Eight years ago, in 2017, a devastating night-time fire claimed the lives of 72 people in the Grenfell Tower in west London. Since then, the remains of the 24-storey tower, shrouded in protective wrapping and a commemorative banner, have stood sentinel over Ladbroke Grove while the painstaking inquiry into the fire has unfolded. In February this year Angela Rayner, deputy prime minister and secretary of state for housing, communities and local government, announced that the ruin of the tower would be demolished; work might begin in September, once a designer has been chosen for the official memorial.
This decision has caused a good deal of controversy, as might be expected. Grenfell United, a community organisation representing the victims and survivors of the fire, called the announcement in February ‘disgraceful and unforgivable’. It feels that the tower should be preserved out of respect for the dead, and that its removal would be an act of erasure or forgetting, akin to an official cover-up. Others are pained by the continuing presence of the tower and regard its removal a necessary step in letting the community recover from the disaster. ‘It is clear from conversations it remains a sacred site,’ Rayner wrote in the announcement. ‘It is also clear that there is not a consensus about what should happen to it.’
It is strange to hear the word sacred used here, without adornment or qualification, and the plainness of it is quite salutary. The decision to take down the tower has been made by engineers, who advise that the damage caused by the fire and by subsequent exposure to elements makes the structure unsafe and impossible to preserve. But the process, overseen by the company Deconstruct UK and outlined in a document released at the end of July, is not informed by practicality alone but by a higher level of care and tact, reflecting the trauma still keenly felt around the tower, and the ‘sacred’ quality mentioned by Rayner. In Purity and Danger (1966), the anthropologist Mary Douglas mentions that the Latin root of the word ‘sacred’, sacer, has a double meaning, and covers what is cursed as well as what is revered. These opposites are united in the meaning ‘that which is set apart’. This mirrored meaning can be sensed in the process proposed by Deconstruct UK.
The process will take more than two years, with a month spent on each floor. The building will be kept carefully wrapped the whole time and special consideration has been given to ensuring that the memorial banner at the top of the existing wrapping will be replicated further down as the work continues. The tower will continue to be illuminated at night. Parts of it, including the architectural crown, will be retained and preserved for possible use in a memorial. Material will be carefully brought down within the tower or lowered by crane in covered containers and removed from the site in covered, unmarked lorries. Debris will be ‘respectfully laid to rest’ at an ‘appropriate, accessible, sacred’ site, separate to the intended memorial, for families to pay their respects. For this, ‘We are speaking to faith leaders to advise us on considerations for the preparation of the land, laying the materials to rest and long-term care.’
Written into the proposed process is an unspoken recognition that demolition in the midst of a big, busy city is often obtrusive, unruly and torn by conflicting emotion, even when the building is not a scene of tragedy. This is finely expressed in Leon Kossoff’s series of four paintings showing the demolition of the YMCA building in Bloomsbury, made in 1970–71. These churning, unsettling pictures capture the combination of captivation and disturbance caused by this rupture, as well as the dirt and disorder of the process. Modern demolition contractors go about their work in a much more thoughtful, safe manner than their counterparts 50 years ago, but there is an unavoidable element of violence and psychic interruption in seeing a building – particularly a prominent building – taken apart.
These are the phenomena that the Grenfell deconstruction process is at pains to eliminate, going about its work with the discretion of the surgeon or priest. Every step is foreseen and planned, every action is considered and every meaning is weighed. Inevitably this gives the proposed deconstruction a ritual quality in keeping with the sacred nature of the site, together with a ritual avoidance of contamination and any unwanted, prying eyes. Even without any numinous side, this level of care is admirable. The tower itself is a grave and a scene of avoidable, criminal tragedy but, properly enacted, this sedulous process of removal can be invested with a deep sense of importance and human meaning. At a time when acts of consideration and the recognition of feelings are often treated as frivolous and wasteful, it is unexpectedly touching to encounter this attentiveness in the unlikely realm of national bureaucracy and public works.
