London Mourns: Grenfell Tower, the Sombre Death of Social and Architectural Brutalism

As the omnipotent, unforgiving rage of burning flames ripped through the concrete giant towering paternally over North Kensington, like fiery, serrated lacerations punishing a subject, we were stopped dead in an emotional stupor from which the appropriate words just would not emerge. The empirical facts of the Grenfell Tower incident were enough in themselves to stupefy and wrench hearts; a fire of such immense proportions that so clearly threatens the individual and serves as a bleak, stark reminder of our physical insignificance in the face of the indiscriminate elements.

Babies were dropped from story-high windows in an attempt to save the flames from destroying more than one generation; men and women desperately hung myriad objects out in the air to grab the panicked attention of equally desperate onlookers, an instinctive effort to stand out in the dense, all-consuming smoke that quickly became the grey, apocalyptic symbol of a community in crisis.

Whoever the onus falls on for this absurd, Kafka-esque tragedy, the heart-breaking, breathtaking and pulse-stopping nature of the event is indisputably lucid even to the coldest of hearts. A fire that violently epitomised the bizarre, Orwellian combination of two terrorist attacks and a huge loss of legislative seats for the nation's leader; though the tragic reality of the event shouldn't be downplayed for rhetoric effect, it must be recognised just how much these successive events resemble an apocalyptic, dystopian tale relentlessly illuminating the darker side of the human condition and the sheer absurdity of life in 'civil society'. As the words 'strong and stable' reverberated around the Tory echo chambers and walls of the city like Big Brother announcing coercive political instructions, the crumbling urban volcano that was Grenfell Tower was being reduced to a mere husk. The sharp contrast between Theresa May's strength and stability maxim and the image of lives being torn apart by a fire - one that may have been linked to negligence and regulatory mistakes under a Conservative administration - is both a tragedy and a farce. The distance between the haves and have-nots was brightly illuminated by a detached Prime Minister whose only shared quality with the Grenfell residents is the blood that runs through her veins.

It is difficult, and perhaps a problematic overextension, to think of this disaster as anything other than what it was in actuality; a fire of incomprehensible scale that - within a matter of hours - destroyed livelihoods and displaced vast amounts of families who were laid bear, broken and empty with salty tears falling from their cheeks like emotional microcosms of the water that may have helped quell the flames in the first place.

The number of those dead that continues to increase with the recovering of bodies and their identification is deeply painful to read about; individuals that lived meaningful, vibrant, multicultural lives in the historic hub of North Kensington whose fate was sealed in a matter of minutes as they realised that a towering inferno takes no prisoners, no matter how kind your soul. These people constituted the very social and ethnic fabric that stitched together the minds and hearts of the community; the melting pot of classes, races, languages and ideas was smashed and reduced to mere ashes. The intimate social ties that were strengthened and galvanised over countless years were rapidly and unequivocally severed by the urban translation of Dante's infernos. The bright, fascinating fruits of British immigration and integration burnt to nothingness.

Coupled with the tragedy of a huge loss of life is the loss of a building that served as the powerful epitome of a social population who lived above the majority of other London residents; subjects who came and went each day with an immersing brutalism filling the cracks of the pavements and their graffitied stairwells stained with the ink of political disillusionment. The beauty of this social cocoon is far removed from the classic aesthetic of the Georgian town houses just a stone's throw away from the tower; a jagged dichotomy between 1960's grey concrete slabs and 1860's white polished pillars. The social connotations and wider metaphors the fire has evoked are both useful and incredibly saddening ; a well-painted depiction of the inevitability of socioeconomic and architectural disparity in a world of preponderant capitalism.

The aesthetics of the tower itself, a 24-story block that immediately reminds one of the aggressive social cramming initiatives developed during the latter half of the 20th century, brings to mind the likes of Trellick Tower, a similarly gargantuan concrete tower once associated with the unfortunate poverty of West/North West London but now widely recognised and admired as a representation of the cool, urban beauty that screams punk music, rebellion and originality. Even Goldfinger himself, the tower's revered architect, would not have foreseen such cultural semiotics becoming associated with the grey monolith he conceived. It now stands tall and proud in the skies of Ladbroke Grove, an area similarly bound by a history of divided wealth and multiculturalism bursting at the seams.

What structures like Grenfell Tower provide is a concrete embodiment of this sociocultural story, one steeped in a plethora of psychologies, races, nationalities and characters whose vibrant spirits become deeply embedded over time into the concrete walls of their urban abode.

.The destruction of Grenfell Tower and the lives of those it provided a home to is both an immense human casualty and a social warning cautioning us against the threat of aggressive urban regeneration, demographic eugenics and the very real danger of losing yet more towering monuments to urban souls; we have lost precious human lives, and we have lost the brutally beautiful structure that so poignantly echoed the heartbeats of its inhabitants