What Should we do About Grenfell?
Why negative heritage can’t be imposed from the top-down
Grenfell Tower today (image via)
On the evening of June 14, 2017, a fire broke out in Grenfell Tower, a high-rise in West London. The blaze was the worst residential fire in Britain since the Blitz, claiming 72 lives. During the subsequent public inquiry, it was revealed that these deaths were entirely preventable. Originally sparked by a malfunctioning electrical appliance, the fire spread rapidly due to the cladding used on the tower – material known to be highly flammable. Government deregulation and cost-cutting measures had allowed developers to use this cladding despite repeated safety warnings from experts and residents.
The tragedy exposes the deep systemic inequalities in Britain’s housing market. That unchecked corporate greed could claim so many lives – disproportionately affecting residents from minoritised ethnic backgrounds – in one of London’s wealthiest boroughs should be unthinkable. But in Britain, it is all too familiar. As rapper and activist Akala said on the Channel 4 News the morning after the fire: "These people died because they are poor."
As the fight for justice drags on, another debate has emerged: how should Grenfell be remembered? The Grenfell Tower Inquiry concluded in 2024, yet survivors and the bereaved remain years away from seeing justice, with prosecutions unlikely to begin before 2026. In the meantime, discussions over memorialisation continue. The tower itself has stood since the fire, wrapped in white sheeting. But earlier this month, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner announced that it would be dismantled over the next two years, with a permanent memorial to be established in its place. She acknowledged that "there isn’t a consensus" among survivors on what should happen to the tower, saying she made the decision after "weighing up the arguments." However, the Grenfell Survivors Committee has stated that their perspectives were not properly considered in this process.
Grenfell joins a long history of ‘negative heritage’ sites – places marked by trauma and injustice, where memorialisation is fraught with political and ethical dilemmas. Examining how similar sites have been established and maintained offers valuable lessons on the dangers of failing to embed the affected community in decision-making.
The Politics of Negative Heritage
The archaeologist Lynn Meskell coined the term ‘negative heritage’ back in 2002 to describe heritage sites and material remains that are associated with trauma, conflict, or shame rather than pride or celebration. She argues that such sites often become battlegrounds for competing narratives, as different groups seek to either preserve, reinterpret, or erase painful histories. In her work, Meskell explores how negative heritage is actively managed, negotiated, and sometimes suppressed by states, institutions, and local communities.
‘Negative heritage’ sites today include spaces for memorialising the victims of the Holocaust, such as the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Museum in Poland, and the victims of the transatlantic trade in enslaved peoples, including the so-called ‘slave castles’ in West Africa. The sites of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan are also commemorated, as is Ground Zero in New York, where the twin towers once stood, the site of the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant in Ukraine, and the District Six Museum in Cape Town.
Heritage is always political, but sites of ‘negative heritage’ are often even more contested than places of more celebratory remembrance. These sites frequently serve as implicit or explicit critiques of those responsible for the events they commemorate. Chernobyl, for instance, is widely viewed as a symbol of Ukraine’s historical exploitation by Russia. The fact that Ukraine sought UNESCO World Heritage status for the site in 2021, in the face of mounting Russian aggression underscores how negative heritage can be wielded as a powerful political tool. Likewise, the District Six Museum, by memorialising the devastation wrought by apartheid, also stands as a testament to the political significance of majority rule in South Africa.
In these cases, the purpose of this negative heritage (to demonstrate the wrongdoing of a former regime), is aligned with the historical narrative that the governments in these states wish to emphasise. Problems emerge, however, when sites of ‘negative heritage’ have different meanings for the governments in charge of the sites, and those who were originally traumatised by the events that led to their designation as such, and their descendants.
There are two examples I would like to highlight here: the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Museum, and the Cape Coast ‘slave castle’ in Ghana. Both cases represent how conflicts between the states administering the sites and other stakeholders can present problems for the way in which trauma and suffering are memorialised, and any lessons that are taken as a result of this.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum is one of the most significant sites of Holocaust remembrance, symbolising the immense suffering of European Jews, who were its primary victims. However, when the museum was established by the Polish government in 1947, its initial focus included the many non-Jewish Poles imprisoned and murdered there, as well as broader antifascist resistance. Under Communist rule, the narrative at Auschwitz at times downplayed the uniquely Jewish aspect of the genocide in favour of a more generalised story of victimhood. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, tensions over how Auschwitz should be memorialised became particularly pronounced. Polish nationalist and Catholic groups erected crosses near the site, culminating in the so-called "war of the crosses" over the placement of a large papal cross at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. This raised concerns about the "Christianisation" of a site where the vast majority of victims were Jewish. While many of these disputes have been addressed, debates persist over how the Polish state frames Auschwitz’s history, particularly regarding the balance between commemorating Jewish and Polish suffering.
