Faith in the Shadows

NOT the return of the band with hits like Apache and though Hank Marvin, Bruce Welch and Brian Bennett are still around, times have changed since their 1963 number one – Foot Tapper, the year when the Grenfell Tower Estate was being designed.

Instead, this week is about an all- too brief speech on Monday given by the Revd Dr Mike Long, the Minister for the Notting Hill Methodist Church. Titled Faith In The Shadow of Grenfell, it was organised as part of University of Reading’s Café Theologique series, for the for the price of a pint or a coffee you could come along to listen and ask questions.

Religion, Politics and Football

For many, there’s three topics you shouldn’t mention at dinner.

Add alcohol to the mix and you’re as likely to see a fight break out as to be told that you don’t know what you’re talking about.

So the ZeroDegrees bar on the corner of Reading’s Gun Street and Bridge Street seemed an unlikely setting for a religious talk.

But with Grenfell as the topic, I wasn’t there for the religion, I went along for the politics. And as things turned out we didn’t hear about football either.

Instead, it was all about community and community spirit – both its presence and its absence – and what follows are near-verbatim extracts of what Dr Long said:

Before the Fire

Grenfell Tower in North Kensington is around 150 yards from the church, door to door.

The area has a history of political radicalism, coupled with protests and a feeing of being ignored.

It’s had a diverse ethnic mix [for decades].

There’s very little green space and surprisingly, with some of the wealthiest residents in the UK, it also houses the very poorest with not much in between.

Sometimes on the same street, or even next door.

After the Fire

For individuals and their families, the church was a place of refuge for the homeless as well as a place for everyone to express themselves – whether by writing on one of the many boards or in the condolence books, or placing flowers or other tokens [on the railings].

At the same time, the emergency services, investigators, council officers and others had nowhere to meet, no hot food, no clean toilets, [so they came to us].

The Grenfell recovery site had no postcode, so packages that couldn’t be delivered there, came to us instead to be collected later.

As Alan Everett wrote in his book After the Fire, people needed to find recognised places of safety and those who turned up for help needed to find themselves in the presence of similar people to whom they could easily relate.

In times of crisis, the places of worship and community centres are ideally both in, as well as of, the places they serve.

Safe Spaces

We offered safe spaces where people could be sad and angry and just be themselves. The issue was hospitality, in all kinds of ways.

Not “us” offering something to the community, saying what you could and couldn’t do. It was more about the community saying what they’d like to do but weren’t quite sure how, then us listening and saying, we’ll try and sort this out together [whatever the topic].

[This was summed up by police] Chief Superintendent Ellie O’Connor when she retired. She called me and said “you were the quiet people who enabled others to express their feelings”.

As to Truth and Justice?

After helping almost all the bereaved relatives and survivors to go back into the tower we found we had to work out what role the church should take in helping individuals discover what truth looks like and also [understand] what justice looks like.

Particularly when many people locally have a very good idea of both and are very clear that they haven’t had either.

When Trust breaks down

And how do we help a local authority and community, where there’s no trust, to actually be able to talk to each other and be heard well?

Because there is a huge breakdown in trust locally.

As I said a bit earlier, some genuinely believe that the local authority was trying to [get rid of] them.

And anything the local authority has said since hasn’t been believed.

But the resilience of some of those local authority officers, who’ve gone to meeting after meeting for months and months and have been shouted down time and time again, I think is extraordinary.

Even as I have been critical of the local authority, I think they have an incredibly, incredibly difficult task in front of them.

While the issues of trust, listening, hospitality, counselling and re-housing remain, the community needs to discover how the local authority can actually regain their trust by [staff] learning to listen genuinely and offer the kind of respect and dignity to people who, for whatever reason, feel they haven’t been afforded.

The Silent, March

Every month on the 14th, no matter which day, hundreds or thousands of people come together outside the church from around 6.30pm to undertake a silent march – to remember the 72 who lost their lives unnecessarily.

As Dr Mike concluded, Nobody speaks, it’s so quiet, you can hear a pin drop.

June 14th 2019 marks the fire’s second anniversary.