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peteapps.bsky.social
Pete Apps
@peteapps.bsky.social
3.2K followers 26 following 170 posts
Inside Housing + freelance elsewhere. Author of Orwell Prize winning Show Me The Bodies - How We Let Grenfell Happen. https://peteapps.substack.com
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peteapps.bsky.social
"I would make those people stand in front of the tower. I would make them stand and look at it"

Building Safety Regulator chair, Andy Roe, asked to respond to commentators who call for the regulator to be axed:
“It is really straightforward,” he says. “I would make those people stand in front of the tower. I would make them stand and look at it, because it is the most profound manifestation of system failure. We can’t repeat that, and that is something people are too quick to forget. “I think one of the great advantages of our background is that it’s not hypothetical for us. I have stood next to Charlie in too many awful spaces over the years, on too many streets in London thinking, ‘How do we get to this?’ ‘How did people end up living like this?’ “And while the Building Safety Regulator wasn’t working as it should, that should not be a reason in the short term to just step away and abandon it. The moral imperative is too great.” This afternoon, he says, he is going to a boxing club with his son. Mr Roe has boxed and coached boxing his whole life. When he attended Grenfell, he knew where he was immediately because of the Dale Youth Boxing Club at the base of the tower – a gem in Britain’s feted amateur boxing circuit that has produced multiple world champions from the streets of west London. “When I go into that space this afternoon, I’m going to be with people in an environment I’ve known since I was a kid,” says Mr Roe. “The warmth, the humour, the banter, the energy. And I know there’s estates and blocks all over this country that are exactly the same. And when I think about what motivates me, it’s that, it’s those spaces. It’s protecting them, and making sure they are safe.”
November 21, 2025 at 11:49 AM
peteapps.bsky.social
Latest Substack, looks into plans to let builders sell 'affordable' homes on the open market - and asks whether there is an 'idolatory to victimhood' in UK politics:

peteapps.substack.com/p/sweeties-f...
November 4, 2025 at 2:04 PM
peteapps.bsky.social
Build baby build is not a housing strategy

Bit by me for the Spectator:

www.spectator.co.uk/article/buil...
Text extract reading: Working out the way forward isn’t easy, but it is the job of serious politicians to at least try. That requires strategy, trade-offs, imperfect answers, compromise and a willingness to at least hear dissenting voices – not branding everyone who questions you a ‘blocker’ or NIMBY, and hiding behind a slogan that is as childish as it is facile. For Reed, the buzz of his cosplay populism will soon fade. He has had his fun being cheered by delegates and surrounded by sycophantic think tank wonks who share his taste for silly hats. But the reality of the state of the economy and the size of the mess he has inherited will soon dawn on him. In the coming weeks, he is likely to meet with leaseholders whose lives have been turned upside down by the building crisis, as well as survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire. When he attends these meetings, he would be well advised to leave his new baseball cap at home
October 3, 2025 at 6:58 AM
peteapps.bsky.social
Jess and I will be sharing a platform to discuss both books on October 23 at Pages of Hackney, if anyone can make it along!
September 28, 2025 at 9:08 AM
peteapps.bsky.social
... a boost. Thamesmead, south London - already a housing zone. Inner city densification in Manchester, hardly a new idea. Milton Keynes city centre, which was a new town originally but can't be again!
A list of developments which will likely become 'new towns', but in fact represent a series of existing areas of private sector development which will now receive enhanced government support
September 28, 2025 at 9:01 AM
peteapps.bsky.social
A shame this isn't going to be made retrospective. There's a few council press officers I could get banged up

www.prweek.co.uk/article/1932...
September 18, 2025 at 10:47 AM
peteapps.bsky.social
And with Vicky Spratt and Jessica Field at Pages of Hackney on October 25

pagesofhackney.co.uk/events-calen...
September 16, 2025 at 6:34 PM
peteapps.bsky.social
The Conduit in Covent Garden with the amazing
@Victoria_Spratt
and
@Kwajotweneboa
- two really powerful voices on what's going wrong with housing and what needs to change

theconduit.com/upcoming-eve...
September 16, 2025 at 6:29 PM
peteapps.bsky.social
In Edinburgh on October 7 with
@lighthousebks.bsky.social
for anyone up there. There is a lot of commonality between Edinburgh's housing crisis and London's, so I'm looking forward to a good discussion

lighthousebookshop.com/events/homes...
September 16, 2025 at 6:26 PM
peteapps.bsky.social
On September 25 (publication day) at The Wanstead Tap in east London, with the institution that is the
@newhambookshop.bsky.social (where I first went when I was about three months old, probably)

newhambooks.co.uk/displaybook....
September 16, 2025 at 6:25 PM
peteapps.bsky.social
I have a few events coming up surrounding the release of my new book Homesick (out next Thursday).

