The tragic Grenfell tower fire in West London has brought to the fore an excellent local action group blog for the area that, for years had been raising fire safety problems. The media and twitter are all over the blog as they pore through the clear and prescient warnings of an imminent tragedy.
Complaints about fire safety from last Nov by residents of tower block now on fire. Landlord faces a LOT of questions. https://t.co/vPnWwbVhD2
— Charles Arthur (@charlesarthur) June 14, 2017
Here’s a few observations about https://grenfellactiongroup.wordpress.com/
The site is an excellent example of a classic hyperlocal site, apparently running since 2012 (maybe earlier) with over 150 posts.
Post lengths can be long, many hundreds of words and aren’t afraid to be robust. the author, who appears anonymous, has put very substantial time into this writing. The site is on behalf of the Greenfell Action Group.
It runs on wordpress.com – this means it has stayed up without any problems despite being under heavy media load
In design terms it uses a traditional two column blog layout, with a very long blog roll in the right hand column
Planning and development issues are a staple for the site
The authors are this morning employing the simple yet powerful tactic of an aggregate blog post that simply links to all their previous stories about fire safety. The media will now be using this as a basis for hard questioning of the landlord and other authorities.
I do hope that the media make full use of the material on this excellent site to hold local power to account.
William Perrin
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