Europe had resulted in tighter regulations everywhere except the U.K., where London’s fire brigade was still unknowingly pushing the deadly policy of “stay put”, whereby residents in tower fires remained in their flats in the mistaken belief that it was impossible for a fire to spread between them. The failures were endless.
Grenfell: Uncovered deliberately juxtaposes its heartfelt human testimony with the disgustingly slippery efforts of those responsible to wriggle their way out of culpability. Predictably, most declined to comment, but there’s enough archival footage of David Cameron, whose government’s performative aversion to red tape carries considerable blame, and Eric Pickles, the housing secretary at the time of the refurbishment, to get the point across. Pickles is especially rancid, an egg-like ignoramus who smugly told the inquiry that they should “make the most” of their opportunity to ask questions because he was a busy man and had other things to be getting on with.
Someone who does make an appearance is Theresa May, who was prime minister at the time and famously bungled her response to the disaster. I’ll admit it takes some bottle for her to feature at all, but her offerings are characteristically weaselly. It’s a recurring theme and explains why so little has been done in the aftermath. Nobody responsible has been brought to justice, those who suffered haven’t been adequately compensated, and many buildings in the U.K. and elsewhere still have similar cladding and the same “stay put” policy. Just as the Grenfell residents feared, it’ll likely take another extraordinary tragedy to draw enough attention to the continuing issues. And even then, if it’s poor working-class people who’re burning to death, it’s likely anyone in power will care. Grenfell remains a blight on our national conscience. Hopefully, this film goes some way towards justice for its victims.