Really looking forward to discussing how we got into this mess and how we can get out with some great people (thread):
September 16, 2025 at 6:25 PM
peteapps.bsky.social
I know about the fiscal situation. But a heavily indebted economy post World War II still managed to push forward policies which engendered this kind of hope. We need some of that politics again, somehow.
There was criticism - it was uniform and monotonous in its architecture - but there was also a lot of hope. In its first years, the town was exclusively social rented housing, mostly houses, with private gardens. To those who were escaping the bombed out slums of east London, it was a paradise. “Some who read these pages at this time may feel almost as if they had wandered into fairyland, that it is too good to be true, that such things can have no relation to the present bleak and troubled days,” wrote the first chair of the development corporation of the first masterplan.
September 16, 2025 at 10:16 AM
peteapps.bsky.social
Finished copies of Homesick arrived!

Out on September 25, pre-order here

uk.bookshop.org/p/books/home...
August 22, 2025 at 4:04 PM
peteapps.bsky.social
My new book, which tracks the impact the housing crisis has had on London since the 1980s and where the city is going in the future, is out on September 25. You can get 25% off if you pre-order with Waterstones here:

www.waterstones.com/book/homesic...
July 28, 2025 at 11:45 AM
peteapps.bsky.social
Around the country - and London in particular - developers are reducing their affordable housing contributions. Do we need a new model for building out large sites? Bit by me for
The Developer

thedeveloper.live/opinion/a-br...
June 16, 2025 at 9:33 AM
peteapps.bsky.social
Then - just six weeks later - she and other senior directors got a business update from the French arm of the business, boasting about a big sale of 3,000 sqm of PE to "Grenfell Towers". Not one of them asked about safety
June 15, 2025 at 9:08 AM
peteapps.bsky.social
New: US bosses at cladding firm which sold material for use on Grenfell knew it was unsafe and knew it was being sold for use on the tower, newly released emails reveal

www.thetimes.com/uk/london/ar...
June 15, 2025 at 9:05 AM
peteapps.bsky.social
Some thoughts on Reeves' big affordable housing announcements. Tl;dr - yes it is good news (and a pleasent surprise), but let's not get carried away:

peteapps.substack.com/p/yes-it-act...
June 12, 2025 at 9:24 AM
peteapps.bsky.social
Sneak peak of the contents page:
May 29, 2025 at 7:37 PM
peteapps.bsky.social
I was born into a city where housing was affordable. But I've grown up into one where it was not. What has gone wrong in London over the last 35 years? And where is it going in the future?

My new book, Homesick, tells that story. Out Sept 25

www.amazon.co.uk/Homesick-How...
May 29, 2025 at 7:36 PM
peteapps.bsky.social
For me, one of the problems with the implementation of the Building Safety Regulator is that industry is not used to having to work out compliance at the start. Changing that was always going to be a big disruption. But it absolutely needed to happen

www.insidehousing.co.uk/insight/assu...
May 23, 2025 at 9:38 AM
peteapps.bsky.social
This week's Substack somehow started with the fall out from a prolific fire engineer being suspended, and ended with my anxieties about AI destroying the scaffolding which supports creative careers: peteapps.substack.com/p/lessons-fr...
May 20, 2025 at 8:20 AM
peteapps.bsky.social
I have my first foray into broadcast journalism coming out next week, with Anatomy of a Firetrap - a dive into the building safety crisis and how we got here for Radio 4's File on 4. It's a Radio Times "pick of the week", which is nice!
April 29, 2025 at 11:05 AM
peteapps.bsky.social
If Labour really wants to build 1.5m homes, it needs to bring back public house building in a big way. An extra £2bn is better than a cut, but it also isn't going to change the picture: unherd.com/newsroom/rac...
March 26, 2025 at 11:29 AM
peteapps.bsky.social
A fair few examples of this comms strategy in action in the government media rounds yesterday and this morning
March 19, 2025 at 10:12 AM