Before Grenfell

On 14 June 2017, flames engulfed Grenfell Tower, a residential block of flats in West London. Seventy-two people lost their lives and many hundreds more were traumatised as a national ‘cladding crisis’ unfolded. Before Grenfell traces the underlying causes of the fire through more than four decades of deregulation of fire precautions, scientific governance and building regulations by successive British governments, shedding light on the historic failures of policymakers to heed the lessons of the past in protecting vulnerable communities.