Listening to the Voices of Grenfell Tower3 min read

The words on this page come from my voice. They speak to my personal experiences, and my own turn of phrase. My voice is my identity. Its tone, it’s written hand on paper and the words chosen can indicate many things. Personal qualities, yes, but also political ones like gender, class, race, and ethnicity.
Voice, then, means something powerful in our social discourse. The fact that ScribersHive has provided a space for my words to occupy these pages says something about who it believes should be allowed to speak, and how. Who has the right to speak, and who our society chooses to listen to is crucial to designing a fair political system.
MP for Tottenham, David Lammy got it spot on in his moving commentary on the Grenfell Tower fire when he said that its inhabitants had ‘no power, no locus, no agency.’ In short, they had no voice that anyone in our society was listening to. The residents of Grenfell Tower, a public housing block built in 1974, were all from a low-income bracket, substantial numbers from ethnic minorities and many being first generation immigrants and even refugees.
In 2014, the fire-resistant zinc cladding approved by residents was replaced with a cheaper aluminium material in the contract between Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO) and Rydon, the company refurbishing the tower. Grenfell Action Group, the organisation representing residents, pointed out the fire risk repeatedly. In November 2016, they all too accurately warned that only a ‘catastrophic’ event would be impetus enough for management to take their concerns seriously.
Grenfell’s residents organised and wrote so that their local authorities would hear their concerns, and act on them accordingly. The reason such groups exist at all is to stake a claim to their local community, to commit to bettering the space they call home. But Grenfell, in the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea, is also home to some of the wealthiest in the country.
While the mean salary, at £123,000, is among the highest in Britain, the median (the amount half the population is above, and half below) is just £32,700. The borough embodies a stark inequality. Helped along by nine years of cuts to public services, places like Kensington have seen the exponential growth of the luxury housing market in one part of the borough and the tripling of overcrowding figures in another.
In London, these disadvantages mean everything from struggling to navigate the bureaucracy of social welfare, to lacking a decent space for children to do their homework. Money and influence speak louder than community action groups, and the voices of North Kensington residents were invalidated and delegitimised by their place on the social ladder.
Persistent calls for health and safety maintenance were ignored in a manner that the developers of luxury penthouses next door would never dream of. The illusion of attention, in the form of the block’s new cladding, was constructed to silence Grenfell’s demands without hearing them. It was a symbol of an ignorance that ultimately killed its inhabitants.
If this tragedy tells us anything, it’s that it’s time to start listening.