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Good morning.

This week sees the fourth anniversary of the Grenfell fire, which killed 72 people. Four years on, an issue which is naturally close to the hearts of bereaved families is how the event and their losses should be memorialized. And now, a father, whose child was stillborn as a result of toxic fumes has proposed, with the support of a group of relatives, that the 24 storey tower where their loved ones died should be preserved, but transformed as a high rise garden, planted with 72 species of plants.

The symbolism of gardens is not tied to particular religions and the simple passing of the seasons speaks to just about all of us in a bitter-sweet mix of associations of rebirth, hope, loss, transience and renewal. And yet in the many religious traditions which have their roots in the Middle East, paradise - from a Persian word meaning literally, an enclosed space – has typically been pictured as a garden. The Koran promises gardens to the faithful; the Hebrew scriptures begin with the Garden of Eden; and the very last chapter in the very last book of the New Testament has a vision of another garden, at the centre of a new heaven and a new earth. And the appeal of gardens in the hot and arid lands of the Middle East is obvious enough – in one of the most anthropomorphic images in the whole of the Bible, the book of Genesis has God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.

In the context, that image seems especially poignant and painful. Paradise was pictured as a garden in hot countries just because gardens provided a respite from the heat, when of course, for the many victims of the fire there was no respite.

But that awful fact makes the case for a memorial as prominent as a high-rise garden would be, all the more compelling to my mind - for alongside the question as to exactly how this terrible loss should be memorialized, there is the question how such tragedies can be prevented in the future. Families of different religious traditions and none, typically express the depth of their private pain and grief in a concern for the public good – specifically that no only else should suffer as they have. The failures which led to this terrible loss of life have been documented in the phase 1 report from the Grenfell Tower inquiry – but its recommendations mostly remain to be implemented. A 24 storey high garden, which could be seen across the capital, might then not only preserve the site and be a fitting and evocative memorial for those who died; it might also turn what on that night four years ago was a frightful beacon of human anguish, into a beacon of resolute hope for a better future.

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