Fire at Grenfell Tower in London

^^^stephen bush there, good for him

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jun/18/cladding-on-grenfell-tower-banned-in-uk-says-philip-hammond

Jesus, 60+ people dead in a forest fire in Portugal today.

http://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/i-wouldn-t-want-to-live-anywhere-else-but-a-block-of-flats-like-grenfell-tower-a3566606.html🕸

lol I missed the headline in the middle and was momentarily very impressed by how talk of moral hazard turned to the topic of Wonder Woman.

Eve Allison, a Conservative who sits on Kensington and Chelsea Borough Council, said the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower should have looked at the inside as well as the outside of the block.

“It is on our watch, it’s our responsibility, we do have a duty of care to all our residents and whatever findings and failings come out, they have to come out soon because all the community, the victims, the families, people need answers,” she told BBC Breakfast.

“All too often we’re a little bit too concerned with how the immediate streetscape looks, how a building fits into other buildings, does it detract from the immediate streetscape.”

“I was not involved with the actual planning of the recent refurbishment....from what I’m hearing, it would have been ideal if part of the refurbishment package had looked at actually trying to gentrify inside, not just outside. “

!

Nick Robinson was really grinding my gears earlier. I can accept that he is an ingrained Tory and the bbc allow him to bring his biases to work with him, but he can fuck and die atm. I don't how many other factors there have been in this disaster, but the simple connection of government drastically cutting local authority funding and local authorities doing shoddy and dangerous refurbs to meet reduced budgets isn't going to be waved away with that weak shit he is coming out with.

This is pretty infuriating. It wasn't the standards of the seventies that killed 80-odd people, it was the standards of 2016. The idea that if you start tearing tower blocks across major British cities down, rather than making them as safe as they are in Germany, people will be re-housed in low-rise, new-build estates in the same neighbourhood is a fantasy.

― Wag1 Shree Rajneesh (ShariVari), Sunday, June 18, 2017 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Was meeting a friend at the Barbican yesterday. Is there anyone who'd want to tear those down? Fucking scum.

The battle to re-house the people who have lost everything in the borough will be key - saw something on my TL around attempts to re-house people outside of London? Its just outrageous.

yup, some of them as far away as preston

really really hoping labour politicians and papers like the mirror can hold the line on this: obviously it instantly undercuts the "expropriation is the end of civilisation" argument

It becomes really difficult to counter the many overlapping arguments against different social housing developments by those that are hostile to them. I don't think it is satisfactory to simply say that High-rise is the only option or is *necessarily* the best option. Its a very complicated issue though. And High rise v low rise has become this very unhelpful but loaded faultline for people arguing all kinds of things about housing and its uses and what makes it good or bad and what is possible or what is necessary.

I do think that the postwar push in this country to build social housing was an extraordinary achievement, and there has been a successful pushback in recent years against various attempts to discredit social housing as a project. The sink estate narrative has deep talons and I think many people have internalised much of the terrible things said about estates and those that live on them. And the starving of estates for years from the 1980s of repairs and services did do much to undermine the integrity of estate communities. But its also not necessary to completely lionise every effort by the architects of the social housing boom and to swallow every modernist principle about the designs for living that was popularised in this period.

Its true that there is a deep hypocrisy that characterises the villainisation of tower blocks in particular. Tower blocks for the poor are painted as being inherently substandard, alien from the "natural" streetscape, meanly denying people of gardens,etc. These accusations are hardly ever levelled at the enormous piles of "luxury" housing I see popping up all over the capital. The stuff that is vaguely affordable, in the sense that it actually has people living in it, seems to me to incredibly mean, often smaller than the social housing units that it has replaced, and thrown up on expensive land with substandard building processes, on the cheap. Yet this housing rarely comes into the crosshairs for being substandard in the same way. It almost makes you suspect that there are other motivations for this concern....

