![\"Adele\"](\"https:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Adele.jpg\")
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For eight years, one of the world\u2019s most famous singers has spent every June 14th at the site of a tragedy most people have forgotten.<\/p>\n
June 14, 2017. 12:54 AM.<\/p>\n
A faulty refrigerator on the 4th floor of a 24-story apartment building in West London caught fire.<\/p>\n
The fire should have stayed in that apartment.<\/p>\n
It didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
The building had been wrapped in cheap aluminum cladding two years earlier as part of a cost-saving refurbishment.<\/p>\n
The cladding was flammable.<\/p>\n
The fire jumped through it like paper.<\/p>\n
In 15 minutes, the fire had climbed to the roof.<\/p>\n
It burned for 60 hours.<\/p>\n
72 people died inside.<\/p>\n
The building was called Grenfell Tower. It was social housing. The residents were working-class families. Many of them immigrants. Many of them children.<\/p>\n
The youngest victim was a 6-month-old baby named Logan Gomes.<\/p>\n
The oldest was an 84-year-old grandmother named Sheila.<\/p>\n
Most of them were trapped above the 11th floor. The fire alarms didn\u2019t work. The single staircase filled with smoke.<\/p>\n
Some of them called their families on the phone while the fire reached their doors.<\/p>\n
The next morning, while emergency services were still working the site, a 29-year-old woman in sunglasses arrived.<\/p>\n
She didn\u2019t bring press. She didn\u2019t announce her visit.<\/p>\n
She walked through the ash in a black hoodie with her husband.<\/p>\n
She hugged strangers.<\/p>\n
She asked who needed help.<\/p>\n
A few people in the crowd recognized her.<\/p>\n
Nobody made a scene.<\/p>\n
She was a singer named Adele.<\/p>\n
She\u2019d grown up a few miles from there.<\/p>\n
She\u2019d been born in Tottenham. Raised by a single mother in Brixton, then West Norwood. She\u2019d lived in council flats most of her childhood.<\/p>\n
Buildings exactly like Grenfell.<\/p>\n
She knew what those flats looked like inside. She knew what a faulty fire alarm in a council building looked like.<\/p>\n
She knew that the people in Grenfell that night had been her neighbors, her classmates, her mother\u2019s friends\u2014a few years and a few miles removed.<\/p>\n
She stayed for hours.<\/p>\n
She came back the next day.<\/p>\n
A few days after that, a woman knocked on the window of the Chelsea Fire Station.<\/p>\n
The station manager, Ben King, came to the door.<\/p>\n
The woman was holding a tray of cakes.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe just turned up at the station\u201d King told a reporter later. \u201cShe knocked on the window and said she had some cakes for us. So we opened the door to her, and then she took her sunglasses off and said: \u2019Hi, I\u2019m Adele.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
She came inside. She sat down with the firefighters. She drank a cup of tea.<\/p>\n
The firefighters had been the first ones inside the building. Many of them were not going to be the same again.<\/p>\n
Adele held a moment of silence with them. She thanked them.<\/p>\n
She didn\u2019t film it. She didn\u2019t post about it.<\/p>\n
She left.<\/p>\n
She kept coming back.<\/p>\n
She paid for funerals.<\/p>\n
She paid for hotel rooms for families who\u2019d lost their homes.<\/p>\n
She hosted a private screening of Despicable Me 3 for the surviving children of Grenfell\u2014because the children had been the ones with the worst nightmares, and a children\u2019s movie was the kind of small ordinary thing that had stopped being available to them.<\/p>\n
She told no one she was doing any of it.<\/p>\n
Her concertgoers found out only when she mentioned, briefly, at a Wembley Stadium show three weeks after the fire, that she was donating \u201ca lot of money\u201d to the survivors.<\/p>\n
The families themselves told the press about the rest. Slowly. Over years.<\/p>\n
June 14, 2018. The first anniversary.<\/p>\n
Adele showed up.<\/p>\n
She stood near the burned base of the tower with a choir. They sang \u201cBridge Over Troubled Water\u201d They sang \u201cLean on Me\u201d<\/p>\n
She wept through both.<\/p>\n
She\u2019s been at every anniversary since.<\/p>\n
