In early 2023 we broke the news that Kensington & Chelsea Council (RBKC) had done a secret deal with the international property developer Ballymore for the sale of one of North Kensington’s last remaining community assets, Canalside House. Ostensibly, very little has changed, but we can update our readers on what hasn’t happened, non-developments that expose the council’s attitude towards its poorer communities, of interest to those who care about North Kensington’s future prospects.Continue reading →
In Kensington Town Hall last Wednesday night, a Labour councillor’s motion, “Assistance to Children in Poverty,” was slapped down by the permanent Conservative majority that dominates the council. A perfect allegory for the hopelessly dysfunctional politics of Kensington & Chelsea.
(the Labour councillors’ original motion)
Councillor Mohammed Bakhtiar’s motion was modest; he acknowledged the appalling rates of child poverty in the borough and the additional challenges created by the Covid restrictions. He called on the council to establish systems and allocate additional funds to address a crisis in which food poverty and job insecurity have compounded the difficulties faced by thousands of families.
The Labour councillor’s motion noted that a quarter (4,500 according to the last census) of the borough’s children live in poverty, with most of them residing in working households. A report by WPU Economics for the Kensington & Chelsea Foundation in 2021 showed that almost half (45.3%) of the borough’s children attend independent schools, far higher than both the London (10.1%) and England (9.7%) averages. This means that, of the Kensington children not in private education, close to half are living in poverty. The WPU report also notes:
• Black students in the borough have a gap in average Attainment 8 scores (a measure of progression in attainment) that is four and a half times larger than in England overall.
• White British pupils eligible for Free School Meals in the borough are the largest educationally disadvantaged group in terms of GCSE performance and higher education.
WPU Economics identified a wide range of factors that contribute to the borough’s educational inequalities:
• RBKC had higher temporary and permanent exclusion rates in primary and secondary state schools than both London and England as a whole. (This has been worsened by the academisation process, including the unaccountable leadership installed at Holland Park School)
• Exclusions for Black and Mixed ethnicity students are twice as high as their White or Asian peers. For students with Special Education Needs provision, they are three times as high as those without.
• Inadequate housing impacts education and 13% of RBKC households are overcrowded; 29.8 out of every 1,000 households are in temporary accommodation in the borough, compared to 17 in London 4.1 in England overall.
• A combination of a lack of space to learn at home and language and cultural barriers has meant that many children struggled to access quality education during the period of Covid restrictions.[i]
If we break the statistics down geographically, they become even more stark. Census figures for Golborne ward in North Kensington revealed that 68% of children were living in overcrowded homes. On Henry Dickens Court in another northern ward, Notting Dale, child poverty was at 58% while in Queens Gate, South Kensington, it was 2.8%.
Before Covid, communities in the north of the borough already faced a deteriorating situation; men in Golborne’s life expectancy had dropped to 72, while in a southern ward, Hans Town, they live 22 years longer. With a higher number of people from Black and minority ethnic communities residing in North Kensington, the area was disproportionately impacted by Covid. Office for National Statistics data showed Black males being over 400% more likely to die from Covid than white males. Parents of children living in poverty and overcrowded accommodation were also more likely to have a job deemed key to the economy, so many had to continue going to work while the laptop class worked from home, saving money and extending economic inequality.
The obscene inequalities affect the south of the borough too, with cuts to services worsening the poverty already entrenched in Earls Court and Chelsea World’s End.
Demand for tuition
While the borough’s third sector has worked valiantly to provide opportunities for children to catch up with lost learning following the counter-productive school closures, the demand has been difficult to meet in a funding environment in which charitable donations are declining.
An education coordinator at local charity told us: “The cost-of-living has bitten down on families, and we’re still in the long shadow of Covid, so demand for our classes has sky rocketed. We’ve doubled our registrations for educational support in the last year.
“All children were negatively affected by Covid because most learning progress happens in the classroom. But children from economically disadvantaged families were hit the hardest, and it’s not because the children aren’t capable or they have the wrong attitude. Factors like a lack of financial resources in the family, unsettled home circumstances and having parents who don’t have a high level of UK education are decisive.
“Children from families with money have been negatively affected too, results are down across the board. But being able to afford private tuition and IT equipment stops them falling behind. Teachers at schools are now over-stretched so can’t give time and attention to those who need it most. So an attempt at equity in education is not unfair in any way. Investing in high-impact support will help all children because it would free up time in the classroom for all pupils.
“Education is the most important thing to invest in in any community. It lifts people out of poverty, breaks negative cycles in families and empowers individuals to improve their circumstances. There’s a net positive effect on every aspect of the local community, social and economic. Crime goes down, cohesion increases.”
It was in this dire economic and social milieu, and under the council’s giant crest with its motto ‘What a good thing it is to dwell together in unity’ that Labour councillors sought to make some inroads into addressing the educational inequality they see worsening every day in their wards.
The Conservatives’ response was moved by Cllr Will Pascall of Chelsea and Cllr David Lindsay, former Mayor of Kensington:
(Tories’ amended motion)
The Tory councillors deleted from the specific actions proposed by the Labour councillors, namely identifying children in particular need of educational support and allocating funds to help them. The urgency in the Labour motion was replaced with a reaffirmation of the status quo and a specific focus on celebrating children at “grant-maintained schools” – the children already least in need of support catching up after Covid because they aren’t hampered by overcrowding, over-worked parents, poverty, and stress.
Because of the rules of the game at the Town Hall, Labour, the minority party, could not oppose the majority party’s amendments; they could only voice their opposition in a debate, and policy remained unchanged. As it has since the 1960s when an in-depth study found that Kensington’s Tory councillors saw it as their duty to limit public spending strictly to the provision of statutory services and to encourage “self-help” among the poor.
This was a boilerplate move from the Tories. Nothing has changed in the 50 years of the borough’s existence. No event, even the “most serious crime committed on British soil this century”[ii] can shake the Conservatives’ complacency. Posh white people with property portfolios who pay other people to raise their children and clean their homes push “self-reliance” on impoverished young people while restoring the council’s bank reserves and keeping their voting base, who have no material problems, on high alert over Labour’s menacing attitude towards the Tories’ one local campaign issue: bin collections.
