On 14 June 2017, a fire broke out in the Grenfell Tower, a high-rise block of flats in North Kensington, London. The tower, built with cheap but highly flammable cladding, burned rapidly, tragically killing seventy two people in the UK's deadliest residential fire since World War Two. A subsequent inquiry into the fire found that a host of failures on both a governmental and private sector level were responsible for the structural inadequacies that rendered the Grenfell Tower – and many others like it – susceptible to a fire of this magnitude.





In The City to Come, Jay Bernard articulates a vision of the British capital at a pivotal point in its history, as the public are forced to contend with an ongoing housing crisis, deepening cost of living crisis, insidious economic ideologies and openly racist demonstrations.





Across a series of conversations, The City to Come documents the lives and perspectives of Londoners who live in the shadow of the Grenfell Tower, from local residents to those who pass by on their daily commute, survivors to community organisers, public servants to artists and writers. What emerges is a portrait of a city in flux, whose old certainties are rapidly transforming into a strange new future.



Jay Bernard (FRSL) is an interdisciplinary writer and artist from London. Jay was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2020 and winner of the 2017 Ted Hughes Award for their debut collection, Surge. Jay was a DAAD literature fellow 2022, a 2023 fellow at the Institute of Ideas and Imagination in Paris and is the 2025 Judith E. Wilson poetry fellow at the University of Cambridge.