It’s been eight years since Grenfell Tower went up in flames – almost exactly. On June 14, 2017, the lives of thousands of people changed for ever. 72 people died. London was shaken, as was people’s trust in things like the fire service and emergency services.
The wounds are still raw, all the more so because the survivors of the disaster have been deprived of justice. And now, Netflix has stepped up to condense it all into an hour and a half of television.
The platform has form in TV as activism. Toxic Town aired earlier this year, of course, bringing the attention of millions to the neglected scandal of Corby.
Grenfell Uncovered isn’t a dramatisation – it’s a documentary, a blow-by-blow retelling, and it uses all of the facts at the public’s disposal during the long-running enquiry into the disaster to tell its story.
Yes, the information is technically already out there, but it’s never really been condensed into something this concise and easily understandable before – certainly not on a massive streaming channel like Netflix, which will put it in front of millions of viewers.
To deploy it, director Laide Sadiq brings together a wide-ranging selection of people involved in the disaster: Inside Housing journalist Peter Apps, activists, and survivors from the tragedy itself, like the Gomes family (dad Marcio and daughter Luana do most of the talking here).
The variety of ways in which people were failed are shocking. We hear that Grenfell Tower – built in 1972 – was ageing and, in the eyes of the Kensington and Chelsea council, ugly. On the hunt for a solution to make the building less of a “poor cousin” to its flashier neighbours, the council opted to hire contractors Rydon to clad the tower in an aluminium composite material.
.jpeg)
The issue? That material – which was only slightly cheaper than better quality, safer alternatives – was extremely flammable. Its makers, Arconic, knew that: we dive down a rabbit hole of failed tests and cover-ups by its senior management.
We hear about how Rydon’s desire to save money resulted in them cutting corners, saving a measly £5,000 and dooming Grenfell’s residents in the process. We hear about how a frenzy of regulation-slashing under David Cameron meant vital laws that might have saved them were never put in force. “Show me the bodies,” senior civil servant Brian Martin reportedly told activists – though this is a comment he denied during the enquiry, saying that while he was “known for using plain English”, that was “a bit plainer than I would have said”.
We hear about how the London Fire Brigade was woefully ill-equipped to handle a disaster on the scale of Grenfell, and how its ‘stay in place’ policy (which is still in force in high rises today) meant people didn’t escape the fire when they could. The blow-by-blow retelling of how the fire spread is unsparing; they’re accompanied by videos taken on the day, which gain potency after we learn about the people who died inside those blazing flats.
After all that, what lessons were learned? The documentary suggests very few, if any. Theresa May pops up to talk about the aftermath of the disaster; shamefully, no other politicians do. Nobody seems willing to take any accountability. In the meantime, the grief of the survivors, families and even the firefighters who tried their best to do their job as people died bleeds off the screen.
Some of it, too, is absolutely enraging. One sequence featuring Eric Pickles, the former Secretary of State under Cameron, who gave evidence at the enquiry, is chilling. A blustering Pickles tells his questioners off for impinging on his “extremely busy day meeting people,” before going onto pay tribute to “the nameless, I think it’s 96 people,” killed in the fire.
As somebody later notes, 96 was the number of people who died during the Hillsborough disaster. I’ll leave that there. No wonder we – and they – are still waiting for justice to be done.
Grenfell Uncovered is streaming now on Netflix