Cape Coast Castle became a significant site of remembrance for the victims of the transatlantic slave trade following Ghana’s independence in 1957, though it was not formally designated as a memorial site at that time. Its historical importance grew in the following decades, particularly with the rise of heritage tourism and UNESCO’s involvement. From the ‘60s onwards, middle-class African Americans increasingly visited the site, with numbers surging in the 1980s and 1990s as Ghana actively fostered connections with the African diaspora. In this period, the Ghanaian state and African American visitors broadly shared a goal of exposing the horrors of slavery and challenging narratives of European moral superiority. However, tensions emerged as the Ghanaian government expanded tourist infrastructure at Cape Coast and other similar sites. Some African American visitors criticised the commodification of their ancestors’ suffering, arguing that the castles should be preserved as solemn sites of mourning rather than commercial attractions. Others also pointed out that the history commemorated there primarily belonged to the African diaspora, rather than contemporary Ghanaians – some of whose ancestors may have benefited from the slave trade.
These examples illustrate how sites of ‘negative heritage’ are often highly contested. When interests and priorities are misaligned between governments, and the survivors of trauma and their descendants, it can often be difficult for minoritised groups to wrestle control of the narratives surrounding these sites, when faced with the power of the state. This has important implications for how we consider the future of Grenfell.
The case of Grenfell Tower
In whatever form it takes, the memorial for the Grenfell fire will not detail the actions of a foreign power, a genocidal regime, or a global empire. It will instead tell the story of corporate greed, governmental indifference, and the victimisation of marginalised, working-class, largely ethnically minoritised Londoners who were failed by institutions at all levels.
There may be some areas of crossover here with the narrative that the Labour government wished to emphasise. The fire itself, and much of the deregulation that ultimately led to it, happened under the Conservative governments of 2010–2024, whose appalling legacy has been a key talking point for Labour ministers. The housing crisis that led to the concentration of poorer Londoners in substandard housing is also arguably a legacy of the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher and her sell-off of good council housing stock across the UK. The block itself was owned by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, one of the few Conservative-majority councils in London.
However, the Labour Party are also implicated in the circumstances that led to the Grenfell fire. Council blocks themselves were a scheme sponsored by the postwar government of Clement Attlee and expanded under the later Labour government of Harold Wilson. Tony Blair did very little to reverse the effects of Thatcher’s ‘right to buy’ scheme and actively contributed to the negative discourse surrounding those living in council blocks. The current Labour government, for all of its left-wing populist bravado, has not done a great deal to challenge the unfettered capitalism that led to flammable cladding being added to blocks like Grenfell.
The case of Grenfell is deeply political – not only because it represents an issue mired in strong sentiments, but because it is a consequence of great political failure and the fundamental failure of the British state. Its memorialisation, therefore, cannot be apolitical, and cannot be administered by the British state.
And this is not the only instance whereby catastrophic failings of the British state and its institutions have led to entirely preventable deaths. Two examples that come to mind are the Hillsborough Disaster of 1989 and the 2020 COVID pandemic. The former was caused by irresponsible policing and the gross negligence of ambulance workers, compounded by negative stereotyping of the Northern, largely working-class victims of the disaster. The death toll of the COVID pandemic was so high because of the fundamental mismanagement of the Conservative government, bordering on ineptitude.
The COVID Memorial Wall (image via)
The victims of the Hillsborough Disaster are memorialised in multiple sites, including a monument near Anfield, Liverpool FC’s ground. This statue was commissioned by the Hillsborough Justice Campaign. The COVID Memorial Wall, just a few miles east of Grenfell Tower in London, was set up by the campaign group Led By Donkeys. In both cases, these sites were established by groups who were at odds with the ‘official’ narrative and the actions of those in power more broadly, particularly in the case of the latter. This is appropriate, considering it is those in power who shoulder some or all of the blame for the loss of life being memorialised.
So why should Grenfell be any different? The decision to disregard the perspectives of the Grenfell Survivors’ Group in the decision to dismantle the tower is a blatant disrespect to the victims of this catastrophic failure. It also suggests that, much like the case of Auschwitz and Cape Coast Castle, if action is not taken, we may see the memorialisation of Grenfell hijacked by the state to tell a different story from the one survivors and the bereaved want to be told. This cannot be allowed to happen. The survivors and bereaved are the only ones with the right to tell this story. Their wishes must be honoured – anything less would be an injustice that compounds the tragedy.