Khalid Ahmed, who escaped the eighth floor, is still in shock as he watches the political fallout and tries to rebuild his life

In the streets around Grenfell Tower victims are instantly identifiable by coloured wristbands which allow them access to support services in a relief centre, located in a gym underneath the motorway. Khalid Ahmed, 20, who escaped from his eighth-floor home, has slipped his off and folded it into his pocket.



“Everyone can see it, and people were stopping me in the street, asking the same questions again and again. Where did you live? What floor were you on? How did you get out? It gets tiring,” he says.

Families who are still in shock and grieving are having to rebuild their lives from scratch. Some are organising funerals, and trying to work out how to get visas and flights for relatives travelling from abroad. But even for those who escaped without losing relatives, the list of immediate tasks is long: new clothes, new passports, Oyster cards, bank cards, driving licences have to be sourced, time off from work has to be agreed, and then there’s the bigger question of arranging somewhere new to live.

Now that survivors have been rehoused in hotels across London, many say they feel isolated, too tired to travel to the residents’ meetings that are being held in community centres around the tower. People are exhausted, disoriented and angry.

Ahmed is staying on the 16th floor of a hotel three miles from the tower; he is not thrilled to be so high up, but he doesn’t feel inclined to make a fuss. His aunt, Amina Mohamed, is on the fourth floor. “She refused to go any higher,” he says. They have already been offered a permanent home in a flat in neighbouring Westminster, but it is on an estate which has a bad record for gang crime, and she has refused it.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Khalid Ahmed. Photograph: Panorama

He remains in shock, watching the political fallout from the tragedy on a television in a victims’ centre set up by local volunteers in a rugby club near the tower. He greets this week’s declaration from Theresa May that governments “simply haven’t given enough attention to social housing” with scepticism and the news of cladding being removed from other blocks with some bitterness.

“At least we are learning, but it feels a bit too late. It took how many people to die for them to realise it wasn’t safe? Putting flammable cladding on a 23-storey building, with one staircase, no alarms in the stairways, no sprinkler systems? Now they are ready to fix it, but before they were just unwilling to spend the money,” he says. “Why did they wait for all these people to die just to do something simple? Victims are just demoralised.”

The noise of the cladding falling from the building is one of the memories that troubles him from the night of the fire. He hopes that those responsible will be pursued. “As far as the cladding goes, and the way the fire was accelerated, someone should be held accountable.”

Ahmed, who has lived with his aunt since moving to London from Somalia when he was six, was awake playing on his PlayStation after midnight, listening to music with headphones on. “My aunt is always telling me off for staying up late, telling me I’ll get insomnia. I’ve been telling her: PlayStation saved your life,” he says.

When he smelled smoke at around 1am, he woke his aunt. As she got dressed, he went out to the deserted corridor, where he realised everyone else was asleep. He knocked on his neighbours’ doors, and woke up the people in the other five flats. Over the past few days, when he bumps into them in the respite centre, they have been thanking him for alerting them and saving their lives. There was no smoke in the stairway as he came down with his neighbours, and there weren’t many other people using the stairs at that time, around ten past one; he assumes that people upstairs were still unaware of what was happening. There was no noise of fire-alarms until he got down to the fourth floor.

He spent hours outside the building, watching as the fire spread, looking after a young girl from Somalia, whom he hadn’t met before and hasn’t seen since, who was crying because her father was stuck in the building. “That was very hard,” he says. Hundreds of residents stood watching the disaster, horrified by the flashes of mobile phone torches from people on the upper stories, trying to signal to firefighters that they needed help.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest People in the streets near Grenfell Tower as it was engulfed by fire. Photograph: Epics/Getty Images

“There was a man on the 16th floor, who kept on coming to the window, and you just watched as the fire connected, and then he was no longer there.”

While he feels grateful for an initial payment of £500 that he and his aunt have received to help cover the immediate costs of the tragedy, noting that it was hard in the first few days, with no money and no access to his bank account, he remains angry at the prime minister’s slowness in coming forward to meet the victims.



“In any other neighbourhood Theresa May would have come straight away, sat with people, had tea in their homes. This is not really her area,” he says. The prime minister’s subsequent efforts to express compassion for the victims have not satisfied residents, who feel let down by the chaotic response to the tragedy. “People were thinking: you put us in this building and you don’t care, and then you still don’t care afterwards.”



Ahmed agrees to be interviewed in Avondale Park, which is a five-minute walk from the tower, but a place he has never previously been to, in the richer, leafier part of the borough. It is quiet, apart from the gentle pock-pock noise of a tennis game, somewhere out of sight, behind a hedge. Afterwards he walks to Holland Park tube station (because his usual station is still closed), a station he never uses. As he waits to get into the lift, a man in a grey top hat and suit comes out, wearing an Ascot badge. “You don’t get that in Latimer Road,” he says.

“You can clearly see the divide – different houses, different environment. I don’t think that many people liked the tower block, and so-called poor people living in such a nice neighbourhood,” he says. He bridles at the way the block has been depicted as a centre of deprivation in the media, irritated at being cast as “some lower status kind of person, with this portrayal of the tall block, a place that the government had got for poor people to live in squalid places. I wouldn’t say it is poor. I wouldn’t say it was high-end … but people work – my aunt works, my neighbours work.”

Although the relief effort is improving, things remain muddled, he says. “Everything is still all over the place. You get a call from someone who says: ‘I’m from housing,’ and then a few minutes later you get a call from someone else who says: ‘I’m from housing.’ No one knows what they’re doing.” He says he doesn’t mind where he ends up living “as long as it isn’t a high-rise”.



Ahmed has lost all of his college coursework assignments, prepared as part of his entry application to study mechanical engineering at the University of Middlesex, but after going to his college in Uxbridge, he has been reassured that he will get special dispensation, and his place remains safe. He has lost all his documents, but he is trying not to complain. “It doesn’t feel good to be talking about losing my things, my passport, my work. Other people have lost children.”