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The Tower
130 pages, Unknown Binding
Published June 1, 2018
About the author
Andrew O'Hagan
47 books816 followersAndrew O'Hagan, FRSL (born 1968) is a Scottish novelist and non-fiction author.
He is the author of the novels Our Fathers, Personality, and Be Near Me, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His work has appeared in the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Guardian (UK). In 2003, O’Hagan was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists. He lives in London, England.
He is the author of the novels Our Fathers, Personality, and Be Near Me, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His work has appeared in the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Guardian (UK). In 2003, O’Hagan was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists. He lives in London, England.
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August 6, 2019Mixed feelings about this. It contains a moving account of the fire itself, and provides a defence of the councillors who bore only partial responsibility, but were scapegoated by the media, and also by Theresa May and Sajid Javid. This defence, however, is constructed against the straw-man argument that the council's objectives were deliberately homicidal. O'Hagan mistakes the exaggerated language of the protest for a substantive accusation. He is insufficiently attentive to the survivors' experiences, and seems to have spent too much time in the Tory councillor's company. It is perhaps too far to claim, as Josie Michelle does, that 'O’Hagan grieves the jobs of Nicholas Paget-Brown and Rock Feilding-Mellen at least as deeply as he grieves the lives of those who perished'. But when the article quotes the councillors more than the survivors, and defends these councillors without investigating who or what really was responsible, I can't help but feel she has a point.
October 24, 2024
The Grenfell Inquiry Report came out last month and I thought I would read Andrew O’Hagan’s long, long essay about the fire, although as O’Hagan says: “Most of the stories are hard to bear.”
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n...
What O’Hagan seeks to do as well as humanising the tragedy by telling the stories of those who lived – and there is an emphasis on their lives, not just their deaths, is get to the truth of culpability. He takes issue with the feeling that Kensington and Chelsea council (RBKC) are solely to blame and the idea that there was some kind of conspiracy, local government playing with poor people’s lives.
But his point is that if people are blaming the council or the leader or one or two particular people then the real culprits, the deregulators, the TMO, the building companies go unpunished.
O’Hagan is right to praise the council workers’ aid after the fire. My partner (who worked in IT at RBKC), was one of the “340 staff members mobilised”, providing money and pre-paid cards to those affected, working from 8-6 with no break. The fact he was cycling round the borough with thousands of pounds stuffed into his panier was worrying, ditto when a group of angry local people went into the building where he worked – although it was outside the building that his boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss was attacked as the group thought that he was the head of the TMO.
However, people lash out when they’re hurt and vulnerable and choose the easiest target, just as people suffering austerity blame, for example, immigrants rather than the Treasury. People really don’t understand deregulation or the machinations of austerity. Who has the time or the desire to read The Building Act 1984, the Thatcher-era bill that got rid of hundreds of statutory regulations?
And AO’H is probably a little too harsh on the survivors who said that the council hadn’t helped them. I agree that people probably didn’t realise that those who were providing aid were council workers; they were expecting men in suits to come down (I’m reminded of when I was in hospital and the woman in the bed next to me said to the young, Asian, female doctor who was wearing scrubs: “I’ll wait to see the doctor”, her presumed impression of a doctor being old, male, white and white-coated). And of course, whenever there’s a devastating event, it reinforces people’s beliefs, and they find a way to fit it into their opinions (consciously or unconsciously).
He objects to people using the fire to comment on society as a whole, but he is also using it order to comment on society, just in a different way. Despite their best efforts, no-one comes at anything impartially and O'Hagan talks about his own upbringing in a council house and how he and his surrounding community saw the state as a good thing rather than as someone or something out get them. And often when a tragedy happens it can be used (sometimes for good, sometimes for ill) to affect change and activists presumably wanted to do this. It’s also unfair to criticise those for misremembering events. We all know that people are unreliable witnesses, not deliberately but because memory is faulty – especially under stressful circumstances. The fact remains that a lot of people begrudge authority, whether it be wearing a mask during COVID or doctors telling them to lose weight and cut down on alcohol; the council is the nearest authority to resent.