June 14, 2020. Third anniversary. COVID restrictions made an in-person gathering impossible.<\/p>\n
Adele recorded a virtual message for the families.<\/p>\n
\u201cI want to send my love to all of you today, and let you know that I\u2019m thinking of you, as I always do.\u201d<\/p>\n
June 14, 2022. Fifth anniversary. The criminal investigation had been dragging on for five years. No one had been charged.<\/p>\n
Adele used her social media to amplify the campaign of Grenfell United, the survivors\u2019 group demanding charges.<\/p>\n
\u201cI stand with the Grenfell families\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n
June 14, 2025. Eighth anniversary.<\/p>\n
She was still there.<\/p>\n
The investigation was still going on. The companies that had wrapped the building in flammable cladding had still not been formally charged.<\/p>\n
The families were still waiting.<\/p>\n
Adele was still waiting with them.<\/p>\n
She\u2019s never made a single album or interview about Grenfell. She\u2019s never written a song about it. She\u2019s never asked anyone to credit her for any of the money she\u2019s given or the time she\u2019s spent.<\/p>\n
She\u2019s just kept showing up.<\/p>\n
She\u2019s one of the most famous singers in the world. She\u2019s won 16 Grammys. She\u2019s sold over 120 million records. Her concerts gross hundreds of millions of dollars.<\/p>\n
Every June 14, she goes home.<\/p>\n
She visits the building. She talks to the families. She sits with them.<\/p>\n
She hugs the children, who aren\u2019t children anymore.<\/p>\n
She hugs the mothers, some of whom lost their own children that night.<\/p>\n
She\u2019s been doing it for 8 years.<\/p>\n
She\u2019ll keep doing it.<\/p>\n
Think about what that means.<\/p>\n
Most celebrities who show up to tragedies do it once. With cameras. With press releases. With photo ops.<\/p>\n
They visit. They post. They leave.<\/p>\n
Adele showed up the morning after with no cameras and has shown up every single year since.<\/p>\n
For eight years.<\/p>\n
Most celebrities who \u201cgive back\u201d want credit.<\/p>\n
Adele paid for funerals and hotels and a children\u2019s movie screening and told no one. The families had to tell the press years later.<\/p>\n
Most celebrities who grow up poor forget where they came from.<\/p>\n
Adele is a billionaire who still remembers what a council flat looks like inside. Who still knows what it means when the fire alarm doesn\u2019t work in social housing.<\/p>\n
Most people forget tragedies after the news cycle ends.<\/p>\n
72 people died because someone chose cheap cladding to save money on a building full of working-class families.<\/p>\n
Eight years later, no one has been charged.<\/p>\n
The companies that made the flammable cladding are still operating.<\/p>\n
The families are still waiting for justice.<\/p>\n
And every June 14, Adele is still there.<\/p>\n
Not for publicity.<\/p>\n
Not for credit.<\/p>\n
Not for an album or a documentary or a brand partnership.<\/p>\n
Just there.<\/p>\n
With the families.<\/p>\n
In the place where 72 people died because their lives weren\u2019t valued enough to warrant fireproof cladding.<\/p>\n
She grew up in buildings exactly like Grenfell.<\/p>\n
She knows those could have been her neighbors. Her mother. Herself.<\/p>\n
So every year, she goes back.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a phrase the Grenfell community uses.<\/p>\n
They say: \u201cWe are still here\u201d<\/p>\n
They mean that the families of the 72 are still here. That the survivors who escaped that night are still here. That nobody is going to let them be forgotten.<\/p>\n
Adele is still here too.<\/p>\n
She hasn\u2019t gone anywhere.<\/p>\n
While the world moved on, while the news cycle shifted, while most people forgot about the 24-story tower wrapped in flammable cladding that killed 72 working-class people\u2014<\/p>\n
She remembered.<\/p>\n
Every June 14.<\/p>\n
For eight years.<\/p>\n
And counting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For eight years, one of the world\u2019s most famous singers has spent every June 14th at the site of a tragedy most people have forgotten. June 14, 2017. 12:54 AM. A faulty refrigerator on the 4th floor of a 24-story apartment building in West London caught fire. The fire should have stayed in that apartment. … <\/p>\n