History & Policy

Dr Jill Pellew FRHistS Senior Research Fellow Institute of Historical Research, SAS University of London WC1E 7HU Wednesday 17 October: 5:00pm - 7:00pm History, Faculty of, Room 6, West Road, CB3 9EF The Grenfell Tower fire is generally agreed to have been the worst tragedy of unnecessary loss of life in Britain since the Aberfan disaster of 1966. In Victorian Britain a number of such disasters struck in various sectors of industry and society as the rapidly changing and largely unregulated profit-oriented economy threw up all manner of hazards from cheap lodging houses to unsafe modes of transport to toxic rivers. The Victorian response to such tragedies was to set-up statutory regulatory bodies, which by the mid-twentieth century had developed into an extensive system of life-preserving regulatory inspectorates overseeing the economy's proclivity to throw-up new and unsafe commercial products and practices. However, British society has now been subject to several decades of economies and cost-cutting red