The Grenfell Tower fire was a tragedy; the case made in a new book by housing journalist Peter Apps is that it was also a choice. Apps, the deputy editor of Inside Housing magazine, had been reporting on the dangers of flammable cladding before the fire. He has subsequently covered the inquiry into the events at Grenfell in meticulous detail. Show Me the Bodies is the culmination of many years of reporting into what Apps calls “the worst crime committed on British soil this century.” It is the best account of the Grenfell disaster and one of the most important books about British politics to come out in recent years.

Show Me the Bodies" becomes tear jerking without being meretricious; the narration of a plethora of stories, deriving both from survivors and bereaved families, is scaringly pragmatic and revealing, without the addition of melodramatic elements. The narration's truthfulness aids to increase the awareness concerning the systematic mechanism failures that orchestrated the fire's extent. Working from painstaking daily reporting from the inquiry, alongside extensive interviews with the bereaved and survivors of the Grenfell atrocity, Apps has written a concise, devastatingly detailed and upsetting book. Peter Apps is an award-winning journalist and Deputy Editor at Inside Housing. He broke a story on the dangers of combustible cladding thirty-four days before the Grenfell Fire. His coverage of the public inquiry has received widespread acclaim. He lives in London. Our 2023 judging panel, chaired by Martha Lane Fox, said:I read this book on recommendation from a relative, and I am glad I did. It took me longer to read than my average reading pace because some parts were incredibly emotional and heavy to get through. If they’d been listened to, they would all still be alive. A similar fire, which killed six people at Lakanal House in south London in 2009, should have been enough of a warning, but it wasn’t. Seventy-eight people were killed by a collision of forces with one common root: the broad contempt showed by people with power towards those without it.

The easy villain of the piece is Brian Martin, who failed to take action on woefully inadequate cladding safety regulation. His name comes up again and again, including during a bizarre exchange when he asserts that a former fireman with a commitment to higher standards being placed in charge of certain regulations would “bankrupt” the country and that “we would all starve to death.” But Apps rejects Brian Martin’s claim, made at the inquiry, to being a “single point of failure” in his department; clearly, this was not the case. Show Me the Bodies is committed to documenting what happened, eschewing easy narratives that detract attention from the structural causes of the Grenfell tragedy. Martin, in Apps’s account, gets neither damnation nor absolution, although it is clear which he deserves. A searing indictment of the construction industry and regulators… The book that follows reads like a prosecution, meticulous and fierce.' Apps, who has covered the inquiry daily, alternates these narrative chapters with a forensic examination of how building regulations and corporate safety standards have been watered down since Margaret Thatcher’s deregulation bonanza. 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.The book’s title, Show Me the Bodies, is taken from remarks said to have been made by Brian Martin, the civil servant responsible for fire safety guidance at the privatised national research laboratory, BRE, to justify not tightening up regulations in response to a series of devastating fires at home and abroad, including Lakanal House in Southwark in 2009 in which six people had perished. This should be a required text for anyone involved in the built environment. From architects to politicians, all decision makers should read Show Me the Bodies.

It is the best account of the Grenfell disaster and one of the most important books about British politics to come out in recent years… Apps’s book is a masterclass in reporting; across a wide span of highly technical detail, it never loses sight of the human story… Show Me the Bodies is a haunting indictment of contemporary Britain and all the people who claimed they could not see the harms caused by austerity, and a moving testament to those who paid the price.' It tells us something about how we are governed and the priority our political and economic system placed on human life,” writes author Peter Apps, deputy editor of Inside Housing, who has been following the tragedy from day one. Author has done a fantastic job of outlining accounts of some that made it out and others that didnt, while interspersed throughout are facts that were already in public domain prior to grenfell, along with others that were kept under wraps by various parties, but primarily the cladding suppliers of the products which weren't safe for use on such a tower under the conditions used. And with only ourselves and South Korea allowing these items on, surely it would have occurred to somebody that it's not a great idea. Apps alternates his narrative between the escalating events of the fire on 14 June 2017, and the decades of deregulation, isolated decisions and blantant neglect which cumulatively created to a tinder box scenario. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here.COINCIDING with last week’s closing of the 300-day inquiry into the Grenfell Tower fire comes the publication of a damning and moving account of the events leading up to the entirely preventable disaster that claimed 72 lives, 17 of them children.