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Trevor Phillips: Grenfell Tower fire is making us ask difficult questions about our cosmopolitan capital

Messages for the fire's victims - Paul Grover for the Telegraph
Messages for the fire's victims - Paul Grover for the Telegraph

The full horror of what took place in West London this week has yet to be  unveiled. In its smouldering ruins, Grenfell Tower still holds the remains  of many of those recorded missing; and it almost certainly shrouds the  answer to how such a grisly tragedy could have taken place. 

As boss of ITV’s The London Programme for two decades I learned the rhythm  of public tragedy. It would often fall to our programme, on Friday night,  to recite the litany of loss after a catastrophe like this. The Kings Cross  fire: 31 dead. The sinking of the Marchioness that drowned 51 young  partygoers; the Clapham Junction collision, where 35 died. Over the coming  weeks and months, painstaking forensic analysis will piece together the  failings that allowed a small kitchen fire to turn into an inferno. 

Posters on the wall of some of the missing - Credit: Paul Grover /The Telegraph
Posters on the wall of some of the missing Credit: Paul Grover /The Telegraph

But what we already know should shame us. Grenfell Towers showed us the  best features of a diverse community; and we took them for granted. But it  also tried to warn of the worst risks and we completely ignored its  entreaties. We should never do so again.  These human tragedies tell us everything about the people who inhabit our  city.  I know this area well.

Notting Dale, situated to the West of the much  better known and better off Notting Hill, symbolises London’s unique  confluence of rich and poor, old and young, native and foreign. As a young  chemist at nearby Imperial College, I passed many hours that I should have  spent in the laboratory rubbing shoulders with pop stars in the nearby  Portobello Road market.

Local residents paying their respects - Credit: Paul Grover/The Telegraph
Local residents paying their respects Credit: Paul Grover/The Telegraph

But I also recall Saturday mornings in a dank  basement teaching black teenagers the rudiments of O-level maths in the  hope that it would be their path to a steady job in a garage or in  construction.  The people who lived in Grenfell represent the multiethnic face of modern  London. The Syrian Refugee who came to Britain for a better life, the  engineering student who fled A war-torn home of Daraa three years ago and  the young Italian couple recently engaged and who had moved into the 23rd  floor.

That should not be a surprise. Notting Dale was the place where the  infamous slum landlord Peter Rachman first gave shelter in dilapidated  war-damaged properties to West Indians like my parents; I was born into one  such tenement a few miles along the Regents Canal. The 1958 race riots were  sparked outside Latimer Road tube station just a couple of hundred yards  away. 

Smoke billows from Grenfell Tower as firefighters attempt to control the blaze - Credit: DANIEL LEAL-OLIVAS/AFP
Smoke billows from Grenfell Tower as firefighters attempt to control the blaze Credit: DANIEL LEAL-OLIVAS/AFP

Research by my colleagues at Webber Phillips shows that fewer than half of  the households in the surrounding postcodes are headed by a white British  person. This truly is a melting pot, a chaotic and joyful mix of strivers  from all nations. But it may have been our political and bureaucratic  incomprehension – indeed our suspicion - of this joyous chaos that left  Grenfell Towers vulnerable to catastrophe.

Much has been made of the fact  that the Tower’s residents predicted that it would take a tragedy of this  enormity to shake the authorities out of their torpor.  We will discover in due course whether the local councillors or Ministers  simply ignored the complaints; but my guess is that the landlords, the  regulators, the local politicians and even the neighbours would have seen  this community of immigrants and transients as a Tower of Babel: hard to  understand, hard to reach and ultimately, here today and gone tomorrow.

Local Volunteers transport donated goods after the tragedy - Credit: Paul Grover/The Telegraph
Local Volunteers transport donated goods after the tragedy Credit: Paul Grover/The Telegraph

The  same may have been true of an earlier tragedy at Lakanal House in  Southwark, where the names of those who died – Udoaka, Francisquini,  Hickman – suggest a similar kaleidoscopic mix.  The people who died here would have rubbed shoulders every day with the –  predominantly white - people for whom they worked. But when they came home  to the Tower they passed into a twilight zone out of the gaze of the  Londoners who could have made a difference – the politicians, the business  leaders, the opinion writers, the doctors, lawyers, bankers and other  professionals. They think that they live in a cosmopolitan city; but  working at the next desk or sharing the lift with someone of a different  background isn’t integration.

The extensive damage to the Grenfell Tower block is seen - Credit: PETER NICHOLLS/Reuters
The extensive damage to the Grenfell Tower block is seen Credit: PETER NICHOLLS/Reuters

In America they have a name for this kind of  parallel: ‘sunset segregation’.  Here, a study for the Social Integration Commission shows that typically  most people from minority backgrounds do not develop close friendships with  the majority – and this uncomfortable truth remains the case in London. 

Analysis of the census data by University of London academics shows that  where there is residential mixing it takes place between minorities –  Grenfell Tower illustrated the point precisely.  My concern is that after the spotlight of grief has shone on this tragedy  it will pass on.

The denizens of all those other Grenfell Towers will slip  back into the darkness, condemned to rage from the shadows. The ghastly  irony is that it has taken this tragedy for the rest of us to focus on  their plight, if only for a moment. At least let’s use that moment to try  and work out the silent plea. I suspect it will say “please, will you hear  our prayer, at last?” 

Trevor Phillips is a writer, broadcaster and former chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission