Yvette Williams MBE, coordinator of Justice4Grenfell, told The Caymanian Journal (TCJ) in Grand Cayman that the London fire that killed 72 in 2017 was no isolated accident, and that its causes reach back two generations.

Its roots, she said, lie in how her own Caribbean community came to live in North Kensington in the 1950s, and in who was allowed to live where in the decades since.

Britain's Crown Prosecution Service is due to receive the last of the Metropolitan Police case files by the end of September 2026 on whether to bring criminal charges over the fire at Grenfell Tower on 14 June 2017. In a briefing published on 19 May 2026, the Metropolitan Police said 57 people and 20 organisations were suspects for offences including corporate manslaughter, gross negligence manslaughter, misconduct in public office, fraud and health and safety matters, and that the CPS was confident of reaching charging decisions before the tenth anniversary of the fire in June 2027. Inside Housing, a trade publication, reported on 19 May 2026 that police told reporters at the same briefing it was "difficult to see" a trial taking place before 2029.

Williams, a resident of North Kensington for more than 40 years whose parents arrived in Britain from the Caribbean in the 1950s as part of the Windrush generation, spoke to TCJ in Grand Cayman during a visit to take part in the TCJ Forum, this newspaper's own event. Her account, and the criminal case now before British prosecutors, have no direct connection to the Cayman Islands beyond that visit, and TCJ is reporting the interview on its own terms. A building of Grenfell's scale could not be approved in Cayman under current planning rules. The tower was 24 storeys; regulation 8(2) of the Development and Planning Regulations (2024 Revision), gazetted on 6 February 2024 and left unchanged on height by the amendment gazetted on 12 May 2026, caps buildings at ten storeys or 130 feet in the highest zones, General Commercial zone 1 and Hotel/Tourism zones 1 and 2, and at three storeys or 40 feet in residential zones. Regulation 8(13) bars the Central Planning Authority from varying the number of storeys, apart from one extra rooftop storey for common areas under regulation 8(4A). Height, however, is not what the inquiry blamed. Its findings, described below, concern the cladding and insulation that spread the fire and the failure of the instruction to stay put, and the UK's new evacuation-plan regulations apply from seven storeys or 18 metres, a height within Cayman's caps.

The week of the fire

Six days before the fire, on 8 June 2017, the Kensington constituency covering the tower elected Emma Dent Coad, the first Labour MP the seat had ever returned, by 20 votes after three recounts. Williams told TCJ she saw the result as a sign that something in the area was already wrong. On the night of 13 June 2017 she was in her garden with Muslim neighbours observing Ramadan when a friend rang her landline just after 1am. "I only get people from the Caribbean ringing me at that time in the morning, and it's usually to tell you someone's dead," she said.

The caller was a friend who lived beneath the tower and had just been evacuated. Williams took her 10-year-old daughter with her to collect the friend, a decision she told TCJ she still regrets. "Fire's on about the fifth floor," she recalled thinking as she approached. "So I think nothing of it. We've had fires before." There were no police cordons yet, so she drove in. "Get there, find my friend, standing there, and all of a sudden, you can just hear explosions." Looking up at the tower, she said, there was "an eerie silence", broken only by a police helicopter circling overhead.

That helicopter, she said, later took on a different significance. It was flying above a building whose residents had initially been told to remain in their flats under the "stay put" policy used in UK tower-block fires, which assumes a blaze can be contained to one flat if fire doors and compartment walls hold. Who eventually died became, to Williams, one of the clearest signs of how that assumption failed. "The death toll amongst those with a disability is high," she said, pointing to lifts that stopped working and residents, including many for whom English was not a first language, who followed official instructions to remain in place. Evidence presented to the public inquiry, cited by Disability Rights UK on 30 March 2021, showed that 15 of the 37 disabled people living in the tower died that night, or 41% of the tower's disabled residents.