It is true, though, that tower blocks are a rather sharp shift in terms of the traditional spatial organisation of people in relation to each other, and this does have many implications in terms of safety, crime, accessibility, community cohesion, access to other services and social spaces. In terms of urban living, high-rise living does open new questions in terms of governance that are more complex than high-rise bad low-rise good. (although again the notion that high rise allows more density is a rather fatuous density, there are extroardinary examples of low-rise high density housing all over london, much of it very successful, cressingham gardens, just by my house is one example, and it is constantly threatened with demolition by the council in order to build new high-rise, mostly-private housing in its place).

It would be a terrible shame if this tragedy became another way of attacking social housing at a time when the UK and London in particular is in desparate need of large social housing projects. In these attacks, a hatred of social housing has always masqueraded as concern for the poor against the arrogance of those modernist architects.

Someone finally said it. @DJISLA #GrenfellTower pic.twitter.com/YCN2Fke38p

— حمزه (@HamzLdn) June 17, 2017

damn

wow. It cuts off prematurely :(

reminds me of 9/11 when there was this rush to "donate blood" and it turned out p much everybody was dead, did not need the blood

They're all dead, yes.
And the philanthropy marketing of the Red Cross needs to die as well.

That woman is awesome btw

You've probably all seen this but I literally cannot get over it. The way he's talking, the language, it's utterly shocking. "We were delighted to have squeezed in more flats" "we got the boxing club a wonderful facility" "a wonderful and happy opening" "we are delighted to welcome the Secretary of State who's coming tomorrow". What the actual fuck?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwvLKIbE264

" a judicious use of space"!

similar story to the video upthread

If you want the truth about #GrenfellTower, listen to the residents and eyewitnesses. Not the authorities. pic.twitter.com/pALQ1E2Gds

— আবু মারিয়া (@Faysal_FreeGaza) June 18, 2017

Couldn't watch that fucking council member talk for long.

I wouldn't say it was shocking though, really grimly predictable. I've known too many people exactly like that in my life. From all over the world, so congratulations London, it's not you.

Mother of God.. read this from Trumpton inside #GrenfellTower https://t.co/eFDrXw1Kw9

— Inspector Gadget (@InspGadgetBlogs) June 18, 2017

That woman is extraordinary

"It would be a terrible shame if this tragedy became another way of attacking social housing at a time when the UK and London in particular is in desparate need of large social housing projects. "

It doesn't help when the Mayor is putting out a totally bullshit message about this tragedy that is just as wrong and muddled as the desperate apologist tones of other various Tory shitheels rn. It is very convenient to blame the housing planners of 50 years ago, but this has fuck all to do with them. FFS every major city in the world has towerblocks dotted all over the place that have had proper refurbs and are safe for human habitation. If anything the only way of dealing with the housing crisis in London would be more social housing and building upwards. Khan seems to be totally out of tune with his party's manifesto imo. Not being as big a cunt as Zac Goldsmith just isn't cutting it rn imo.

Assume he's calling for the Barbican to be pulled down too

Well I thought that Skepta vid for Shutdown was filmed on a London council tower-block estate, until someone pointed out it was the Barbican.

Which is a london council towerblock estate to a certain extent and still a model for how to build one.

That firefighters account - whatever we pay firefighters, it's not enough. Next time they try and cut there fire service, that account needs to be plastered everywhere.

i don't think the barbican is a useful model for building social housing unless you think putting a world class concert hall in every tower block is realistic. but there are excellent examples all over the uk of successful high rise and low rise housing.

can't find a diagram that makes it clear, but the concert hall is only quite a small part of the barbican estate complex -- as originally conceived, the bulk of it was conceived as social housing (with some privately owned blocks maybe), tho this was fvcked up when thatcher allowed ppl to start buying their council properties; certainly the overall layout was very much thought of as a solution to some of the problems earlier brutalist estates had with a sense of shared community space

http://www.barbicanliving.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/151201_-MAP_SOUTH_TO_NORTH.jpg

name-dropping note: i once waked round it with owen hatherley and mark fisher and nina power and chums, while owen explained why some of the elements were so excellent -- there was a booksale in the little church in the middle, and i bought a fontana modern masters on frantz fanon

yeah it's p spread out - feels more like an area rather than simply a concert hall.

