It is a night like thousands of others in London. Mild, quiet, uneventful. The 13th of June ends, the 14th begins, and nobody notices the difference. In the streets of North Kensington, the street lamps light empty pavements. The windows are dark. Behind the walls of Grenfell Tower, 24 storeys of concrete standing there since 1974, people are asleep. Children, old people, families squeezed into one-bedroom flats, tenants who will get up at dawn to go to work. Nothing sets this night apart from the others. Nothing, except what comes next.
At 00:54, Behailu Kebede calls the fire brigade. In his kitchen, on the fourth floor, his Hotpoint fridge-freezer is on fire. A model FF175B, made between 2006 and 2009, around 64,000 units sold. A fridge like millions of others. Kebede was woken by his smoke alarm. He opened the kitchen door, saw smoke coming out of the appliance, and did exactly what he had been taught: warn his neighbours, knock on doors, call 999. He leaves the building without his wallet, without his keys. He does not know yet that he will never go back up to his flat.
The first engines arrive at 00:59, five minutes after the call. Firefighters enter flat 16 at 01:07, search the bedrooms, look for casualties. Only at 01:14 do they open the kitchen door. A wall of flames. But the problem is no longer there. The fire has left the room, it has gone out through the window. And outside, it has found something.
Panels: metal on the surface, plastic inside. The fire does not know this is called polyethylene, that it is highly flammable, that it was put up a year earlier to “improve” the tower. The fire knows nothing. It climbs.
At 01:21, it reaches the eleventh floor. At 01:30, the top. Twenty floors in 36 minutes.
It should not have happened like this. The 1974 tower was built to contain a fire. Each flat was a fire compartment: a fire in your home stayed in your home, the firefighters dealt with it, the neighbours slept on. The principle worked, on one condition: that the fire could not get round the walls from the outside. The panels fitted in 2016 changed that. They gave the fire a vertical route. It took it.
By 02:00, several floors are burning at once. Inside, some people are still asleep, others are calling 999. They are told to stay in their flats, that is the advice. We will come back to that. By 03:30, the whole tower is ablaze. The fire will not be brought under control until the next day. 72 people died that night, from an unborn child to a woman of 84. Whole families. Neighbours who had known each other for decades.
Outside, the neighbours watch. The ones in the £8M houses, two kilometres to the south. The ones who had never seen this tower, or pretended not to. Because Grenfell Tower stands in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC), the richest borough in London. But above all it stands in North Kensington, in the Notting Dale ward, among the 10% most deprived areas in England. Eighteen years less life expectancy than the southern part of the borough. Same borough, different world. In the 19th century, pigs were kept here, in the mud. W.H. Wills, writing in Household Words, Dickens’s magazine, described the place as a “plague spot”. The slums were cleared, the towers went up. Poverty changed shape, not address.