The specific councillors who submitted the Tories’ response are typical Kensington toffs. Cllr Lindsay is an old Etonian, while Cllr Pascall apparently sent his children there.
The council does not look like an administrative entity capable of responding to the needs of disparate groups in a time of widening inequality when senior councillors treat politics like a sport. The Labour councillors who spoke against the Conservatives’ amendments to the timely “Assistance to Children in Poverty” motion also have to reckon with Sir Keir Starmer’s determination to keep those same children in poverty as he appeases the donor base that he serves, many of whom live in Kensington.
What a good thing it is to dwell together in unity.
[i] All statistics in these bullet points are taken from Poverty and Prosperity in Kensington + Chelsea Understanding inequalities in a Borough of Extremes; A WPI Economics Report for The Kensington + Chelsea Foundation; November 2021
[ii] Peter Apps, quote from Show Me The Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen; Oneworld Publications
The aristocratic politician who vanished from public view after the Grenfell Tower fire, Rock Feilding-Mellen, has re-emerged. Reinventing himself as a spiritual man working for the greater good, yet still a businessman; connected, dynamic and wealthy. Is that the reality? Or is he a man on the run? From justice, from North Kensington, from himself and the spectre of karma? Six years on from the atrocity, it is worth considering who Feilding-Mellen was, who he is, and what his transformed image means.
Image from Beckley Retreats
Who?
Rock Hugo Basil Feilding-Mellen is the son of Amanda Feilding, who also goes by the titles Countess of Wenyss & March and Lady Neidpath. The family are distant royals, a lineage tracing back to Charles II. Among the properties they own is Stanway House in Gloucestershire, which they promote as “an enclave of very English and almost magical harmony.”
As well as being steeped in aristocratic and feudalistic privilege, Amanda Feilding is also a drug reform campaigner, a sought-after “thought leader” in psychedelic drug research. The media has presented a bohemian, eccentric image of the family, but their radical credentials are limited to psychedelics and do not cross over into causes that challenge the status quo such as land reform or social justice. You can watch her drill a hole in her own head here.
Radical Politics
Rock Feilding-Mellen took a career in politics and in 2010 was given a safe Conservative council seat in Kensington, the most unequal local authority area in Britain. Just three years later, at the age of 34 and with no obvious expertise or qualification for either position, he was made Deputy Leader of Kensington & Chelsea Council (RBKC) and Cabinet Member for Housing, Property and Regeneration. This positioned him to become the most consequential politician in recent local history. Feilding-Mellen set about manifesting a vision of dramatically altered demographics and culture in North Kensington, stating that he wanted to “wean people off” the idea of being able to live in social housing in the borough.
Under the banner of ‘regeneration,’ Feilding-Mellen cut RBKC’s housing waiting list in half and imposed a decant policy which removed the right of return to their neighbourhoods for residents forced out. The deputy leader also set out on an aggressive campaign of asset stripping the north of the borough; his targets included the college, library, Westway Information Centre, Canalside House and whole housing estates, including Lancaster West, site of Grenfell Tower.
During this period, Feilding-Mellen was also a director of various small, possibly shell, companies including Socially Conscious Capital Ltd which deals in “strategic land promotion projects” and remains a going concern at Companies House.
The name Socially Conscious Capital jars, given that it was Rock Feilding-Mellen who oversaw and signed off on the 2016 refurbishment of Grenfell Tower, done on the cheap while RBKC sat on a third of a billion pounds of reserves. It appears that the deputy leader still planned to ‘regenerate’ Lancaster West, presiding over the local authority’s culture of cost-cutting and denigrating residents who raised their voices.
After the Fire
Feilding-Mellen was forced by the government to resign from his RBKC leadership roles in the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire. He retained a passive income from his councillor’s salary until the May 2018 election despite vanishing from public life.
Rock’s mother Amanda Feilding carried on seemingly without compunction. A month after the fire, Vice magazine showcased her pro-drugs health campaigning, with no mention of Grenfell Tower, and she gave further interviews and talks on psychedelics throughout 2017 as if nothing had happened in North Kensington.
Four years on from the fire, Rock Feilding-Mellen answered some questions at the Grenfell Inquiry. But the Inquiry Chairman, Sir Martin Moore-Bick, did the politicians, Tenant Management Organisation officers and corporates who played roles (prima facie) in the atrocity a huge favour by creating a gap of years before any criminal investigation would commence. Moore-Bick’s priority was to establish what happened, not who was to blame. Covid lengthened this lag and the precedent of people like Graham Mackrell (implicated in the Hillsborough disaster) show how the passage of time and expensive lawyers can provide a way out for those determined to avoid justice in cases where the British establishment has a vested interest in avoiding a reckoning.
Image from Grenfell Tower Inquiry
The tortoise pace and “merry-go-round of buck-passing” of the Inquiry has not served the victims, only the criminals and the establishment. And Rock Feilding-Mellen, by birth and through his deeds, is an establishment figure.
Psychedelics
In contrast to many in North Kensington who live in forced passivity, waiting for a sign of justice for Grenfell, Feilding-Mellen has been able to explore a wildly different lifestyle via the family business. His mother is Founder and Executive Director of the Beckley Foundation, a registered charity focused on drug policy reform and scientific research into psychoactive substances. The foundation is named after Beckley Park, an Oxfordshire country house owned by various Royals, Dukes and Lords. Used historically as a hunting lodge by Kings, and possessing three moats, it is one of Amanda Feilding’s properties.
Beckley has two for-profit offshoots; one is Beckley Psytech Limited, a drug research company overseen by Amanda’s other son, Cosmo. Despite reporting a loss of over £9 million in 2021, Beckley Psytech also reported retained total assets of over £67 million.
Rock Feilding-Mellen co-founded and directs the other offshoot, Beckley Retreats, a company that offers supervised, legal psilocybin retreats in Jamaica and The Netherlands. Beckley offers 11-week programmes for participants, including online preparation, five nights of immersive retreat and support afterwards. The retreats are not cheap, but bursaries are made available, and Feilding-Mellen has stated that he wants to expand the availability of bursaries to enable more people to benefit from the healing and awakening experiences accessible through psychedelics.
