Television

Grenfell: Uncovered is an unflinching account of the greed and political callousness that surrounded the 2017 London high-rise tragedy. By Alison Croggon.

Grenfell: Uncovered and the anatomy of a deathtrap

The burnt-out Grenfell Tower in London.

Credit: Netflix

Just before 1am on June 14, 2017, Behailu Kebede, a resident in Grenfell Tower in the London district of North Kensington, was woken by a fire alarm. He saw smoke by a Hotpoint fridge-freezer in his kitchen, near the window, and at once called the London Fire Brigade. Firefighters arrived less than 10 minutes later and extinguished what they believed to be a routine kitchen fire.

They did some thermal imaging to check that the fire was out and to their concern saw what appeared to be embers falling outside the kitchen window. That was the first sign something was wrong. The fire spread up 20 storeys in only 90 minutes and engulfed the tower block, resulting in the deaths of 72 people, 18 of them children. It was one of Britain’s worst peacetime disasters.

Netflix’s Grenfell: Uncovered, directed by Olaide Sadiq in her feature debut, is a gripping account not only of what happened on June 14 but also of the myriad institutional failures, incompetence, corporate greed and criminal neglect that made it almost an inevitability. As the documentary shows in its tight 100 minutes, the Grenfell fire should never have happened.

It begins with an audio recording of the first panicked call from Kebede and wonky phone footage showing flames already beginning to climb the tower. “Words can’t explain it,” says firefighter Dave Badillo. “It felt like I was in a disaster movie … I’d never seen anything like that.”

At the centre of the documentary are people: the residents who died, the survivors and the grieving relatives and first responders who still grapple with the trauma of what happened that night. Their firsthand accounts are interwoven with interviews and footage that broaden the lens to the systemic problems in government and the private sector that made Grenfell Tower a deathtrap.

Sadiq deliberately foregrounds those who were forgotten or intentionally ignored in the deregulated austerity Britain created after David Cameron was elected in 2010. It’s their words that create the film’s devastating emotional charge.

Marcio Gomes and his daughter Luana, who was 12 at the time of the fire, describe their life before the tragedy – a lovely life, says Marcio – and then begin the harrowing story of how they escaped the burning tower with Marcio’s wife, Andreia, and Luana’s younger sister, Megan. Andreia was seven months pregnant at the time and her unborn baby, Logan, died after she was put in a medical coma and treated for cyanide poisoning, making him the fire’s youngest victim.

Omar Alhaj Ali, who shared a flat on the 14th floor with his brother Mohammad, was rescued by firefighters, but his brother was left behind. Finally, Mohammad tried to let himself down from the window, fell and died. Friends Bernie Bernard and Jackie Leger remember Bernie’s brother, Ray “Moses” Bernard, a musician who had lived on the 23rd floor at Grenfell for three decades. Residents from lower flats took refuge in his apartment as the fire climbed the tower. He died by a bed where children were huddling.

The accounts by firefighters who were there that night are just as harrowing. Badillo is clearly still haunted by his failure to save 12-year-old Jessica Urbano Ramirez, who took refuge on the 23rd floor. Chris Batcheldor, who arrived on the scene later, was powerless to help Zainab Deen – who was trapped with her two-year-old son, Jeremiah, and some neighbours in a corner apartment – and stayed on the phone to her until she died.

Together the Grenfell residents paint a picture before the fire of a thriving community of workers: architects, teachers, students, artists, musicians. But underneath ran the dark abyss of race and class. Grenfell Tower was bang in the middle of Kensington, one of London’s wealthiest boroughs. As one resident says, the tower was bringing down the value of the local real estate. The Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO) decided to spruce it up.

KCTMO put the plan out for tender and went with a company named Rydon, which quoted £8.7 million – undershooting its nearest competitor by more than £2 million. Cost-cutting was the byword, which is how they reached the catastrophic decision to use the cheapest material available – aluminium composite panel (ACP) cladding. ACP – which fuelled fires in residential towers in Melbourne’s Docklands in 2014 and the CBD in 2019 – is highly combustible.

Investigative journalist Peter Apps, the author of Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen, acidly notes in the documentary that it would have cost only another £5000 to ensure the building was fire-safe. As becomes clear, the company that made the cladding, Arconic, was well aware how flammable the product was and actively concealed the failures of its safety tests. Also culpable were Celotex and Kingspan, who made the flammable insulation.

There were many people – including tower residents – who had raised the alarm about the cladding in the years before the fire. Unfortunately, their campaigning coincided with Cameron’s deregulation push in Britain, which included a policy that if a new regulation were to be brought in, two had to be thrown out. When architect Sam Webb, a long-time campaigner for safety standards, told Brian Martin, a senior civil servant responsible for fire regulation, a year before Grenfell that safety standards needed to be tightened to prevent a tragedy with multiple deaths, Martin allegedly answered: “Where’s the evidence? Show me the bodies.” (Martin denies he said this.)

Even more egregious is Eric Pickles, who was housing secretary from 2010 to 2015. An enthusiastic supporter of Cameron’s deregulation campaign, he ignored a 2013 coroner’s report from an earlier fatal fire involving ACP. His appearance at the Grenfell Tower inquiry – convened by prime minister Theresa May shortly after the disaster – is breathtaking. He begins by telling the inquiry’s chief counsel, Richard Millett, that he is a busy man. “Feel free to ask me as many questions as you like,” he says. “But could I respectfully remind you that you did promise that we would be away this morning and I have changed my schedules to fit this in … I would urge you to use your time wisely.”

Millett’s pause and expressionless “Right…” in response is remarkably eloquent in its understated distaste. Later, when pressed about his deregulation agenda, Pickles spouted homilies about the lives lost. “Ultimately it comes down to the nameless – I think it was 96 people who were killed in the Grenfell fire – it’s them we should think about,” he said. In fact, 72 people died at Grenfell: 96 people were killed at Hillsborough Stadium. “If [those deaths are] not important to you,” remarks Peter Apps, “you’ll just mix it up with another disaster where a lot of working-class people died.”

The inquiry formally closed in February this year. Not one person has been arrested or charged for their part in the Grenfell tragedy, and worse, almost nothing has changed. The survivors are left to deal with their loss. “It was just not justice,” says Luana Gomes. “I don’t think that’s too much to ask.” Meanwhile, Eric Pickles was elevated to the House of Lords in 2018.

Grenfell: Uncovered is streaming on Netflix.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 5, 2025 as "Anatomy of a deathtrap".

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