please empty your brain below
A stunning memorial to a truly awful tragedy. Your last sentence is most salient.

Joe | 17.12.17 - 7:38 a.m. | #

A powerful memorial in so many ways. The looming shape of it seems to bear down on those below, echoing the crush of victims.

Most telling is the range of victims, overwhelmingly women and children. With the men gone to the war effort, those on the Home Front paid a price too.

RosemaryT | 17.12.17 - 7:55 a.m. | #

It is a fitting memorial, on several levels.

I hope enough funds are left for maintenance. How long is the wood expected to survive outdoors?

(Can a wooden structure be called a cast? Not quite the same thing as Rachel Whiteread's Stairs.)

Andrew | 17.12.17 - 8:09 a.m. | #

Once agin you have produced a wonderful article DG,
I saw a documentary about this event on BBC Europe.
I will be including this work of art on my next visit to London.

YDU | 17.12.17 - 9:59 a.m. | #

Delighted to see this and makes the pathetic previous plaque obsolete. We must never forget tradegies like this.

Mark | 17.12.17 - 10:25 a.m. | #

Perhaps a smaller memorial then some of that £400,000 could have been spent locally to improve access to other places, a ramp here, a door widened there.

mclm | 17.12.17 - 11:06 a.m. | #

Such a sad tragedy. Looks like whole families were wiped out.

Cornish Cockney | 17.12.17 - 12:04 p.m. | #

08:09 - As the wood used is teak then its survival outdoors should be no big issue, I'm not sure how it'll weather though, as for the cast part, it is more in the context of how you would cast an actor.

11:06 - The memorial was crowdfunded rather than coming out of the TfL budget, so the possibility of using the money elsewhere is irrelevant.

07:00 - The use of the phrase 'beautifully carved' does give the impression of someone with a chisel doing the work - but it's CNC with a router, this is shown on the memorial website.

Of the civilian deaths during WWII, perhaps this one is marked out by it's scale, and that it wasn't directly caused by enemy action (although of course the guns were there because of the war), unlike Balham, Bank and Bounds Green.

Still Anon | 17.12.17 - 12:05 p.m. | #

Thank you DG. A wonderfully written report. Well done mate.

Bernie | 17.12.17 - 12:29 p.m. | #

I'm not sure it's inverted - surely it's a representation of a cast of the stairwell (the hollow space), in which case the steps should be on the underside.

It was obviously not a literal cast (even if you could mould teak, you could only have taken a cast of the stairwell by temporarily filling it in)

I wouldn't be too worried about weathering - they used to build railway carriages out of teak, and they are generally left out in all weathers.

timbo again | 17.12.17 - 2:26 p.m. | #

Oh, yes, teak can survive outdoors for a very long time, with proper maintenance. Which is why I asked about funding for maintenance. Without it, the memorial could be in a poor state within a few decades.

Is it meant to be a representation of the staircase itself, but inverted and suspended (as DG indicates) or of the space above the staircase (as suggested above)? Either way, clearly is it not a cast (not in the sense of casting an actor (really!), nor of filling a mould; nor indeed in the sense of throwing something, except perhaps shadows).

Andrew | 17.12.17 - 5:10 p.m. | #

In case you're not keeping up, Andrew's sure the staircase memorial wasn't cast, Timbo thinks it isn't inverted and Roger knows it wasn't carved.

Meanwhile on Twitter, Debra doesn't understand why anyone would call a disaster great, and Mal reckons I meant greatest as in 'most' and should have said 'greatest loss of life'.

Mugs on their way to all of you.

diamond geezer | Homepage | 17.12.17 - 5:27 p.m. | #

It's a very appropriate and long-overdue memorial to this wartime disaster. Thank you for the report.

Grenfell reminds us also that the 'stay put' policy, in a properly constructed and altered block (which Grenfell patently was not) is based partly on the risk involved when large numbers of people go to a staircase at the same time.

Bob L-S | 17.12.17 - 5:28 p.m. | #

Whoever the other Roger was it wasn't me.
I wasn't there today but was pleased to have been at a fund-raising event a while ago, at the Genesis cinema - at which Tommy Walsh (as noted, a patron of the project) and others who had direct memories of the incident actually spoke - which provided an opportunity to learn directly about what had happened here, and make a contribution to help bring this memorial to its completion.

RogerW | 17.12.17 - 7:08 p.m. | #

I first became aware of this tragedy in 1975 thanks to this programme http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072517/

DavidC | 17.12.17 - 9:30 p.m. | #

Gosh, a mug! Please send it to the usual address.

Andrew | 17.12.17 - 9:55 p.m. | #

A brilliant post dg.
I like the name of the memorial. Even now I’ve got the song with the same name going around inside my head.

As an aside, I just hope that the local miscreants don’t damage it.

Rob Healy | Homepage | 18.12.17 - 7:03 a.m. | #

Wot? It's 7.44am Monday 18 December, and no sign of a blog post from DG.

shirokazan | 18.12.17 - 7:44 a.m. | #

Jesus! Give the man a lie in!!!

TP | 18.12.17 - 7:46 a.m. | #

I remember seeing the film @DavidC mentions when it was first shown on Thames TV. The story was a real shock.

Curiously unlike so many TV films of that time it doesn't appear to be on YouTube. Sadly I can't imagine ITV showing it again.

ap | 18.12.17 - 10:47 a.m. | #

Yet this was a result of panic and not enemy action unlike the Balham Tube Disaster http://ww2today.com/14th-october-1940-disaster-at-balham-tube-station

Drew | Homepage | 18.12.17 - 11:04 a.m. | #

Thank you. Very powerful and an incident that I have never heard of. Glad that it can be recognized in this way. would love to think that these kinds of hazards would be "designed out" by now, alas not true.

Mitch | Homepage | 18.12.17 - 11:41 a.m. | #

Thanks for this. Every now and again when I am stuck in some godawful queue in a narrow tube passageway, in front of a ticket barrier or indeed on a staircase I remember this disaster and I think that really we have not learned a great deal from it. As the dreadful event earlier this year illustrated all too painfully, we are still making spaces and buildings which are death traps. Memorialisation is important but I think the best memorial of all would be to ensure 'never again'. I have the same view of war memorials. Part of me thinks that they should not be allowed because they serve to accommodate the reality of the events. Instead the scar should somehow be left open to serve as a reminder. How that might be achieved I know not but being permanently uncomfortable with the consequences of tragedy seems a useful state for humanity.

drD | Homepage | 18.12.17 - 5:27 p.m. | #











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