Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen

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Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

Peter Apps (Author), Colin Mace (Narrator), W. F. Howes Ltd (Publisher)
4.8 4.8 out of 5 stars 317 ratings
See all formats and editions

On 14 June 2017, a 24-storey block of flats went up in flames.

The fire climbed up cladding as flammable as solid petrol. Fire doors failed to self-close. No alarm rang out to warn sleeping residents. As smoke seeped into their homes, all were told to ‘stay put'. Many did–and they died.

It was a disaster decades in the making.

Peter Apps exposes how a steady stream of deregulation, corporate greed and institutional indifference caused this tragedy. It is the story of a grieving community forsaken by our government, a community still waiting for change.

“However painful the story of Grenfell is, it is one we must hear. Apps' powerful testament tells us how injustice was manifested and how lessons still fail to be learned.”–David Lammy MP

“A staggering achievement, both a testament to the victims, the bereaved and the community of Grenfell and a painstaking, forensic investigation into the causes of the crime itself.”–David Peace, author of the Red Riding Quartet

“Compelling, rigorous, utterly forensic and so very needed. This book has to be the moment that things change.”–Lucy Easthope, author of When the Dust Settles

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  1. Listening Length
    8 hours and 15 minutes
  2. Author
    Peter Apps
  3. Narrator
    Colin Mace
  4. Audible release date
    January 19, 2023
  5. Language
    English
  6. Publisher
    W. F. Howes Ltd
  7. ASIN
    B0BRLD2SKJ
  8. Version
    Unabridged
  9. Program Type
    Audiobook
  10. See all details
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Product details

Listening Length 8 hours and 15 minutes
Author Peter Apps
Narrator Colin Mace
Whispersync for Voice Ready
Audible.com Release Date January 19, 2023
Publisher W. F. Howes Ltd
Program Type Audiobook
Version Unabridged
Language English
ASIN B0BRLD2SKJ
Best Sellers Rank #416,597 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals)
#185 in Poverty & Homelessness Studies
#1,754 in Poverty
#2,840 in Sociology (Audible Books & Originals)

Customer reviews

4.8 out of 5 stars
4.8 out of 5
317 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Julian G Halliday
5.0 out of 5 stars Infuriating and deeply distressing; a first rate book
Reviewed in the United States on August 7, 2023
Verified Purchase
Peter Apps has a clarity of expression which appears to derive directly from his clarity of purpose; he's angry, and he's right to be. The interweaving of human drama and catastrophe with bureaucratic and political lethargy, incompetence, and just stupid thinking, is very well done. On the cover the single blurb says that this is the first book "on housing" which brought the reviewer to tears; I would challenge any thinking person with an ounce of empathy not to have the same reaction. I found myself pounding the bed next to me with my fist, somewhat to my wife's surprise (though she was accustomed to me reading out the odd especially egregious passage of malfeasance or heedlessness) repeatedly.

I bought this book because I read a review essay which mentioned it in tandem with another book ("The New Life," by Tom Crewe, coincidentally with a very similar cover-colour scheme, also waiting beside my bed now), and although I of course knew about the Grenfell Tower disaster I did not know what to expect. You would think that a book about fire safety standards, planning permissions, social housing management and so forth would be dry and hard to warm to; not this book. This book gets its hooks into you more or less instantly and doesn't let go until you're done. It's not merely a literary accomplishment -- it is also the sort of cautionary tale which ought to be read and absorbed by anyone responsible for risk assessment in housing, anyone responsible for urban planning or city management or fire department policy...the lessons Apps draws are so widely applicable that I cannot but describe this book as an extremely important contribution. It doesn't escape me that it is almost certain that none of the constituents who might benefit from it will read it -- here in the US because it's "not local and therefore irrelevant," in the UK because, well, "that's not the way we do things."