After the Grenfell Tower fire and his enforced resignation from his cabinet roles at Kensington Town Hall, Feilding-Mellen apparently went into hiding. For months, posters in North Kensington asked where he had disappeared to.
But the protracted progress of the Grenfell Inquiry sheltered Feilding-Mellen from public accountability for years, and the national media had lost interest in him by August 2017.
Numerous sources who knew him in both his politician and businessman days recall a man so arrogant and without regard for others that they assumed he took cocaine before every meeting. As a young man, Feilding-Mellen would apparently startle rooms of seasoned businessmen with his projection of absolute entitlement. Community leaders in North Kensington say that, while he liked to present himself as dynamic and entrepreneurial, he was transparently an old-school Conservative politician pursuing the interests of his class. It is not known to us whether or not Feilding-Mellen has a diagnosis of sociopathy or psychopathy, but his conduct in Kensington was consistent with somebody devoid of empathy and filled with a grandiose sense of self. These same traits are no barrier to somebody transitioning to an entirely new image by learning how to present certain emotions that elicit sympathy from empathic people.
Among the stable of right-wing Tory councillors that dominated the local authority, Feilding-Mellen was the youngest and most ambitious. Perhaps it was deference to his ancestry that inspired his colleagues to prematurely promote somebody with no obvious talent to a position of significant power. Or, with the unleashing of so-called austerity in 2010, the Kensington Conservatives knowingly used Feilding-Mellen as their attack dog against the working class communities of the borough, knowing that with every action taken against the population, a reaction would come in the form of resistance. Some Tory councillors from that era remain in cabinet roles including one who is now RBKC’s leader.
It is easy to argue that Rock Feilding-Mellen did more than any other individual to establish the conditions and normalise the attitudes that played out in the run-up to the Grenfell Tower fire. His personality and ambition, and the power he was gifted, added to his determination to lead a devastating demographic transformation of North Kensington created circumstances that reflected his destructive attitudes towards poorer communities.
Rock’s Recovery
Image from Instagram / Beckley Retreats
On the fourth anniversary of the fire, Forbes Magazine published a reverential piece on Amanda Feilding and her commitment to “cognitive liberty.” The impression is of Beckley being an enterprise aimed at some kind of common good but operating in a silo, and now being utilised to stage manage Rock Feilding-Mellen’s rehabilitation, possibly an important element in future court appearances. Beckley’s public relations output use the horror of Grenfell to portray Feilding-Mellen as a victim, with no hint at his true role.
Beckley’s copywriters use the passive voice around the Grenfell atrocity to re-position Rock as a man of vulnerability and virtue: “In his mid-thirties, a tragedy left him feeling purposeless and lost.”
Beckley’s website doesn’t identify Feilding-Mellen as a politician. He has moved on, “an entrepreneur and investor” who “seeks to create, cultivate and support start-ups that are poised to provide transformational benefits to individuals and our society at large through finding innovative solutions to the growing epidemic of mental illness or through finding new ways to boost creativity and connectedness.”
His political career in Kensington is brushed off as “rebelling against his upbringing” by his hippy parents. This rebellion ended with the devastation at Grenfell Tower, but this had a positive outcome for Rock that the reader is presumably supposed to be happy about: “It was only then that he found himself willing to explore that which his mother had long championed….finally seeing how transformative and regenerative the use of psychedelics could be.”
A section on the Beckley website titled “His Why” explains that psychedelics saved Feilding-Mellen from “a pit of cynicism” and inspired him to “help other skeptics and ‘realists’ discover the strength and joy that come from perceiving that we live in an enchanted universe.”
Rock states: “I am dedicated to helping others in the same way I was helped, to turn their lives around and see the wonder all around them.”
Does Feilding-Mellen need to package his story in such a sanitised, corporate-friendly way? Does he need to publicise his agonised spiritual awakening and personal development, only achieved on the back of his rapaciously abusive policies that targeted the most vulnerable in society? Perhaps he does, if he is to convince two audiences of his innocence: himself, and further down the line, possibly a judge.
Feilding-Mellen (right) with then-RBKC Leader Nicholas Paget-Brown (left) and leader of the now-disbanded KCTMO Robert Black inside Grenfell Tower during its refurbishment, 2016.
A supposedly transformed and regenerated human being, reset by psilocybin and meditation, yet in his appearance on the New Health Club podcast, Feiling-Mellen sounded very much the politician or businessman, focusing on the practical aspects of Beckley’s work, glossing over the absence of any personal spiritual insights by saying “I try very hard not to wang on too much about my connection to the divine” and “I try not to sound too woo-woo.”
Feilding-Mellen stated that he remains “mission driven,” focusing on the “core delivery side of the ecosystem” of the company and wants to “harness the best bits of capitalism” to expand the good work of Beckley.
Meanwhile, in Kensington
Suicides, trauma, depression, poverty, and no sign of justice. Such is the design of British society that somebody of the almost inconceivable privilege of Rock Feilding-Mellen can be confident that he will remain protected. He can believe that he is not guilty of an all-out attack on the poorer communities of North Kensington and all that brought; that he is in fact a victim.
Feilding-Mellen, with no apparent talent and without having contributed anything productive to our economy, can simultaneously reinvent himself as a spiritualist and enrich himself with a new venture that not only maintains high social status but also promises serious dividends as psychedelic treatments become a boom industry.
Privilege is sheltered from justice, then demands that it must feel and be accepted as virtuous, no matter how many people suffer for these brief releases of the feel-good chemicals in the brains of the least self-aware people in the country.
Like the crime at Hillsborough, most of the people affected by the atrocity at Grenfell Tower are stuck in a form of purgatory, unable to move on while justice is denied; unable to have faith in a system that is stacked against them; yet unable to give up hope for some kind of justice as that would be to dishonour those lost. In contrast, it’s a time of abundance for the spiritual-corporate complex, mainly because it has been co-opted as a means for the worst people in the world to feel good about themselves without the boredom of contemplation or the burden charitable giving found at the heart of the major religions.