O'Hagan is vindicated by the inquiry report, which blames deregulation, effective fraud by the construction industry and the cutting of red tape by successive governments:
“Housing minister, Gavin Barwell, ignored repeated warnings from MPs on fire safety. The report makes clear that 'the government's deregulatory agenda' was so pervasive that 'matters affecting the safety of life were ignored, delayed or disregarded.' Cameron's promise to 'kill off the health and safety culture for good' had far-reaching effects. Grant Shapps's 'deletion' of the Tenant Services Authority 'the TSA is toast,' as he put it - knocked out a crucial way for tenants to challenge their TMO.” (This is from the LRB’s Inquiry Report by James Butler from October 2024: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n...).
Yet there is mention by AO'H of RBKC’s cost-cutting, for example, the senior building control surveyor John Hoban talks about: “a department that had cut nine experienced inspectors and replaced them with one recent graduate; he was overloaded, often working all weekend. During the Grenfell refurbishment he had an additional 55 projects added to his workload.”
O’Hagan is too kind to RBKC. None of the below is to do with Grenfell, cladding, fire safety or deregulation but it pertinent, I think. According to my partner, when he first started working there, RBKC was a fairly paternalistic organisation that hadn’t outsourced services: they had in-house cleaning, in-house buildings management, in-house catering (they literally had a tealady) until 2010 when the coalition took power and the councillors, perhaps wanting to curry favour with the new government, started to make cuts, even though RBKC is (or was) a rich borough, their central government funding wasn’t cut as much as other inner London councils’ grants and their council tax revenue remained high.
For example, the Financial Services IT system worked well and had a dedicated team. However, the councillors decided that it was bad VFM for RBKC residents and outsourced it to BT. People were made redundant, with generous pay-outs. After 2 years, the BT system was declared to be unfit for purpose and RBKC had to buy their way out of the contract and bring it back in-house – including re-employing some of the people who’d been made redundant. None of this was value for RBKC residents.
The cleaning and in-house building management were outsourced and my partner reported it taking several weeks to fix the hot water in an office block where hundreds of people worked. The tealady was sacked and a high street coffee chain brought in. There was a hushed-up scandal about the mayor buying his official car outside of the normal procurement system. None of this is as serious as 72 people dying in a preventable fire, but RBKC were not innocent of cost-cutting.
The final word goes to O’Hagan:
“All over Britain, the sight of the burning tower gave people a horrible sense of dread followed by a sense of relief. Then comes shame, the shame that curdles into blame, as we hurry to appoint the baddies who made us feel such complicated things”.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n...
What O’Hagan seeks to do as well as humanising the tragedy by telling the stories of those who lived – and there is an emphasis on their lives, not just their deaths, is get to the truth of culpability. He takes issue with the feeling that Kensington and Chelsea council (RBKC) are solely to blame and the idea that there was some kind of conspiracy, local government playing with poor people’s lives.
But his point is that if people are blaming the council or the leader or one or two particular people then the real culprits, the deregulators, the TMO, the building companies go unpunished.
O’Hagan is right to praise the council workers’ aid after the fire. My partner (who worked in IT at RBKC), was one of the “340 staff members mobilised”, providing money and pre-paid cards to those affected, working from 8-6 with no break. The fact he was cycling round the borough with thousands of pounds stuffed into his panier was worrying, ditto when a group of angry local people went into the building where he worked – although it was outside the building that his boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss was attacked as the group thought that he was the head of the TMO.
However, people lash out when they’re hurt and vulnerable and choose the easiest target, just as people suffering austerity blame, for example, immigrants rather than the Treasury. People really don’t understand deregulation or the machinations of austerity. Who has the time or the desire to read The Building Act 1984, the Thatcher-era bill that got rid of hundreds of statutory regulations?
