Once upon a time, it was a symbol of hope.
Hope for a better life, if we did have a better life there.
For some, Grenfell Tower is more
than just the ruin everyone's seen on the news.
Mum gave birth to me at Grenfell Tower in 1982.
The flats were out of this world.
To what we'd been brought up in, it was a palace.
This is where I grew up, this is where my heart is
and this is where I always want to be.
Before the fire, you might have thought of Kensington
as simply the wealthiest place in Britain.
But now, everyone could see it was also one of the most deprived.
We've always felt like there's a "them" and there's an "us".
Today, the gap between the richest residents and the poorest
is wider here than anywhere else in the country.
We're talking about millionaires,
the millionaires that live up the road.
The disparity is almost surrealistic.
People have got, like, clubs and swimming pools
and things underneath their houses.
But the extreme inequality that Grenfell revealed
was something that the residents of this part of Kensington
have lived with for over 150 years.
It's part of a story, it's part of a journey.
It's connected to the history of this borough
and the disparity between the rich and the poor.
This film will tell the story of the working-class community
whose families have lived
in the area around Grenfell Tower for generations.
They're not just ordinary parents,
they're parents who have come through that adversity for you
and that strength is genetic in you.
From Victorian slums to racial division and '70s housing estates,
it's the story of how North Kensington
became the most unequal place in Britain.
It's the old story, divide and conquer.
It was hard, it was damn hard,
but that is what made me very strong.
Because if you understand the history of this place,
you'll understand how Grenfell could have happened here.
It's the past disrespect, the ignoring of our voice,
that made that disaster happen.
We've learnt to be survivors
and, no matter how much they tear us down,
we will always get up and fight.
Welcome to Kensington -
five square miles of London, just west of the centre.
It's the richest borough in the country.
It has the richest residents,
the richest homes, there's even a palace.
But there's another side to Kensington, too,
a side that, until recently, no-one really talked about...
This side.
There is an invisible boundary.
On one side, those that can afford everything
and then there's those that can't.
In this part of the borough, average income is over £150,000 a year.
But just yards away, a third of families earn £16,000 or less.
It's all unequal and I think that everyone ignored it
and then, as soon as Grenfell happened,
it was thrown in your face
and everyone could see around the...
The whole thing is unequal, everything's unequal.
You know, and it's not their fault
because they wouldn't have a clue.
It's just a different world.
And I think, because of Grenfell, it opened up our world to people.
Grenfell Tower stands in North Kensington,
the poorest part of the borough,
in an area called Notting Dale.
If you know the whole story,
then it's obviously connected
to the disparity between the rich and the poor in this borough.
Inequality is nothing new.
It's at least 150 years old, going on 200 years old,
just in this borough.
It's always been about those two extremes.
But the story of inequality in Kensington isn't a simple one.
To understand how it ended up like this,
you have to go back to its very beginnings.
In the 1840s, London's population was growing.
So on what was then the open fields of Notting Hill,
ambitious property developers began building large, expensive houses
for affluent families.
But there was a slight problem.
Right next door to the posh new houses
was the worst slum in Victorian London.
It was a pretty poor, rundown area.
There wasn't housing as such. They were shacks.
They were thrown together like...
..sadly, like we see now in Third World countries.
Alan Tyrrell lives down the road from Grenfell Tower,
right where the slums once stood.
I mean, some actually lived with their pigs.
You would have been up to your elbows in human excrement,
pig shit, you name it.
It's kind of pen and ink a bit, isn't it? You know.
The average life expectancy here was just 11 years...
..compared to 37 across the rest of London.
And the pig keepers were giving Notting Dale
a reputation for filth and disease.
Latimer Station been named Piggery Junction!
I still can't believe it.
It just makes you wonder
about the way things were,
the rich over there and the poor down here.
It hasn't really changed.
I think that stigma is still there.
It's like two worlds, really.
And these two worlds were divided by a wall.
It was built in 1864
and still stands at the bottom of Alan's garden.
That's the infamous wall -
it was to keep us out and them in.
A physical barrier between them and us.
They extended right the way along,
right the way down to what is Wilson Street.
On the southern edge of Notting Dale,
the wall divides the affluent St James's Gardens,
home then to lawyers, bankers, and sea captains,
from Alan's side...
..then a notorious slum, filled with prostitutes, criminals,
and those of the lowest class.
All the people in St James's were the elite.
I mean, there's record that one house,
I think there was nine servants for just two people.
Now, that says something, doesn't it?
The affluence and the wealth.
But it wasn't always supposed to be two worlds.
Original plans show a road that was once meant to link rich and poor...
Union Street.
But it never got built.
Where we're looking now was going to be a through road.
Union was for everybody to be united, but it certainly didn't.
In fact, it was the opposite. It was divided.
It was a 19th-century Berlin Wall.
It was to keep us out and them in.
Inequality had been built into the very fabric of the streets.
You know, there's always been that separation
and that's been going on for, what, 150 years at least now.
It would have always been there because the Royal Borough
are all the king's horses and all the king's men,
and not everybody is part of that.
Yeah? There's the people at the bottom of the hill
who will never be part of that establishment.
Even today, homes on this side of the wall
are worth around £8 million.
But just on the other side of the wall is an estate
with some of the highest levels of child poverty in Britain.
For a long time, North Kensington remained two very distinct worlds -
the rich up in Notting Hill and the poor below them in Notting Dale.
Only after the Wall Street crash, when the Great Depression hit,
did the boundaries between rich and poor really start to shift.
And it was the Depression
that brought many residents' grandparents here.
This picture, I found.
This is my great-grandfather, my great-grandmother.
This is my gran.
My grandad was a Jarrow walker
and walked down from Newcastle.