Beckley Retreats and Rock Feilding-Mellen’s re-emergence without repentance are now intertwined. It is difficult to know what to make of Beckley as company, founded by Feilding-Mellen and presumably staffed by people who know his background yet proceed, “committed to diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging.” As Deputy Leader of Kensington & Chelsea, Feilding-Mellen would have known the council’s motto: ‘Quam Bonum In Unum Habitare’ – ‘What a good thing it is to dwell together in unity.’ Nobody would invoke RBKC’s motto as evidence of the council doing good work. Similarly, nobody should be fooled by the fine words of Beckley Retreats’ public relations when it comes to assessing whether Sinnerman Rock has changed.
He has landed in the perfect safe place for somebody desperately needing a rebrand ahead of at least one day of judgement.
International property developer Ballymore has met with community groups from Canalside House to address anxieties over what will come next if the historic building is demolished as part of the transformation of the Kensal Gas Works site. While Ballymore has shown willingness to explore ways to maintain and enhance the vital work done at Canalside House, the building’s owner, Kensington & Chelsea Council, has remained conspicuously silent.
Recap
In February, we revealed that Kensington & Chelsea Council (RBKC) had struck a secret deal with Ballymore to sell one of North Kensington’s last remaining community hubs, Canalside House. Decided without democratic oversight, consultation with the affected communities or engagement with tenant organisations, the deal, if completed, will fulfil a long-held wish of the council to rid itself of a centre that was built in 1929. Canalside House has been an integral part of North Kensington, hosting a diverse range of events, charities, community groups and businesses, including being the starting point for Innocent Smoothies, a company now worth over £2 billion but still located directly opposite Canalside House on Ladbroke Grove.
“Film is too obviously a message for one not to assume that it is coded.”(Christian Metz – the Language of Cinema)
So I’ve just been to a showing of the Grenfell film by Steve McQueen and was blown away by it. The film is a 24 minute, two second colour video which contains no dialogue or commentary. It starts with bird song faded to black then we are on board a helicopter camera panoramic shot. We move steadily over green stretches of England, punctuated by clusters of terraced houses, the occasional football field, canals and sewage tanks. Throughout we hear the unsettling noises of what sounds like industrial machinery intermingled with copter blades and this seems to take at least five minutes. It is both meditative and disturbing because we think this is meant to be about Grenfell Tower, so why are we seemingly travelling across the hinterland of England? The suburbs is where we start. The denizens of most of the houses were most likely unaffected by the tragedy unfolding in June 2017. Does this also point to the cultural and political divide that has grown in the UK over the last decade?
It is when we see Wembley Stadium with its distinctive arch and the cluster of new builds around it that we gain our bearings, realise we are in North West London we realise we are only kilometres away from the Grenfell site. As we pass over Harlesden, the sound suddenly cuts out. Whatever we are travelling in becomes a glider; we become a disembodied seeing entity. When we arrive at the building it is shocking how raw it all is. It is a charred and gutted sarcophagus supported by scaffolding. In the years since the filming, clearly the building has been covered up the way the wounds of an incinerated body would be shrouded away. This has been done for many reasons, trauma reduction but also health and safety. As local residents we have become used to the green love heart emblazoned atop the tower; a symbol of unity and remembrance for campaigners, but seeing the tower in its raw state again was very salutary.
The Drone Gaze
The value of the film is to transform our gaze – but we start with something that is just unsettling: a disembodied perspective making its way steadily, ominously across the landscape. Although filmed using helicam, it has a deliberate drone effect and this is a drone view.
As Adam Rothstein author of Drone Theory writes: “Drones at their current level of technology allow us to observe large swathes of ground for an extended period of time. CCTV and satellite imagery each have their particular advantages for different surveillance and reconnaissance tasks. But drones allow a mobile platform that can remain over the ground at a distance that minimised the targe’s awareness of the platform, while also allowing live re-targeting of the area of focus.”
Rothstein continues: “This ever present visual relationship permanently alters human perception. Drone sensor operators talk about the range of way that starting through the drone’s camera for hours on end can change a person. This vernacular technology outlines the odd technological relationship the drone allows – that of generally passive observer, but with the extreme power that constant observation gives.”
Marshal McLuhan said the medium is the message. Drone or CCTV footage is about social control. When we are looking at aerial drone views, we are usually in the realm of invigilating savannah animals, of cadastral surveys, but also of crowd surveillance and of extra judicial assassinations. The drone view privileges the power of the voyeur to surveil others. Drone footage is never particularly relaxing: there is a sense of foreboding to it – especially when accompanied by the sonic concomitants of such footage, the humming buzz or industrial white noise devoid of emotion. Drone noise intimidates populations under occupation. Military drone executions take place at a distance. Drones are therefore the epitome of the banality of evil in the technological realm. They enable heinous acts to be done with the minimal fuss, personal involvement or moral embroilment. The famous philosophical thought experiment with the trolley car demonstrates that people tend to have fewer qualms pulling the lever than pushing the man onto the train tracks.
Kensington & Chelsea councillors can’t recall at enquiry hearings if the blandishments of more aesthetically pleasing cladding options blinded them to the more critical safety considerations that should have been prioritised in refurbishing Grenfell Tower. When being cloistered away from the consequences meets asymmetric power decisions made at a distance – whether operating a drone or managing housing stock – it can have terrifying repercussions.
The drone gaze is bereft of all empathy for what it takes in, akin to the beast ‘moving its slow thighs’ in the poem The Second Coming described by WB Yeats as having a “gaze blank and pitiless as the sun.”
So, the drone gaze is how we start the film with the sense of alienation and foreboding that that brings.
The spiritual gaze
But soon we settled into a sequence which feels closer to much of Steve McQueen’s video art oeuvre. McQueen’s films contain long uninterrupted takes that build tension, emphasise a need, or track real time.
Paul Gilroy writes of this section in the programme notes: “a soundless camera wheels around the damaged structure. The vertiginous movement of orbiting that fixed point induces nausea as viewers are pulled into the gyre. We move in close still and the animated geometry of the broken building disorders perception. The rotary motion becomes hypnotic and, as this monument to loss begins to transmit its own traumatising rhythm, we start to see the interior of the scaffolded structure”.