Anyway, I recommend "Show Me the Bodies" without reservation.
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David G
5.0 out of 5 stars Very Sobering
Reviewed in the United States on July 2, 2023
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This a book that all Architects, Building Officials, and, in fact, anyone related to the building industry should read.
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Geir Jensen
5.0 out of 5 stars Best ever all-embracing anatomy of catastrophy
Reviewed in the United States on December 27, 2022
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Apps links daily life routines of Grenfell victims all the way to prime minister via industry and every parties on how they affected the catastrophy unfolding. Technical and administrative, it is all here. Unique food for thought for everyone involved in life safety.
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Top reviews from other countries

Phil Cheshire
5.0 out of 5 stars Essential reading.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 29, 2024
Verified Purchase
This is an excellently researched, detailed, highly readable, important and humane account of a disaster that has significance in its own right but also serves to alert us to a deeper underlying rot in our society and political culture.
Peter Apps should be congratulated for the way he has uncovered and brought together the details and laid out the ramifications for the prevalent political and management culture in the UK, while retaining the centrality of the human tragedy and moral crime of the fire in his deeply humane telling of the story.
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Norman Bave
5.0 out of 5 stars Sad but necessary
Reviewed in Italy on July 14, 2023
Verified Purchase
Having come from a social housing background I thought it was a must read to see how it happened.
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CNicS
5.0 out of 5 stars Forensic, insightful and thoughtful - a must read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 10, 2023
Verified Purchase
I came to this book by way of Apps’ summaries of the Grenfell inquiry, and frankly expected this to be a rerun of those columns (albeit in a more user friendly format). How wrong I was. This book is so much more - detailed, thoughtful, considered and analytic, and yet immensely readable (and an excellent digest and companion to the inquiry columns for those who want to return to those columns for more detail of those proceedings). It seamlessly switches between explanations of the events at Grenfell, previous events involving other buildings, and the workings of government and the construction industry. An absolute must read.
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john clark
5.0 out of 5 stars MUST BE READ.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 3, 2024
Verified Purchase
This is an amazing book, it's incredible as you read the book how many individuals and companies were responsible from governments both labour and conservative to councils, building supplies and constructers and even the fire service. It makes you ashamed and annoyed. And with the overwhelming feeling that these people weren't valued at all. Peter Apps book should be read by all.
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annwiddecombe
5.0 out of 5 stars A vital book
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 24, 2022
Verified Purchase
I own a London flat in a block that was clad in ACM panels similar to those that proved so disastrous at Grenfell, so I have a vested interest in this book.

But the story, brilliantly researched and told by Peter Apps, is of course much wider and deeper than just the advent of this type of - thank God - now-damned building product.

It is a tragic, depressing account. Apps exposes the very worst of UK plc: a construction industry involved in a race to the bottom; the dehumanising effects of neoliberal, cost-cutting, small state ideology; a bizarre, macho, monolithic culture in the London Fire Brigade (recently exposed again); under-qualified people making life-and-death decisions; a local council that seemed to actively loathe most of its residents; a peculiarly British attitude to housing that has stripped it of its essential purpose - to provide a safe home - and turned it into something as greed-driven and unstable as the market for crypto-currency.

Add in Brexit, add in COVID, and who could deny that venal, self-serving attitudes, mendacity and callous incompetence are coming to define this country?

The book cuts between the development of the lethal materials and shoddy construction processes that were in place at Grenfell and the events of the tragic night itself, creating an effective tension between the business and human sides of the story. Apps is not afraid to point fingers, and rightly so. There has been so much inaction and so many inane excuses, particularly from this government. I, like many hundreds of thousands of flat owners, have despaired as a succession of housing ministers have refused to address the issue. Meanwhile we all sat in our homes, made worthless by events and the mortgage industry, anxiously checking the batteries in our smoke alarms, fixing our self-closing doors, paying for waking watches, and worrying if we would all be made bankrupt by the vast demands from landlords and freeholders for remedial works.

72 people died at Grenfell. 72. Grandparents. Babies. Mothers. Fathers. With so little change, politically and socially - still, unbelievably, we have a government committed to austerity and deregulation - there will be another terrible event like Grenfell, and yet more bodies.
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