Grenfell Tower and Diversity

While we were writing this chapter, a devastating fire overwhelmed Grenfell Tower, a 24- floor high-rise block in one of London’s most prosperous districts, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. While the borough as a whole was one of the wealthiest areas in England, the locality of the tower was in the top 10% most deprived areas in the country. The marks of inequality were starkly evident. In the fire 80 people were reported to have lost their lives, many of them apparently following fire safety advice to stay in their flats. The external cladding and insulation material on the building were reported to be not fire-resistant, survivors said there were no water sprinklers, and the building had only one exit. Whole families were said to have perished in the fire. Rage and anger quickly gathered momentum in the fire’s aftermath, as local residents expressed their fury at developers, local government councillors, and national government austerity policies.

The word ‘diversity’ was in regular use by media reporters and residents alike as they described Grenfell Tower and its immediate neighbourhood. Common phrases included: diverse community, diverse area, vibrant and diverse, ethnically diverse, religiously diverse, economically diverse, diverse people, socio-economically diverse, and linguistically diverse. Members of Parliament and lawyers for the Grenfell survivors recommended that a diverse panel be appointed to advise the inquiry into the fire (The Guardian 22.07.2017). The ideological nature of the term ‘diversity’ is evident here. Diversity becomes a superordinate term to describe the poor, gathered together discursively to include ‘migrants’ (documented and undocumented), black and minority ethnic working-class people, and white workingclass families. Religious diversity were also referenced through mention of the many churches, gurdwaras, mosques, synagogues and charities volunteering to provide assistance to those in need, often in the absence of official or professional provision. Running alongside a discourse of diversity as difference was a discourse of the unifying power of diversity. The collective, shared experiences of those affected by the disaster was readily apparent. The ‘diversity’ of Kensington and Chelsea’s poorer northern wards stood in contrast to its ‘hypersegregated’ (Flores and Lewis 2016) wealthy wards. Media discourse did not describe wealthy residents of Kensington and Chelsea as ‘diverse’. This tended to be saved for the ‘diverse poor’. This is not to say that diversity did not exist within the wealthy areas of the borough. People of many different nationalities lived in the affluent areas, just as there were people of different nationalities and ethnicities living in the tower. London’s globalized financial sector attracted highly paid workers from across the globe, and Kensington and Chelsea had the highest proportions of residents working in the financial sector, outside the City of London itself.

::: Blackledge, A. & Creese, A. (2017). Language and Superdiversity: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, LINK

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photograph via SkyScraperCity