Black ash still comes through Virginia Sang’s kitchen window, six years on from the Grenfell Tower disaster. It blows in off the scorched shell of a building that still stands, wrapped in plastic, a reminder that the Lancaster West estate, where she’s lived for 45 years, is forever changed.
“Every day I go in and you have to clean, and it’s all black ashes,” she says, sitting in a leisure centre on her lunch break. At the memorial wall metres away, she points to a picture of a man who died in the Grenfell fire. They used to go drinking together. “The majority of the people in the tower, I grew up with,” Sang says.
But now residents are facing rising charges and an increasingly unliveable estate. “After the fire we have been living on a building site,” Sang adds.
This is life in the shadow of Grenfell Tower, six years on.
The Big Issue spoke to residents on the Lancaster West estate – home not
