Death and denial in the city

Making sense of London Bridge and Grenfell

Bibliographic Data

ID7153157
AuthorsOwen David Thomas (0000-0001-5470-9013, University of Exeter, corresponding author), Victoria M Basham (0000-0002-8829-5119, Cardiff University), Rhys Crilley (0000-0003-1816-5535, University of Glasgow)
Year2025
Volume43
Issue7
Pages1332-1349
Publication date2025-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironment and Planning C Politics and Space (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2399-6544 • E-ISSN: 2399-6552
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/23996544251326476
OpenAlexW4408582078
LanguageEN
References cited55

In the wake of violent events comes a rush to make sense of what happened. Sensemaking matters because it bounds political possibilities, producing knowledge about what caused the violence, who is accountable, and whether society should change to prevent a recurrence. This paper explores sensemaking through an intertextual discourse analysis of elite, print, and social media responses to two violent events in the global city of London in June 2017: the London Bridge terrorist attack and the Grenfell Tower fire. For some, global cities like London are imagined as inclusive and post-imperial: a place of safety and security. Others regard global cities like London as sites of intensive racialisation, inequality, and hierarchy: a political order that produces insecurity. Scholarly debates suggest that public sensemaking could generate alternative political registers to contest the established narratives that sustain violent orders. Yet, our analysis reveals that, in this instance, intertextual sensemaking in a social media age overwhelmingly reflected and reproduced existing socio-political order. Through discourses of denial, the prosperous global city of London emerged as a place where violence might occur but not a violent place . We analyse three discourses of denial: (1) that the events failed to reflect ‘who we are’, (2) that ‘others’ were to blame, and (3) a fatalistic acceptance that some violence ‘is what it is’. Despite academic optimism about public sensemaking, we show denial functions to externalise the causes of violence from socio-political and spatial orders, limiting the scope for change

Denial · Psychoanalysis · History · Law in Society and Culture · Medicine · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Psychology · Public Spaces through Art