Like a massive aerial lathe, the ‘coptercam’ hones our reverence for the stricken object with its every rotation.
A reviewer put it like this: “McQueen likes to linger. And he is much less likely to use flashy camerawork or editing techniques to manipulate the viewer. Instead, he wants one to marinate in the moment…To frame it in a way to draw attention to what’s actually happening. Look at this. Look at this. Look at this.” I know I’m looking.”
This was forensic scrutiny but the camera also sacralised the space for the moments we were invited to stay in it – so it was also a guided visit and chance for a harsh, confronting contemplation.
The gaze undoubtedly deepened many viewers’ appreciation of a devastating trauma. We see the tattered exoskeleton with beams and girders still hanging off it and blackened interiors. The helicopter comes disturbingly close to the building and lingers upon facets of the upper parts of the structure. We are mesmerised by the visual spectacle. For my part, before long I passed into a form of meditative reverie, devoting my attention to every cell. I tried to sympathetically imagine in each cell the suffering though I knew I never could know the enormity of it. All I could do was murmur a mantra, may all beings be happy, and free from suffering. It was harrowing viewing, it became hard to watch eventually and admit I welled up at one point.
The invitation to contemplate was excruciating but also moving. In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, monks and adepts of meditation visit burial grounds to remember the dead and muse on impermanence and get in touch with their own mortality. Grenfell Tower and the deceased are honoured here as such.
Cinematographic Tribute
As the cam repeatedly spins is where the power of the film really begins for me because the circumambulation of the building has huge significance. Beyond the forensic vista it provides into the guts of the structure to reveal a full picture of the devastation, there is a reverence. Circumambulation has a strong spiritual significance. In Islam, pilgrims to Mecca circumambulate the black stone Ka’aba, to demonstrate a unity of faith. I do not know whether the symbolism was deliberate but the resemblance was not lost on me. As someone who is affiliated with Buddhism I know that you pay tribute to the passing of a spiritual person by walking around a stupa or burial mound. This is how the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, said he wanted to be honoured. I have myself done this at a memorial for a deceased friend. Of course, being Steve McQueen, all this is implicit. There is no overt sentiment in the shooting of the film. It was very stark. Indeed, the beauty of the film to my mind is the way it combines intense focus on the rapid destruction of a whole living ecosystem while at the same time displaying a tender monument to the dignity of those who keep pushing for justice, to keep the memory of the dearly departed alive. This is a McQueen hallmark:
“He inserts moments that are Deleuzian time-images, disrupting expectations, pausing the conventional narrative progression and in the process implicating the viewer in the content. The features, for this reason, function as unique hybrids between the time-image and the moving image.”
For me, the greatness of this simple film was precisely the way it subtly oscillates between the technologized, minatory gaze of the drone – the tool of surveillance and death – and a more sympathetic and reverential, human gaze; still harsh but with the transmutation of spiritual wrath confined to spiritual beings and suffused with knowledge and empathy for the monumental importance of what happened here. The omniscient gaze of a God consciousness. McQueen achieves this collision of gazes toggling between these two views aesthetically through skilful use of camera work and manipulation of sound. The dignified circumambulation is the cinematic equivalent of the Grenfell silent walks that were initially organised monthly and are now held 11 days before Christmas and on the anniversary of the disaster.
The silent dénouement
The end of the film is poignant and beautiful. Unexpectedly, the director breaks the silence and brings the ambient noise back. We hear the ingress of a Hammersmith and City line train into Latimer Road. The everyday hustle and bustle around the Lancaster West Estate rushes back. This is a place where I have a close friend; which houses the Aldridge Academy where I have volunteered many times at a homeless shelter, and the Kensington Leisure Centre where I swim every week in the shadow of the tower. In other words, life goes on – this is a reminder that those closest to the deceased have to deal with a crushing attrition; calls for justice in the face of implacable systems of law, government and media that long ago stopped responding to demands for justice for the crime. This is a visual protest against the enormous condescension of the British establishment in the face of a horrendous atrocity.
Even the process of planning a fitting memorial, undertaken by bereaved and local residents has been subjected to myopic control by the government a further indignity. As Tom, editor of Urban Dandywrites: “There must be no fait accompli regarding the way we, as a community and as a nation, honour the victims of Grenfell. The site must never become a reflection of establishment control; devoid of imagination and empathy, a symbol of class war and indifference.”
It is precisely this indifference the film is designed to shake us out of. Estrangement – a term identified by the Russian formalists to name the way we are shaken out of our sleep walking. All the best art works recalibrate our senses through estrangement. It is an antidote to complacency and indifference. A quote from Paul Gilroy in the film programme seems apposite: “The implicit obscenity of the Grenfell fire has been made to look normal, to appear routine. We have been habituated to that blankness and are encouraged to imagine that there can be no alternatives to this particular way of organising human life and calculating its minimal transient value”
Everyone involved with the Grenfell Inquiry should be forced to watch this amazing film. TS Eliot winning poet Roger Robinson writes in a tribute in his 2019 collection Portable Paradise:
Grenfell
The building burned,
so the council blamed the contractors
who shredded all the papers;
so the contractors blamed
health and safety for passing
all the required tests;
so the prime ministers
came, saw and left,
and talked to no one
and shook no-one’s hand
meanwhile its tenants are left
to grieve in sterile hotels,
with nothing to bury but ash,
and survivors walk up like zombies
trying not to look up
at the charred gravestone.
people still cry
nobody took the blame.
We cannot really talk about this film without mentioning trauma. We CoProduce organised an event in June 2019 with Dr Gabor Maté in order to invite local residents to explore their trauma in the aftermath of the fire. From an article in Urban Dandy: “Trauma from a huge-scale disaster starts to manifest two years after an event; it is what we carry inside ourselves. So many local people had filled the vacuum left by the council and national government; mindful of those who had lost everything, or everyone, the trauma was suppressed but easily triggered.”