And AO’H is probably a little too harsh on the survivors who said that the council hadn’t helped them. I agree that people probably didn’t realise that those who were providing aid were council workers; they were expecting men in suits to come down (I’m reminded of when I was in hospital and the woman in the bed next to me said to the young, Asian, female doctor who was wearing scrubs: “I’ll wait to see the doctor”, her presumed impression of a doctor being old, male, white and white-coated). And of course, whenever there’s a devastating event, it reinforces people’s beliefs, and they find a way to fit it into their opinions (consciously or unconsciously).
He objects to people using the fire to comment on society as a whole, but he is also using it order to comment on society, just in a different way. Despite their best efforts, no-one comes at anything impartially and O'Hagan talks about his own upbringing in a council house and how he and his surrounding community saw the state as a good thing rather than as someone or something out get them. And often when a tragedy happens it can be used (sometimes for good, sometimes for ill) to affect change and activists presumably wanted to do this. It’s also unfair to criticise those for misremembering events. We all know that people are unreliable witnesses, not deliberately but because memory is faulty – especially under stressful circumstances. The fact remains that a lot of people begrudge authority, whether it be wearing a mask during COVID or doctors telling them to lose weight and cut down on alcohol; the council is the nearest authority to resent.
O'Hagan is vindicated by the inquiry report, which blames deregulation, effective fraud by the construction industry and the cutting of red tape by successive governments:
“Housing minister, Gavin Barwell, ignored repeated warnings from MPs on fire safety. The report makes clear that 'the government's deregulatory agenda' was so pervasive that 'matters affecting the safety of life were ignored, delayed or disregarded.' Cameron's promise to 'kill off the health and safety culture for good' had far-reaching effects. Grant Shapps's 'deletion' of the Tenant Services Authority 'the TSA is toast,' as he put it - knocked out a crucial way for tenants to challenge their TMO.” (This is from the LRB’s Inquiry Report by James Butler from October 2024: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n...).
Yet there is mention by AO'H of RBKC’s cost-cutting, for example, the senior building control surveyor John Hoban talks about: “a department that had cut nine experienced inspectors and replaced them with one recent graduate; he was overloaded, often working all weekend. During the Grenfell refurbishment he had an additional 55 projects added to his workload.”
O’Hagan is too kind to RBKC. None of the below is to do with Grenfell, cladding, fire safety or deregulation but it pertinent, I think. According to my partner, when he first started working there, RBKC was a fairly paternalistic organisation that hadn’t outsourced services: they had in-house cleaning, in-house buildings management, in-house catering (they literally had a tealady) until 2010 when the coalition took power and the councillors, perhaps wanting to curry favour with the new government, started to make cuts, even though RBKC is (or was) a rich borough, their central government funding wasn’t cut as much as other inner London councils’ grants and their council tax revenue remained high.
For example, the Financial Services IT system worked well and had a dedicated team. However, the councillors decided that it was bad VFM for RBKC residents and outsourced it to BT. People were made redundant, with generous pay-outs. After 2 years, the BT system was declared to be unfit for purpose and RBKC had to buy their way out of the contract and bring it back in-house – including re-employing some of the people who’d been made redundant. None of this was value for RBKC residents.
The cleaning and in-house building management were outsourced and my partner reported it taking several weeks to fix the hot water in an office block where hundreds of people worked. The tealady was sacked and a high street coffee chain brought in. There was a hushed-up scandal about the mayor buying his official car outside of the normal procurement system. None of this is as serious as 72 people dying in a preventable fire, but RBKC were not innocent of cost-cutting.
The final word goes to O’Hagan:
“All over Britain, the sight of the burning tower gave people a horrible sense of dread followed by a sense of relief. Then comes shame, the shame that curdles into blame, as we hurry to appoint the baddies who made us feel such complicated things”.
December 7, 2018
I bought this issue of the London Review of Books’ in the summer. The long essay by Andrew O’Hagen on the Grenfell Tower fire - which filled the entire issue - had caused quite a bit of controversy and had divided opinion. People whose views I respected had said that it was an in-depth and balanced view on the tragedy. However there were also quite a large number of dissenting voices (also by people whose views I respected) who said it was riddled with inaccuracies & was a travesty.