Warnings before the fire

Williams said the danger had not been a secret. "We all knew things were wrong down at the tower," she said, referring to years of safety complaints raised by tenants through a blog run by the Grenfell Action Group. Once the fire began, she said, no one from the local authority arrived that morning. "People who turned up for us were some young people who were coming from the mosque, and they brought water." She said it took the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea three days to produce "a definitive list of people who lived in the tower", for a landlord, she noted, that collected their rent every month. In its formal response to the inquiry's final report, published in November 2024, the council wrote: "The Council failed in some of its most basic duties – to keep residents safe, to listen to and act upon their concerns, and to respond effectively when disaster struck." It added: "For those failings, and for the harm that was done, we apologise unreservedly." The same document commits the council to a culture "where standards are upheld without compromise, where projects and priorities are delivered with sustained effort, pace and urgency, and where safety, responsiveness and quality are prioritised over convenience and cost."

The fire burned for about 60 hours before it was declared extinguished on the evening of 16 June 2017. In the days after, Williams said, she and other volunteers organising donation points noticed plastic debris from the building's exterior panelling blowing along the street. That panelling, aluminium composite material with a combustible polyethylene core fitted during a refurbishment completed in 2016, was identified by the public inquiry as the principal reason the fire spread as fast and as far as it did. Williams believes it was chosen for appearance's sake. "They wanted to make the building look aesthetically pleasing," she said, adding that she believed the tower's appearance mattered because it faced a new shopping centre and was visible from a nearby rail line, a connection TCJ could not independently confirm. The inquiry's final report, published on 4 September 2024, found that the manufacturers of the cladding and insulation had acted dishonestly in how their products were tested, certified and marketed.

Williams also pointed to an earlier warning. A fire at Lakanal House, a tower block in Camberwell, south London, killed six people on 3 July 2009. On 28 March 2013 the coroner who heard the inquests, Frances Kirkham, wrote to Southwark Council and the London Fire Brigade, and separately to the UK Department for Communities and Local Government, recommending clearer national guidance on the "stay put" principle and better attention to the fire-protection qualities of materials used in refurbishment works. Just over four years passed between those letters and the Grenfell fire.

The account given of her neighbours

By the next morning, Williams said, the fire's victims were being described in terms she did not recognise. "Most of the residents in there are migrants or black and brown people," she said, describing the narrative she encountered in early coverage. "Many of them are undocumented … they don't work. They're benefit scroungers." She rejected it outright. "That's not the people. We know who lives there. My mate lives in there. She's a teacher."

Theresa May, then prime minister, visited the scene on 15 June 2017 and met emergency responders but not survivors or bereaved families. She met survivors and residents the following day. Writing in the Evening Standard on 11 June 2018, she said: "What I did not do on that first visit was meet the residents and survivors who had escaped the blaze. And I will always regret that by not meeting them that day, it seemed as though I didn't care. That was never the case." Queen Elizabeth II and Prince William visited on 16 June 2017; Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, and Jeremy Corbyn, then Labour leader, visited on 15 June 2017. Each met survivors directly.

Outside the tower, Williams's daughter asked her what she was going to do. "I can't do anything. I cannot do," Williams told her, one of the only times, she said, she had to tell her daughter she was powerless to fix something. Her daughter lost a friend in the fire.

A community that had already fought to belong

Williams argues that Grenfell cannot be separated from how her parents' generation came to live in the area at all. Caribbean migrants settled in Notting Hill in the 1950s in part because wealthier residents had moved out after the Second World War, and because, she said, they were shut out of council housing built for the area's existing population. "We're not entitled to council houses," she said. Landlords including Peter Rachman exploited that demand so thoroughly that "Rachmanism" entered the dictionary: Collins defines it as extortion or exploitation by a landlord of tenants of slum property, especially where intimidation or racial fears are used to drive out sitting tenants.

