09:02

Under the Westway there’s a makeshift outdoor centre where volunteers have been inundated with piles of donations.

At the gates, Imran Khan, who lives in White City, is making up flat-pack boxes and turning away people arriving with new donations. Here, the team desperately needs people to help sort the goods, volunteers say.

“I brought loads of clothes and stuff and I ended up staying,” Khan said. “When I came there were two of them [volunteers] and look at this.”

He waves towards bin bags full of clothes piled to above head height, household goods and hundreds of bags of food – tinned goods, boxes of crisp bags, palettes of water bottles and trolleys of fresh fruit. Khan returned this morning at 4am.

Mohammed Khanji, another volunteer, said: “I’m a doctor, so I came to see if there was any medical help [needed]. They seemed to be well covered so I just came to see what else they would need.” He has been sorting donations since 6pm yesterday. “There’s a surplus of donations and it needs to be sorted first before people bring other things.”

Alice Ross (@aliceross_) Volunteers worked through the night sorting vast quantities of donations #GrenfellTower pic.twitter.com/wbII6QzI0G

Satta Badham, another volunteer from west London, usually runs a homeless charity. He said nobody was in charge of the sorting effort – it was entirely ad hoc.

Once goods are sorted they are being driven to the centres around the area where people made homeless in the fire are being housed.

“The amount of stuff that’s come here is enough for thousands of people. More than anything they need housing: where are they going to go?” he asked. In the medium and long term, it’s money people will need to get back on their feet, he said. “There’s only so much of this stuff we can keep bringing and moving,” he added.

Like others, Badham is concerned about the lack of central coordination. “There should be a different system if something like this happens for people to be taken care of,” he said. “It’s the poorer people in the richest place. You’re in the richest council in the country and you’re telling me you can’t house 600 people?”