Towering Inferno

[arry]

I wouldn't disagree (hey, in some ways they pay my wages) - it was more the political play of the headline I was getting at; especially after yesterday's calls for re-routing of the carnival because reasons.

[M.C]

[Kickstart]

[Rogerborg]

[M.C]

[Rogerborg]

[Jewlio Rides Again LLB]

[M.C]

[hellkat]

So.

How many of you in this thread have actually been to Grenfell Ground Zero and looked at the tributes and notes?

Probably slightly more might have at least been over the A40 where you cannot help but view the tower in all it's grimness from a slightly further distance.

Come then, come to London, get a good look up REAL FUCKING CLOSE at the lives of those affected.

Let's see how many of you are still glib statistic-quoting smart arses then, eh
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[hellkat]

That tower is such the shame of our city.
I don't think it should be pulled down.
I think it should stay standing, a grim reminder of what grasping greed and power-wrangling can do to people's lives.

What I'd like to see them do is scaffold the lot, shore it up as best they can, and then put concrete planters in on each floor, with a rose bush or other hardy type of flowery shrub* for every dead or unaccounted-for person.

Couple of years and it would be a fitting gravesite for all those bodies still in there/unable to be identified.

When it starts to fall down of its own accord, hopefully many years in the future, maybe then arrange to have it demolished.

But we as Londoners need the short sharp shock of being reminded just what happens when you forget about the small lives of people.

/hippy




*NOT buddleia which despite the pretty title of "butterfly bush" is a pestilential weed in London and will grow in any crack in abandoned buildings, given half a chance. Hate the stuff.
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Not nearly as interesting in real life.

[craigT19]

That's a nice idea Hellcat but I imagine the council has already been showered with offers from developers to "re-develop" the site and the greed will get the better of them eventually.
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[Im-a-Ridah]

[Rogerborg]

[hellkat]

Yes, at first glance it does seem that way, I fully understand what you are implyiing, but in fact from a human level you feel compelled to see if you can somehow empathise. It hasn't incentivised me to do anything other than realise just how little we consider the lives of other people, so busy are we in shouting about what we think are the big things, we forget about the small lives of ourselves and everyone else.

What happens is that you find yourself in the vicinity, and the human side of you thinks "Maybe I'll go and see how it is, now, surely after this much time it's not so ... gross (or indeed so ghoulish) as it was earlier on."

For myself, I took down some old clothes the following day for people to wear, but you couldn't get near the place, and they were suggesting you leave things with organised collectors at a local church. So I dropped the stuff and went off and vowed to come back. Hoping the smokey smell would not be there the next time I went back.

So you slink into the area, clutching some sort of conciliatory flowers that you might have wanted to pick from the rich-people's gardens down the road, but ended up getting a two quid bunch from a foreign guy at the traffic lights on the Westway, and which now feels like a beacon designating your outsiderishness, and feeling somewhat like a ghoulish tourist, and you try not to catch anybody's eye, in case they importune you for money, belongings, sympathy. But everyone (including the machete-brandishing cultural types that apparently everyone thinks are on every street corner in London), keeps themselves to themselves and you find somewhere to rid yourself of the flowers fairly sharpish.

But then you find yourself reading people's agony, on pieces of paper stuck to walls, in colourful angry graffiti which has bloomed on every building nearby, or just on the faces around the neighbourhood, its like standing at the back of a church during a funeral and watching the people giving the eulogy crying their eyes out, you're uncomfortable, embarrassed to be looking into the pain of people's lives, even those who did not live in the tower, you hear them talking to other people: their kids went to the same schools, or they knew someone from the pub or the chip shop. And then you read one too many tribute, and find the hairs on your arms tingling and your eyes leaking, and you creep away, yes feeling ghoulish, and wondering how the fuck anybody can make that right for those people. The neighbours feel guilty for having the fortune to still be alive, to not have been living in that block, because any number of locals could have been put in that block, and now they are feeling their own vulnerability, not just as people living in social housing, but as people with a lot less control over their lives than they ever realised before.

When you look at that tower, and like I said, you will do so if you travel on the Westway. The first time you come round the corner of the motorway and see it, its grim charcoaly reality is right there in front of you and it makes you gasp at its stark glassless windows and carbonized "splendour" in comparison to the other towers around it.

