Nine years after the fire, no justice for Grenfell

Nine years after the Grenfell Tower fire, survivors, locals and bereaved families will come together in north Kensington on Sunday to remember the 72 people who were killed.

Multi-faith services will be held honour those who died, including 18 children and entire families for whom the tower was home.

Across west London, different community centres and projects will also hold memorial events and offering support to those who need it.

It will be the final anniversary before the tower block is completely demolished to make way for a permanent memorial.

Just before 01:00 BST on 14 June 2017, fire broke out in the kitchen of a fourth floor flat before spreading through the whole building.

The Met Police have said their investigation into the fire was the force's most complex in its history.

There are 57 people and 20 organisations currently under suspicion of criminal offences including corporate manslaughter and misconduct in public office.

Decisions will be made on whether any charges will be brought before next year's 10th anniversary, Scotland Yard said.

The latest figures from the London Fire Brigade suggest more than 1,600 residential buildings in London still have fire safety defects.

Almost 200 of those are linked to ACM cladding, the dangerous combustible cladding on Grenfell Tower, and found by the public inquiry as a cause of the rapid spread of the fire.

The tower itself - once a 23-storey high rise block home to hundreds of people - is being brought to the ground floor by floor. The demolition began in September 2025 and is expected to take two years to complete.

The site will be turned into a memorial.

The design team chosen by the Grenfell Memorial Commission said it wanted to ensure all those affected feel involved with the creative process, and the community will be involved in creating the design.

Grenfell United, a campaign group of survivors and bereaved families of the Grenfell Tower Fire, said in a statement released on the ninth anniversary that the community "is still fighting for the justice, accountability and change we were promised".

It said: "In the aftermath of Grenfell, governments stood before the country and promised that lessons would be learned, accountability would follow and no community would ever again experience such a preventable tragedy.

"Yet nine years on, too many promises remain unfulfilled.

"Governments have changed, ministers have come and gone, but the urgency and meaningful action survivors and bereaved families were promised have too often failed to materialise.

"Most painful of all is the continued delay to criminal justice. Nine years is an unbearable amount of time for bereaved families, survivors and residents to wait for accountability."

On Sunday evening, the annual silent walk will take place in west London, followed by the reading of the names of the 72 victims and speeches by campaigners, who will call for justice and long-lasting changes to housing and fire safety, to ensure a tragedy like Grenfell never happens again.

The mayor of London Sir Sadiq Khan said it had been "nine long years in which the pace of change has been all too slow and the road to justice all too long.

"Those responsible must be held to account for the systematic dishonesty, corporate greed, institutional indifference and neglect."

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