Clearly Grenfell arouses deep emotions in people and the reactions to this essay showed those emotions playing out in microcosm. I wanted to read the article for myself & then decide what I felt about it and not take a side based on Ignorance.
O’Hagen makes clear that he wants the essay to be based on facts & not opinion or hearsay. The opening part of the essay is incredibly harrowing as it describes what happened as the fire took hold. I don’t think anyone could argue with how he presents this. It’s what happened in the aftermath of the fire that is the part that has engendered most of the heated debate - and it’s easy to see why.
Everyone will remember that even as the tower was still smouldering the blame game started. Fingers were pointed everywhere - particularly at the council, and in the days & weeks afterwards council officials were demonised. It quickly became the accepted narrative & any deviation from that was seen as disrespecting those who lost their lives.
However O’Hagen takes a more nuanced view. I’m going to be honest, it’s a view that was persuasive to me. Essentially his thesis is that life is complicated, events can’t be explained as being the result of one or two factors, and to do so is to wildly simplify things.
Yes the council could have done things differently, but the picture he paints is that many ordinary council workers worked themselves to a standstill in the hours after the fire started - but the ‘conventional narrative’ has decided that it’s the council that needs to wear the ‘black hats’ in all this.
Politicians don’t come out of this particularly well. Theresa May & Sajid Javid are guilty of playing the optics & reacting to the media & hanging the council out to dry.
However O’Hagen also questions the reactions of some in the community - especially in relation to the enquiry. God knows they’ve suffered but they shouldn’t be immune from scrutiny.
My one criticism of the essay is that it didn’t really go into the issue of the cladding. Why it went up, why it didn’t meet standards. There is another story to tell there.
This is far from the final word on the Grenfell tragedy. However I think it’s a balanced article which seeks to make clear that perhaps we should start to unpick the narrative that was being written as the Tower burned.
Clearly Grenfell arouses deep emotions in people and the reactions to this essay showed those emotions playing out in microcosm. I wanted to read the article for myself & then decide what I felt about it and not take a side based on Ignorance.
O’Hagen makes clear that he wants the essay to be based on facts & not opinion or hearsay. The opening part of the essay is incredibly harrowing as it describes what happened as the fire took hold. I don’t think anyone could argue with how he presents this. It’s what happened in the aftermath of the fire that is the part that has engendered most of the heated debate - and it’s easy to see why.
Everyone will remember that even as the tower was still smouldering the blame game started. Fingers were pointed everywhere - particularly at the council, and in the days & weeks afterwards council officials were demonised. It quickly became the accepted narrative & any deviation from that was seen as disrespecting those who lost their lives.
However O’Hagen takes a more nuanced view. I’m going to be honest, it’s a view that was persuasive to me. Essentially his thesis is that life is complicated, events can’t be explained as being the result of one or two factors, and to do so is to wildly simplify things.
Yes the council could have done things differently, but the picture he paints is that many ordinary council workers worked themselves to a standstill in the hours after the fire started - but the ‘conventional narrative’ has decided that it’s the council that needs to wear the ‘black hats’ in all this.
Politicians don’t come out of this particularly well. Theresa May & Sajid Javid are guilty of playing the optics & reacting to the media & hanging the council out to dry.
However O’Hagen also questions the reactions of some in the community - especially in relation to the enquiry. God knows they’ve suffered but they shouldn’t be immune from scrutiny.
My one criticism of the essay is that it didn’t really go into the issue of the cladding. Why it went up, why it didn’t meet standards. There is another story to tell there.
This is far from the final word on the Grenfell tragedy. However I think it’s a balanced article which seeks to make clear that perhaps we should start to unpick the narrative that was being written as the Tower burned.
October 11, 2021
Whilst O’Hagan defends the council slightly too strongly, his point still stands - that until we look what happened at Grenfell in the eye, without the narrative the media constructed, we won’t ever truly hear what the fire had to say about the world we live in.
November 9, 2023
started out really strong with a beautifully done tribute to the residents of grenfell, but then did a weird turn into making the council the victims? like it's an interesting perspective and there's obvs nuance but idk. a thinker for sure
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