After Grenfell: Accumulation, debris and urban change in London

The Grenfell Tower fire in 2017 was both a terrible tragedy and a drastic exposure of longstanding urban inequalities and injustice. For local residents, the fire is inextricable from deeper histories of division that have been built into the urban fabric of Kensington and Chelsea and which have marked the local landscape in enduring ways. Since 2018, the tower has been wrapped in a white casing, hiding the remains of the fire from view. Nevertheless, it has become a locus for new kinds of memorialisation and calls for urban change. 

Exploring themes of accumulation and erasure, the visible and the hidden, this paper explores the ambiguous afterlives of the tower, and what kind of future might be contained within its wrapping. It highlights how the future of the site is charged with a politics of presence and absence in which the debris of the fire, and the accumulated histories in which it is embedded, are made to matter in new ways.