This reflects the breadth and depth of the PTSD across North Kensington. Of course, the healing needs to happen but the impacted communities do not want this event to be brushed under the carpet. Grenfell United continue to campaign to prevent another atrocity elsewhere, while in the absence of any sustained media interest, local campaigners struggle against the council as it returns to its pre-fire policies, shielded by a formidable PR budget. This sedulously stunning film coming before the Government Inquiry will publish its findings, reminds us that our anger as local residents at the continuing impunity was, and is, righteous, and the 72 lives needlessly lost are being grieved as keenly every day.
Chris Arning, 2023
BIBLIOGRAPHY (unfinished)
The Drone Theory – Adam Rothstein
The Language of Cinema – Christian Metz
The Auteur Theory: Steve McQueen – Paolo’s film blog
Portable Paradise – Roger Robinson
Grenfell: Programme – Paul Gilroy
Urban Dandy (blogs, multiple) – Thomas Charles
Celebrating The Charnel Ground: Notes on Death and Meditation – Stephen Butterfield
Numerous property developers are set to profit from the huge development of the Kensal Gas Works site. Sadly for North Kensington, one of these property developers has a side hustle as Deputy Leader of Kensington & Chelsea Council. Kim Taylor-Smith is attempting to fulfil the plan of his predecessor, Rock Feilding-Mellen, in selling Canalside House for demolition. Taylor-Smith denies that he has struck a secret deal to sell the historic building, but as you will read below, the council and the developer have yet to get their story straight.
Taylor-Smith
In February we exposed Kensington & Chelsea Council (RBKC)’s secret deal to sell one of North Kensington’s last surviving community assets, Canalside House. Councillor Taylor-Smith was unimpressed by our reporting, labelling it “misinformed” while admitting that secret talks had been held with Ballymore.
RBKC’s deputy leader, who is also Lead Member for Grenfell Housing and Social Investment, told Byline Times last month, “We would only sell the building if Ballymore were able to meet the proposed terms, including on reprovision of community space, and if they are also able to get planning permission from the council.”
Taken at face value, Councillor Taylor-Smith was suggesting that RBKC might reject Ballymore. However, we now know that it was the council who approached Ballymore about Canalside House, not the other way around. See the section below on Ballymore for evidence. Canalside House does not sit on the site of the Kensal Canalside Gas Works development, and therefore could be maintained and upgraded as a community asset, as Taylor-Smith has repeatedly promised since the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017.
Under the watch of Councillor Taylor-Smith, Canalside House has been in managed decline. See our previous articles for details of his duplicitous dealings over the building.
Via a council press officer, the deputy council leader told Urban Dandy: “We recently wrote to all Canalside House tenants to provide them with the most up to date information about the future of the building and will continue to communicate directly with them and keep them informed of any developments.”
We have checked with several Canalside organisations, who all confirmed that they have received no such communication from the council.
One organisation showed us an email from Taylor-Smith himself, sent in response to our article, in which he claims “We’ve been open with you, the tenants in Canalside House about these discussion and I wanted to reassure you that no agreement has been reached with Ballymore.”
But RBKC’s dealings with Ballymore were kept entirely secret and were not subject to any democratic oversight at the Town Hall. Without us having reported on the deal, it is improbable that anybody in North Kensington, including the building’s residents, would know that Canalside House had been allocated to property developers to be added to the area for development.
RBKC’s response
Councillor Taylor-Smith’s response to our questions included a denial that a deal has been made with Ballymore, as well as a claim that the council had written to all Canalside organisations and a vow that RBKC will continue to communicate with all residents directly.
On Ballymore, Taylor-Smith conceded that the developer is putting its proposals together and these will include the land occupied by Canalside House since 1929.
In what could be interpreted as a contradiction of his denial of a secret deal, Taylor-Smith also told Urban Dandy “Should a time come when Canalside tenants may have to move out of the building, we would work closely with them to find them suitable alternative accommodation in the local area, with a view to them moving back on to the site once it is finished should they wish to do so.”
Public meeting
A chaotic public meeting hosted by Ballymore at Moberly Sports Centre a fortnight ago was surely a sign of things to come. With thousands of people across North Kensington and Kensal Green to be impacted by the Gas Works development, Ballymore’s Project Manager was ill-prepared for the wide range of questions from attendees.
Ballymore might be hoping that public confusion will enable their plans to proceed without too much input from the communities set to be impacted. Comm Comm UK, Ballymore’s communications consultancy for the project suggested to us that a meeting specifically about Canalside House could be held, at Canalside House. We haven’t heard from them since.
Questioned about Canalside House, Ballymore’s representative at Moberly confirmed that it was RBKC that had instigated the deal. He also said that the council had told Ballymore that they were looking into the possibility of moving the Canalside organisations into the Gramophone Works on Kensal Road. The building was purchased for £18 million by Resolution Property in 2015 and is marketed as a “contemporary workplace in the heart of creative West London” and “industrial style workspace.”
For the care agencies, youth groups and housing co-ops of Canalside House, echoing around an open plan building that provides zero privacy for clients would be impossible. It seems highly unlikely that RBKC would dip into its famous reserves to pay the rent at the Gramophone Works for the displaced Canalside organisations. It does however seem likely that RBKC told Ballymore that the Gramophone Works is being considered as a way of allaying any concerns the developer might have about bulldozing a cherished community building.
RBKC’s vague reassurances about the fate of the community groups might be sufficient for Ballymore but Taylor-Smith’s characteristic chicanery is not convincing anybody locally and the deputy leader seems to have exhausted any lingering goodwill he had cultivated since 2017.
Ballymore’s response
Via Comm Comm, Ballymore told Urban Dandy that the purchase and demolition of Canalside House represents “an opportunity to work with RBKC to increase the already significant community, work, leisure and activity space we are planning within Kensal Canalside.”
They did not mention the specific groups or activities currently at Canalside House, but they stated “our proposals incorporate all the community-focused activities of Canalside house as part of what the wider development will offer, and including this additional land will allow it to be opened up as another area of public space for the community to use.”
This vague claim was repeated by Ballymore’s representative at the Moberly meeting.
The developer’s response to us also confirmed that the council is offering reassurances to Ballymore that the community might find difficult to stomach: “We understand RBKC is working closely with the remaining charities based at Canalside House to find them a new home in a more modern building with better facilities nearby.”
