One Kensington: Tales from the Frontline of the Most Unequal Borough in Britain

by Emma Dent Coad

Kensington and Chelsea - one of the wealthiest spots on planet Earth - is also one of the most unequal. A short walk from Harrods, families cannot buy enough food to feed themselves. Desperate overcrowding is found in the shadow of ultraluxury property developments. A 20 minute bus ride across the borough can encompass a 30 year difference in life expectancy.


Emma Dent Coad, a councillor in Kensington and Chelsea since 2006, and has spent her life fighting for those left behind in the Royal Borough. That fight became all the more urgent when, just a few days after she was unexpectedly and triumphantly elected MP for the area, the Grenfell Tower disaster occurred, illustrating to the country and the world just how neglected the most vulnerable members of our society had become.

One Kensington lays bare the appalling degree of mismanagement and neglect that has made Kensington and Chelsea a grim symbol of an ever more divided a glimpse of a wider future of hollowed-out local government and cynical corruption. But through the depth of community connections and tireless political organising, it also suggests a potentially hopeful future for a new Britain.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Sociology, London

352 pages, Hardcover

First published January 17, 2023

About the author

Emma Dent Coad, born Margaret Mary Dent in 1954, is an English architectural historian and politician who served as Member of Parliament (MP) for Kensington from 2017 to 2019.

Dent Coad graduated from the Royal College of Art with an MA in History of Design in 1992. She has written or contributed to a number of books on architecture and design, including on Javier Mariscal, and studied at the University of Liverpool School of Architecture for a PhD on "Constructing Modern Spain: Architecture, Politics and Ideology under Franco, 1939–1975". She has been an organiser of the modern architecture campaign group Docomomo UK since about 2000.

A former member of the Labour Party, she has been a member of Kensington and Chelsea London Borough Council for Golborne since 2006. She resigned her Labour membership on 27 April 2023, but remains on the local council as an independent.

Reviews

[Corinne Fitzgerald · Rating 4 out of 5]

A reason to be angry if ever there was one.

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 4 out of 5]

The specific manner in which I left the Labour Party was as late and petty as anyone else's - it was on the day that the new leadership deselected Emma Dent Coad, the MP for Kensington between 2017 and 2019, in late 2022. Maybe this was partly solidarity between architectural historians - there aren't many in politics - but it was mainly because it, first, seemed so outrageous to kick out one of the only MPs to truly understand how housing and construction and city planning actually work (that the right of the Party have absolutely no fucking idea is currently seen by their indulgence of 'YIMBY' snake-oil-salesmen, that the left aren't that much better by Corbyn's appointment when he was leader of the awful John Healey as shadow housing minister), but second and especially because Dent Coad was so prominent and so eloquent in fighting for the residents of a certain high-rise building in her constituency, which went on fire seemingly hours after she was elected, due to the fact one of the richest local authorities in the world had covered in flammable cladding because it was cheaper. I didn't read this book for ages because I expected it would, like everything about Grenfell, make me incredibly angry, and, well, it did, but it's also a great portrait of a hugely misunderstood part of a hugely misunderstood city, and the way in which the Cameron-Osborne faction, the now-almost-forgotten urban Tories, treated it as a forum for whimsy, laissez-faire non-planning experiments, and class war.

[Grace Bartholomew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Devastatingly important book - esp for those living in the borough