beings waving towels from windows, flashing lights on and off, desperately signalling for help in the most basic and urgent of all languages. Like flares at sea: SOS! But with no sky-boat to pluck them from their raging hell.

'The agreed evacuation policy was to "stay put / defend in space". And the frightened residents did as they were told by the people who knew best'

People here are angry. There is a real feeling that all these residents were a sacrifice to greed, at best, and vanity, at worst.

An £8.7 million refurbishment project on this tower was completed in May last year. Nez says it was cheap. She makes a face. She believes 'the bathrooms, the materials, everything was the cheapest, the worst.'

There was no care for those onthe hill everything is black. The tower is a crematorium, with bodies piled up inside. Hundreds, they say.

It is surreal, this burned-out black building, still billowing acrid smoke up and across the people scattered in the surrounding streets with dust masks on their foreheads and necks.

It’s all too macabre for the real world; I feel like I’ve stumbled onto the set of a film, a made-up scene plonked in the middle of normal-ville.

Except this is real.

A woman pushes past me with her shopping to get back into her home in the block of flats directly opposite, muttering something about the number of people missing. One hundred? Two? Others nod in agreement. She says we will never know. People had friends to stay. She says these will be the