According to multiple sources who are based at Canalside House, this is categorically untrue.
by Tom Charles @tomhcharles
Canalside House, centre left, seen from the Gramophone Works. Image from thegramophoneworks.com
The following article was published by Byline Times on 27th March 2023.
When Grenfell Tower burned in June 2017, the building’s owner – the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea – was missing in action.
Among those to step into the breach to provide emergency relief and respite were community organisations based at Canalside House.
Less than a mile from the Tower, these groups have continued to support residents attempting to recover from the catastrophe which took 72 lives. But RBKC now plans to sell one of North Kensington’s last standing community spaces to an international property developer that will demolish the building.
It appears that RBKC is now back to business as usual.
In the years before the Grenfell fire, RBKC had been busy altering the demographics of one of Britain’s most vibrant and culturally diverse neighbourhoods. Its means of achieving this included asset-stripping North Kensington.
Entire estates, including Lancaster West, home of Grenfell Tower, were slated for demolition and community buildings were targeted by the then Council’s Deputy Leader – and property developer – Rock Feilding-Mellen.
Canalside House has long been home to groups providing social care, mental health support, youth work, sports, supplementary schooling, business start-ups, housing cooperatives and African Diaspora representation. In 2016, the council informed resident organisations that their time in the historic building on Ladbroke Grove was ending and that they would be moved to a hot desking space on a converted industrial site with poor transport links.
In Summer 2017, with then Communities Secretary Sajid Javid forcing Feilding-Mellen to resign, new RBKC Leader Elizabeth Campbell acceded to demands to pause the Canalside sale.
Under scrutiny from the media, Theresa May’s Grenfell Taskforce and long-suffering residents, the new leadership at Kensington town hall promised to change RBKC’s approach to the north of the borough, admitting it had been “a property developer masquerading as a local authority”.
The local community forced the council to abandon its planned sale of North Kensington Library, which Feilding-Mellen had planned to give – cut-price – to a private preparatory school that his children would attend. Campaigners saved the local college and Lancaster Youth Club.
By Winter 2017, as the news cycle moved on, RBKC’s new Deputy Leader and lead member for Grenfell housing and social investment, Councillor Kim Taylor-Smith – also a property developer – issued an executive decision that Canalside House would be sold as part of the huge development on the Kensal Gas Works site. Zero social housing was to be included. Taylor-Smith branded Labour councillors’ objections as “a banal conversation”.
The move was slapped down by the Grenfell Taskforce and furious locals. A contrite RBKC publicly committed to upgrading the building, part of its post-Grenfell ‘change’ policy.
But the threat to the Canalside organisations lingered.
In late 2018, RBKC tried again, claiming that Canalside House had to be demolished to facilitate the Gas Works development. Conservative councillors claimed that it offered poor disabled access and the building’s generally poor condition made refurbishment too costly.
But it was RBKC that had squandered a £100,000 grant secured by residents to install a lift. The Kensal-Canalside Development Team confirmed to residents that the building did not intrude on the planned development so could be retained alongside the planned new neighbourhood.
Councillor Taylor-Smith stated that the council had “no plans whatsoever” to sell or demolish the community centre. Investment was promised. But RBKC’s managed decline continued while plans for the adjacent development progressed.
Late last year, RBKC stopped renting out Canalside House’s vacant offices and organisations were forced to deliver services without heating. Last month, the community’s fears came true, with the exposure of an agreement between Councillor Taylor-Smith and Ballymore that will see the building out of use by early 2024.
Without democratic oversight or consultation, this contradicts the post-Grenfell promises of council leaders.
A spokesperson for Ballymore’s Project Flourish told this newspaper that it was RBKC that had initiated the deal, asking the developer to include Canalside House in its plans. There are concerns about Ballymore’s suitability, a company that was among the last to sign the Government’s new building safety contract.
On Ballymore, former Kensington MP and current leader of the Labour group at RBKC Councillor Emma Dent Coad, told Byline Times: “Their early designs had a single staircase – so shocking within sight of Grenfell Tower in its shroud. Will an outfit like this rehouse the Canalside tenants, or leave it to our slippery council?”
Ballymore’s spokesperson said: “Our proposals incorporate all the community-focused activities of Canalside House… including this additional land will allow it to be opened up as another area of public space for the community to use.”
Councillor Kim Taylor-Smith, RBKC’s Deputy Leader, told Byline Times: “We would only sell the building if Ballymore were able to meet the proposed terms, including on reprovision of community space, and if they are also able to get planning permission from the council.”
“Community space” is a term that can be broadly applied and there has been no specific commitment to the tenant organisations, so integral to North Kensington’s recovery and culture, replicating their current shared space and its ideal location.
Ballymore added: “We understand RBKC is working closely with the remaining charities based at Canalside House to find them a new home in a more modern building with better facilities nearby.” But resident organisations believe Ballymore has been misinformed and have said that there is no equivalent space locally.
“RBKC is back to its old ways… Where is the transparency we were promised?” asked Councillor Dent Coad.
The horror of Grenfell awakened a spirit of defiance and democracy in North Kensington. But hopes for justice via the courts and redistribution of political power have been thwarted. If one of the community’s last remaining assets is demolished, it is likely to symbolise the end of the post-Grenfell era and a return to ‘business as usual’ in Kensington.
“A challenge given to us by the bereaved and survivors from Grenfell Tower. Simply…to be the best Council.” – Councillor Elizabeth Campbell, leader of Kensington & Chelsea Council,Keynote Speech,May 2022
Kensington & Chelsea Council (RBKC) is consulting with North Kensington residents again. We ask what will be different this time around.
RBKC’s amoral bearings…. ‘What a good thing it is to dwell in unity’
RBKC’s current Grenfell Recovery Programme runs until March 2024. Their planning work for the post-2024 period has commenced with a “wide-reaching conversation” about the future with bereaved, survivors and the local community. In theory, the consultation will provide an outline of what “best council” will mean in practice.
A problem with the current consultation process is that in other initiatives with similar wording and ostensibly aiming at the same outcome – change – RBKC has comprehensively failed to create any identifiable change.
