The Daily Telegraph

Bryony Gordon London is like a grotesque game of Monopoly

- Bryony Gordon

My dad lives in a high-rise on an estate half a mile from the charred wreck of Grenfell Tower. From his flat on the 10th floor, you can see what remains of the tower block, now a tomb, dominating the skyline like a vision of horror straight out of the head of JG Ballard.

My dad woke up to the sound of sirens that night and assumed there was some sort of fight kicking off on the ground, but instead he discovered a nightmare come to life, a neighbouri­ng block in flames and God knows how many people waiting to die inside.

If you lived in Grenfell and had managed to escape, you might

– not unreasonab­ly – think that this was the worst that life could throw at you, witnessing the slow and painful deaths of neighbours and loved ones in a devastatin­g blaze the fire brigade seemed powerless to put out.

Then you learn that these deaths would most likely not have happened 20 or even 10 years ago, before someone thought it would be a smart idea to dress the building up like a budget version of a designer outfit: cheap and highly flammable, but aspiration­al all the same, a bit more in keeping with the burgeoning London skyline of soulless, samey “apartment” buildings, the kind that offer luxury living to people who will never actually live in them because their main homes are in Malaysia.

I asked my dad if his building had this cladding on it, but he said no, they were lucky because the council hadn’t actually managed to “modernise” their block, on account of the residents refusing to move to the outer edges of St Albans for the duration of the refurbishm­ent.

There’s nothing wrong with St Albans, of course – at least not if your children happen to attend a school within an hour’s drive of it. (Yesterday morning, my dad confirmed there were no sprinkler systems installed in his block, and that the only smoke alarms he had in his flat were those that he had fitted himself.)

The last time I checked, it was the year 2017 and you could have a conversati­on with your phone before asking it to videocall your friend in Australia for free. You can pay for a flat white with your fingerprin­t and even download an app that can tell you when you are ovulating.

Wonderful, all these things, but not worth a great deal if you are being told that you might never be able to identify the remains of your girlfriend, who may or may not have died of cyanide poisoning from the panels installed on the building she lived in, the panels that were sort-of-illegal but kind-of-legal, the panels that were placed on the side of the building by the council or was it the building contractor?

It wasn’t me, says the head of the council, who goes on to explain that the residents were offered a sprinkler system but apparently turned it down because it would slow up the process of getting their boilers fixed. This is the kind of politics toddlers engage in at nursery, but then this is a country where ball games are banned outside high-rise blocks that can be sent up in flames by breathtaki­ng arrogance and criminal negligence. Where, for the cost of cladding an entire block of flats housing up to 600 people in a non-flammable material, you can buy an empty, eight-bedroomed house up the road.

Apparently, many survivors of the Grenfell fire are to be rehoused by the Corporatio­n of London, two miles away in a developmen­t where some units go for £2million.

Some of the existing residents, who enjoy the use of a spa, gym and cinema, are apparently upset by this. “It’s so unfair,” said one woman called Maria. “We paid a lot of money to live here, and we worked hard for it. Now these people are going to come along, and they won’t even be paying the service charge.”

A man called Nick, who is paying £2,500 a month in rent for a one-bedroom ‘apartment’, announced that he was “very sad that people have lost their homes, but there are a lot of people here who have bought flats and will now see the values drop. It will degrade things. And it opens up a can of worms in the housing market”.

Is this what our capital city has become? A grotesque game of Monopoly played by people whose souls are as empty as the new builds they reside in?

The so-called Day of Rage this week turned out to be more of a Day of Rest – a couple of hundred people marching on Downing Street in stultifyin­g heat, with most of the anger spouted on Twitter by keyboard warriors.

I was initially surprised that there weren’t riots.

Initially surprised, but then not at all. As my dad pointed out to me, the people in this part of the world have witnessed enough needless destructio­n to last a lifetime.

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 ??  ?? High-rise horror: the devastated Grenfell Tower looms over London
High-rise horror: the devastated Grenfell Tower looms over London
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