The area became a base for the far-right politician Oswald Mosley in the late 1950s, and in late August and early September 1958 white mobs attacked Caribbean residents and their homes over several nights. On 17 May 1959 Kelso Cochrane, an Antiguan carpenter, was stabbed to death walking home in Notting Hill; no one has been convicted of his murder. "My dad had moved to Notting Hill with three friends," Williams said, "and one of those guys was murdered, Kelso Cochrane. Up to this day, that is still an unsolved murder." Her family moved to Birmingham for a period afterward. Out of that same period, the Trinidadian activist Claudia Jones staged an indoor Caribbean Carnival at St Pancras Town Hall in 1959, which the Notting Hill Carnival's own history credits as the seed of the outdoor event first held on the streets of Notting Hill in 1966 and now staged every August.

When Williams helped organise the community's response to Grenfell, including a monthly silent walk led by faith leaders and bereaved families that she said continues today, she drew on that history. Justice4Grenfell states on its website that it was set up in the days after the fire and launched formally with a silent walk on 19 June 2017. Williams told TCJ she brought in the barrister Michael Mansfield, whom she said she had known since the Mangrove Nine trial of 1971, when nine Caribbean activists were tried at the Old Bailey over a protest on 9 August 1970 on Notting Hill's All Saints Road. Two of the nine, Altheia Jones-LeCointe and Darcus Howe, defended themselves. The judge in that case said the trial had "regrettably shown evidence of racial hatred on both sides", which the UK National Archives records as the first judicial acknowledgement of racial prejudice within the Metropolitan Police. Williams said two of the nine, both women, are still alive; TCJ could not independently confirm this.

Williams also traces a more recent grievance to the land beneath the Westway, the elevated motorway that opened through the area in 1970 after the demolition of homes along its route. An organisation established in 1971 as the North Kensington Amenity Trust, renamed the Westway Trust in 2014, manages 23 acres beneath the road for community use, which its own published history describes as "a means of redress" for that demolition. Williams said the trust progressively excluded the African-Caribbean community from that land, a grievance behind the Westway23 campaign, and that a nursery called Maxilla was later closed, a library and further-education classes came under threat, and an earlier estate redevelopment nearby returned only a quarter of the households who had been told they could come back. TCJ has not independently verified the closures or the redevelopment figure; they are presented as her account. On the central charge, however, the trust has spoken for itself. An independent review by the Tutu Foundation, commissioned by the trust, found in December 2020 that the Westway Trust "has been and remains institutionally racist", citing decades of decisions that had bred mistrust, above all among African-Caribbean residents. Toby Laurent Belson, the chair of trustees, said in a statement on 11 December 2020: "Westway Trust apologises to our entire community. Those inside and outside of our organisation." He added: "We look ahead to working with and representing our community as never before, so that in time we may be the organisation our community deserves."

Where the case stands now

The public inquiry into the fire, announced by May within days of it and chaired by Sir Martin Moore-Bick, reported in two stages: an October 2019 account of the night itself, and a final report on 4 September 2024 that found the deaths avoidable and attributed them to failures across national government, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, the tower's tenant management organisation, the contractors, the architect and the product manufacturers. The Metropolitan Police's announcement on 19 May 2026 that 57 people and 20 organisations could face charges followed that report.

The tower itself is being taken down in a process that began in the week of 2 September 2025 and is expected to take about two years, ahead of a permanent memorial on the site for which a planning application is expected in late 2026. Williams said Justice4Grenfell will keep pressing for the prosecutors' decision, and for the UK Government to adopt in full the inquiry's recommendation that building owners be legally required to prepare personal emergency evacuation plans for residents unable to leave a high-rise building unaided. The UK Government's position is on the record. In a written ministerial statement to the House of Commons on 4 July 2025, Alex Norris, the minister for building safety, fire and local growth, said the Residential Personal Emergency Evacuation Plans Regulations "addresses recommendations 33.22c, 33.22e, 33.22f" of the inquiry's first report, would come into force on 6 April 2026, and would apply to residents of buildings "at least 7 storeys or 18 metres high", entitling residents with disabilities to a person-centred fire risk assessment and to "the measures that could be reasonably and proportionately introduced to mitigate against their risks". Williams said her group regards those regulations as falling short of what the inquiry recommended, and will keep pressing for the recommendation to be adopted in full.