“This Council – its policies, its leadership, its senior people and its culture – has changed.” This was the audacious claim of Cllr Campbell and Barry Quirk, RBKC’s then Chief Executive in March 2020.
Yet, it was not clear what specific things they were referring to. No evidence was offered. RBKC internalised their story and believed it to be self-evidently true.
After June 2017, RBKC enthusiastically adopted noble-sounding policies but didn’t implement them in the community. After the fire, the council’s leadership changed. The chief executive quit and the disgraced councillors Paget-Brown and Feilding-Mellen were made to resign by the Communities Secretary Sajid Javid. But the new leaders carry out approximately the same policies for the same political party and Conservative campaign literature in the borough goes out of its way to avoid mentioning Grenfell and North Kensington.
For an area in which many residents disproportionately suffer the impacts of poverty and inequality, the upshot has been no meaningful culture change at the local authority during the years when implementing change and offering real political concessions to North Kensington seemed possible. During those years, backing up their declarations of “change” with real action should have been a moral imperative to RBKC, impossible to resist despite their ideological discomfort with socialist policies. This failure was acknowledged by Callum Wilson, RBKC’s Director of Grenfell Partnerships, in an email to residents about the Beyond 2024 consultation: “I do recognise that many people in the community will ask why this work has not already been done, and we need to acknowledge this openly – but nonetheless I think it is important that is done now, however delayed it may feel.”
It is difficult to draw much confidence from this admission given the record. Five and a half years since Grenfell and RBKC have not offered a major vision, nor have they significantly improved their attention to detail in delivering services.
Expectations
There is a natural expectation that does not fade over time that the scale of change should be commensurate with the scale of the crime and the losses suffered. There should at least be a sincere attempt at commensurate change.
If power continues to be distributed unevenly in Kensington, profound change does not look possible. Consultations have taken hundreds of volunteer hours from the local population but have not addressed worsening social and economic injustices. Increased democracy would do more to arrest the prevailing impotence and apathy than another 50 years of consultations, conversations, and co-designs.
RBKC and the media have talked about the local authority ‘regaining trust’ as a prerequisite to North Kensington’s recovery. They need to drop the ‘re’ and focus on establishing trust for the first time since the borough’s creation in the 60s.
“Devastatingly Frank”
In a conversation with Urban Dandy, Callum Wilson acknowledged that there is a long way to go regarding trust: “We know we are dealing with a degree of apathy heightened by Grenfell, with some people not taking part because they believe change is not going to happen. But we have to keep trying and we have to evidence change.”
On ways for the public to participate without having to sign up to the RBKC format, Wilson said: “Spin-off consultations, run by residents with or without council representatives, are possible. They are more organic. There’s an end-of-year deadline for all consultations. We’re happy to receive input, we’re happy for people to make demands.
“I just want as many people to share their views as possible so we can try and build a Council that works better for all our residents.”
RBKC says that over 600 people have spoken to them so far about what they want to see from their council in the next five years. Some have been “devastatingly frank” Wilson told us.
We will pick up our dialogue with RBKC’s Director of Grenfell Partnerships in the new year when the latest consultation has concluded, and the council can explain how they will “simply…be the best Council.”
How to deal with an inflexible, disconnected, disgraced local authority that gets to mark its own homework on its supposed Changepolicy?SPID Theatreon Ladbroke Grove spun its web and caught some official flies with an up-close performance of The Story of Fires and Floods. It then headed to the V & A to perform the same show and screen its film The History of Neglect. The event was also used to announce that SPID and residents of Kensal House are taking legal action against the council for its neglect.
Three of the protagonists break down how this all came about….
Act One – Sophia
‘Social, Progressive, Interconnected, Diverse!’ we shout.
The audience at the Victoria and Albert Museum rises, celebrating with us Kensal House Estate’s heritage and breathing life into the museum. The place buzzes with community spirit – artistic activism in action. It’s empowering to meet the eye of so many press and SPID funders as I announce class action against our landlord, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) for their negligence.Continue reading →
RBKC’s coat of arms. The motto means ‘What a good thing it is to dwell in unity’ – picture from rbkc.gov.uk
An outsider assessing Kensington and Chelsea Council (RBKC) from a distance can be forgiven for believing that the council has become a more progressive, liberal, and democratic institution since the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017. This illusion is sustained by the local authority’s exhaustive public relations policy and an absence of political or media scrutiny. In this induced amnesia, RBKC keeps a firm grip on North Kensington. But the council’s approach to the north is arguably more regressive and undemocratic than at any time in its history. A study conducted in the early years of the borough sheds light on the dynamics at play.
Sixties London
In 1963, the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea was formed by a merger of the separate K and C boroughs through the London Government Act. In 1967, Professor John Dearlove of the University of Sussex began researching the relationship between RBKC’s decision-makers and those seeking to influence policy, referred to as interest groups. For years, Professor Dearlove attended council meetings and learned about community issues, publishing his findings first in an academic journal[i] and later in a book[ii].
In the 1968 local elections, London turned blue, the Conservatives winning control of 28 councils to Labour’s three. The 2022 results reflect a changed city with just six councils controlled by the Tories and 21 by Labour. But RBKC stands apart from the wider city, remaining a Conservative safe seat throughout, and the only remaining Tory council in inner London. But it has been a divided borough, with North Kensington council wards tending to vote Labour, and two now-abolished parliamentary constituencies, Kensington North, and Regent’s Park & Kensington North, returning only Labour MPs to the Commons between 1945 and 2010.
The stark contrasts of the borough were present from its inception. The London Housing Survey in 1968 stated: “one of the most distinctive features about the Royal Borough […] the sharp contrast between North Kensington and the rest of the Borough”[iii]
Professor Dearlove noted the north’s higher number of manual labourers, its overcrowded homes, lack of open spaces, and higher proportion of children. Relating these disparities to his research, Dearlove saw the social, economic, cultural, and political divide between the north and the rest of the borough reflected in the contrasting interest groups interacting with council decision-makers, with northern residents inclined to seek innovation, change, and sometimes the reversal of the council’s policies.Continue reading →
Urban Dandy London 