The more often you see it, the more you think about the people still inside, the ones nobody even knows exist, a block like that, its got to have had some illegal sublettings. The ones who were found in a big group in the corner: were they trying to band together to rescue one another? But when you see it and you imagine how they must have watched one another die, how they must have been mourning those dying in front of them, who they could not help and yet still trying desperately to save their own lives, when you think about those real details of what might have happened, their souls scream at you ... and finally you learn to avert your eyes, in that very English way, when driving past just as the right time not to see it. But you can't help yourself. It's like a mirror, when you pass you have to look, and when you do ... its like baring your soul to the Furies.

Once you've seen it, and thought about it, not as a facile commentator on the internet, or as a (rightfully) angry provincial feeling aggrieved at Londoncentric policies and events, but as a human being considering the lives of other human beings in circumstances you would never never want to find yourself, you can't unfeel the awe-inspiring terror of finding yourself in a similar situation, or the anger of thinking other people might be at risk of the same thing through simple acts of greed, selfishness or base stupidity.

So certainly it may be considered ghoulish, but I think the people taking selfies are the ghoulish ones, like the people who take selfies at Belsen. People genuinely do go there to be rememberingest, and to try to make sense of what happened and to feel how ruined the remaining lives are, and others go for the publicity value : "I went there, look at my selfie".

Yeah Rog, I went there, too, but I was too traumatised to even consider taking a selfie. You can rest assured that no matter what your reason for visiting, if you are an even slightly emotionally aware person, it does haunt you.
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Not nearly as interesting in real life.

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Having sympathy for those killed or affected is one thing, what this has turned into is way beyond that though.
It's being turned into a political weapon with blame being hurled around, where it's not really justified.

The level of begging and demanding of money far exceeds the needs of those claiming to be affected, many of whom it appears shouldn't have been in the country, let alone the tower block.
With the public pressure and anti establishment protests, we've now decided not to apply immigration law to anyone claiming to have been living there illegally at the time. The law should not be selectively applied.
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[hellkat]

I agree. It was turned into a political weapon before the flames had even been put out.

EDIT: (Indeed, its likely to have turned that way before the flames had even finished running up the building).

Not everybody in social housing is illegally in the country, or subletting. I do agree that sub-letting is rife, although the housing organisations have been making quite a strong attempt (prior to the fire) to ensure they are aware of individual occupants in every property, but as we all know, its like herding kittens.

(so now we are discussing the burnt-to-a-cinder souls of kittens screaming out for justice, it somehow makes it seem worse, even if they are illegal immigrant kittens)

I do also agree that the law should not be selectively applied. Indeed, for all my bleeding-heart liberalist rant in the post above, I take the somewhat unpopular view that if they had not been in the country and illegally lliving there, they would not have got themselves in that situation in the first place.

But you can't really say that to dead people whose sooty flakes of skin are probably still sticking to the tops of trees.
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[M.C]

[hellkat]

I've been to everywhere on I'm-a-Ridah's list, except Bristol - so I do know where they (all) are, and more. Despite rumours to the contrary, I do sometimes leave the gilded luxury within the M25, although admittedly it is quite rare. Be there not dragonnes out there? I don't always have my dragonne-banishing underpants on.

Although sure, if the same towerblock disaster were to happen in the distant lands of yore, I'm the first to admit I'd be unlikely to travel beyond the M25 just to have a look at some crusty old burnt out building full of allegedly illegal immigrants.

On Ridah's other salient point, I think people don't have too much trouble noticing that I am not the most politically correct person that ever lived.
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[M.C]

Well I've been to Lands End and John o' Groats, and quite a few places in between, and I can safely say the North's shit and worth avoiding where possible Londoners do tend to travel a fair bit, the best thing about this place's there are a million ways to get out.

[Im-a-Ridah]

[hellkat]

Of course I've heard of Shipley, its where the Manchester Shipley canal is.


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[M.C]

[hellkat]

If it makes you feel any better, we don't actually want Crossrail.
That was Bloody Boris's idea.
In fact, it may even have been Red Ken's idea before him.
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Not nearly as interesting in real life.

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