The disaster that was Grenfell Tower is documented in a most moving film from Olaide Sadiq.
Image courtesy of Netflix.
It appears that society cannot function very long without some sort of scandal intruding into public life. The country seems to go from one scandal to the next with increasing rapidity. If it’s not the Press hacking into private phone calls, the Government’s racist treatment of the Windrush generation, child abuse in care homes, politicians ignoring Covid regulations, the BBC falling into disrepute by ignoring misdemeanors, and the Post Office ruining the lives of their sub-postmasters through faulty computers and incompetent executives, then there are other scandals waiting in the wings such as the Thames Water fiasco and the ill-advised HS2 rail project. The worst of them, of course, was the horrendous fire that consumed most of the 24-storey residential Grenfell Tower in London’s North Kensington area in which 72 people died. No one has been prosecuted for the ‘accident’ which need not have happened if it were not for the penny-pinching policy of the local council involving the use of the wrong sort of cladding. The scandalous history of Grenfell has now been told in a brilliant and moving documentary by Olaide Sadiq.
Grenfell Tower was designed in 1967 and built in 1970 for the Kensington and Chelsea Borough Council as part of a local housing scheme. It consisted of 120 flats, six per floor on 20 storeys with the bottom four floors used for other purposes. It had been built to last for at least a hundred years with the use of precast concrete blocks. The building opened in 1974, housing many local immigrant families. Renovations were made to the Tower from 2015 to improve the Brutalist appearance of the architecture, including a new heating system and new windows in order to increase its thermal efficiency. However, the aluminium composite rainscreen cladding used to smarten up the building’s appearance was faulty. Unfortunately, the Council had chosen the cheapest form of cladding which, in some quarters including other European countries, had been deemed unsafe and highly flammable and as a result banned from use.
On 14 June 2017 a small fire broke out in one of the flats due to an electrical fault but with the flammable cladding the fire spread to the rest of the block. The fire raged for some 24 hours and despite the efforts of hundreds of firefighters and nearly fifty fire engines, 72 people and a stillborn baby perished in what was a disaster that should never have happened. Had the Council used better cladding or even kept the original material without trying to upgrade the building’s appearance, Grenfell Tower would still be in use and a terrible scandal would have been averted.
Documentarist Olaide Sadiq has compiled a most compelling film about the worst disaster in recent history and the most scandalous, from which the archive footage of the fire is beyond belief. He has interviewed residents of the Tower, firefighters, local Council members and the Tenant Management Organisation, lawyers and counsel, fire scientists and even the Prime Minister of the day, Theresa May, while journalist Peter Apps, deputy editor of Inside Housing magazine, explains the situation. There is also archive footage of politicians at the time, all of whose contributions make a most distressing picture of the whole disastrous ‘accident’. Of course, everybody regrets what happened but it is too late to say sorry afterwards, which is often what happens with cases such as Grenfell, the Post Office scandal, Windrush and Covid etc. These scandals should just not happen under whatever government is in power.
Grenfell Uncovered is a sobering look at Britain today. It is a carefully thought-out piece, convincing, truthful, moving and not at all sensationalist. The irony is that nobody has been held to be responsible for any aspect of the fire and its consequences, yet the results of the fire are still being felt in the rehousing of the tenants who managed to escape with their lives. And the worst irony of all is that there are still tower blocks elsewhere that contain the wrong cladding and that could at any time become another Grenfell.
MICHAEL DARVELL
Featuring journalist Peter Apps, firefighters David Badillo and Chris Batchelor, Celestine Cheong of the Fire Protection Association, Dany Cotton, London Fire Brigade Commissioner, Rock Feilding-Mellen, Deputy Council Leader and Cabinet Member for Housing, Stephen Hockman, Geraint Webb and Graig Orr, lawyers, Peter Maddison, Kensington & Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation, Richard Millett, Lead Counsel, Guillermo Rein, Fire Scientist, Theresa May and many Grenfell residents in person and on archive film.
Dir Olaide Sadiq, Pro James Rogan, Soleta Rogan and Sandy Smith, Ph Harry Truman, Art Dir Nathan Clarke, Ed Dan Preston, Music Ed Baillie, Sound Patrick Pripp.
Rogan Productions-Netflix.
101 mins. UK. 2025. UK and US Rel: 20 June 2025. Cert 12.