The key point re the Barbican is building in diversity of uses within housing estates whether that's a boxing gym, shops, sports facilities or, yes, even an arts complex, why not?

So that people outside of the estates use those areas too and the residents are not "othered" in a sense. The Unité D'Habitation has a hotel in it, for example.

concert hall is i think not actually pictured in that^^^ diagram? it's the space in front of frobisher crescent and looks across the water at st giles cripplegate, which is the church (also the name of a v good lp by the v problematic jack nitzsche)

(all the non-residential buildings, like the guildhall school for music and drama and the city of london school for girls, are omitted)

I stayed at the Unite dHabitation in Marseille once and got the distinct impression from the residents that the main problem was feeling gawked at by modernism tourists....

I think a lot of incredulity is needed wrt to the claims of "good design" in relation to housing projects. What distinguishes the barbican first and foremost is wealth and prestige. The inhabitants are wealthy and the building is well maintained, the balconies are kept neat, there is good security.

Lots of estates are built with a pub, some shops, a community centre, sometimes even offices. This does not explain why in some cases the shops are all vacant and the pub is genuinely scary. Good design might help in preventing estates from developing blind spots, or in making spaces that feel less remote, weird culs-de-sac. But this is of limited use if the council is using the estate as a last resort for "problem" families, and making no attempt at other interventions, (sure start, youth work, etc.) There are much larger structural issues affecting social cohesion that estates can become barometers of. I think a healthy dose of skepticism regarding the social engineering claims of architects is always needed, particularly given the radically divergent results the same approach can have in two given instances as a result of other tangential factors.

The woman is incredible. Tbf I have been amazed by how well-informed, level-headed, emotional obv but completely otm and 'real' all the people from the area of the building have been. It made me regain some faith in humanity. Which is idiotic. Because they are humanity. If only we'd see them on the telly more often than just after a massive tragedy. This is doing my brain in. So many good people out there, but alas, they're not politicians...

Great post Plax, and I agree with you on all point except that I didn't get that impression re The Unité. It's perhaps something to take to a new thread at greater length. You're right to be sceptical of architectural spin but the original Architects can't bear the brunt of the responsibility here but neither can they just give up. Thats why Khan's response is so wrong and frustrating.

And the Barbican went through a good 20 years of being vilified in the uk before being embraced again iirc and yes, it was partly because of wealth.

But this is of limited use if the council is using the estate as a last resort for "problem" families, and making no attempt at other interventions, (sure start, youth work, etc.)

Council housing is always offered first to 'problem cases', isn't it? When did that start? I suppose when the housing stock started being depleted.

So many good people out there, but alas, they're not politicians...

good people rarely go into politics, coincidentally, for reasons that aren't too dissimilar from why most of us don't go into firefighting or combat

30,000 buildings in UK are covered in the same cladding as Grenfell Tower

87 more tower blocks use the same cladding

30,000 or 87? Because I find it unlikely that 29,900 odd non-tower blocks are clad in it.

It's common in low-rise applications, especially shops/commercial apparently

as mentioned upthread, it's considered acceptable on storefronts and as you say "petrol stations" because if those go up it's what's inside that matters, not so much what's on the facade

can you really AFFORD to strip and re-refurb 87 high rise housing complexes, though, in these times, etc

I'm just sceptical about that particular figure.

http://imgur.com/hrzEUoT

http://imgur.com/wc2Yg7M

https://image.ibb.co/cVbsa5/image.jpg[
https://image.ibb.co/fRJihk/image.jpg[

Glasgow has a Tory MP? I truly understand nothing

MSP (member of the Scottish Parliament) which is apportioned through proportional representation. If they got @ 15% of the votes they would get an MSP.

oh wait lol that's the one that drinks and is a lesbian and should maybe get the PM job

yes

ThT was a stupidly simplistic way to describe how it's apportioned but yes, you don't have to win a seat to get representation because it's tallied by a larger area not a specific seat. Kind of.