A period of extreme austerity after the financial crash
had pushed unemployment in Britain to an all-time high.
The gap now between rich and poor was vast.
So thousands of the working classes from all across Britain,
including Laura's grandfather, marched on London to protest.
So they decided to walk down to the Prime Minister at Downing Street.
Downing Street didn't open the door,
so they couldn't actually get in,
but it started off with, like, 200 men and ended up being 2,000.
It's quite famous, the Jarrow Walk,
but, anyway, he didn't move back to Newcastle.
He got a job and sent for my grandmother, my gran,
and my great-aunt and my great-uncle from Newcastle
and sent them down.
They got a boat down because they couldn't afford the train,
so they got a boat down all the way.
My nan said it was, like, ages.
As the poor flocked to the city in search of work,
the population of North Kensington began to grow.
But the Depression had hit the rich round here, too.
Their large homes beyond the wall were now too expensive to maintain
and, with more and more poor families living nearby,
many fled to the sanctuary of the suburbs.
Their vacated properties were now hastily subdivided
into cheap flats to rent
and, soon, working-class families moved
into the once wealthy Notting Hill.
I can't imagine now how my parents, coming from a place like Llanelli,
lovely fields, cows, sheep, and all that sort of thing,
and coming to a rundown house in Portland Road.
The landlords neglected the buildings,
and soon they were riddled with vermin and lice.
My mother was stuck in the top floor, you know.
To go to the toilet, she'd have to go through someone else's house,
out the kitchen. The cooker that was on the landing
was shared by other families.
But she...she did what tens of thousands of other mothers
had to do in them days, get on with it.
By 1936, there were over 2,500 families
living in overcrowded and unsanitary homes.
But the working-class population still continued to rise
as more came looking for work
because not all the rich had retreated to the country.
Just a few streets away,
South Kensington was one of the last remaining strongholds
of the aristocratic classes...
..who still needed servants.
My gran, at 13, moved into Portland Road
and then my gran became a maid for Lord Holland.
She used to scrub, you know, scrub the steps and stuff.
Holland House was the grandest of all the mansions in Kensington
and employed over 30 staff.
It was hard work, but she was grateful that she had a job.
If there was any sausages left, like two sausages,
and she brought them home...
..she was like, the family were like...
SHE GASPS
Being allowed to take home scraps from your employer's table
may have felt like a privilege to poor families like Laura's,
but it came at a price.
Imagine those children having to work there
because they were children, you know.
Imagine 13-year-olds having to work
and doing that just because they had to,
so they can help their family survive
and you think, "Bloody hell, I couldn't do it".
You know, that's the strongness of that generation.
They didn't really have a choice and they had to,
and that's why they've passed on, I hope,
that strength down the genes.
I think it's like, nowadays, there's people that are cleaners,
that are nannies that work for the rich and come home to, you know,
something...maybe a room, if they're lucky.
You know, they might have a one-bedroom
or they might have a bedsit.
No-one on the estate's mums had it easy.
They would squeeze families so hard
and made it so hard for us at the bottom
that all we can really focus on is keeping our roof over our head,
and that was it. That's the be all and end all, innit?
Like, just keep the roof over our head.
People around here work hard. They work hard.
Today, the same number of people work in domestic service in London
as they did in Victorian times.
But, 70 years ago,
the old world of masters and servants was about to be destroyed.
30,000 homes were bombed in Kensington by the Nazis.
The bombs were indiscriminate, falling on rich and poor alike.
Holland House was destroyed...
..and so too was Alan's.
148 Portland Road,
the only house at the time to get bombed,
which my mum always said, "That's the best thing Hitler ever done" -
because it got rid of all the bugs and the rats.
When the smoke cleared after the war,
the rich chose not to return to the bomb site that was North Kensington.
The whole area was now equal for the first time -
equally poor.
But although the wealthy no longer lived here,
they still owned almost all the homes.
Rents had been capped during the war,
but in 1957 a new law scrapped rent controls.
Landlords could now charge what they liked
and make life even harder for the residents.
You are a representative
of one of London's largest firms of flat owners.
Are you going to put your rents up?
Yes, we are, by an average of about 30%.
Some unscrupulous property owners decided to make a killing...
..and they had an ideal group of new arrivals to exploit.
Well, we were like pioneers, it was an adventure.
We didn't know where we were going. We didn't know if we'd get there.
In the '50s, desperately short of labour after the war,
Britain had advertised for workers
to come here from our old colonies in the Caribbean.
Thousands answered the call.
We were two weeks at sea.
We stopped off at quite a few places
until we got to England.
The crossover from the Caribbean to here wasn't easy,
but we made it easy by being together.
Among the thousands who made the trip over in 1957 to look for work
and a place to call her own was 21-year-old Vee Davies.
It's the mother country, they used to call it the mother country,
and everything would be all right.
The only thing I never expected...
..to be reminded how black I am.
Now, inequality in North Kensington was no longer just about wealth,
it was also about race,
and it began as soon as you tried to find somewhere to live.
They tell you plain, no blacks,
Irish, and the dogs.
"If you're black, you can't come in my place,
you can't, it's not allowed. You're not going to come".
So, where would you go?
Where would you go for a roof over your head?
One answer was to approach a man in North Kensington
who would become one of London's most infamous landlords...
Peter Rachman.
Down the mean streets of west London,
Peter Rachman drove his crimson Rolls-Royce, PR 23.
This was his empire.
"Is it not passing great", he may have thought,
"to be a property king and ride in triumph through Notting Hill?" -
usually with a pretty girl on his arm.
Rachman was a refugee from Poland
who had fled both Nazi and Soviet labour camps
before ending up here, in west London.
Rachman's success lay in seeing more clearly than anyone else
that dazzling opportunity for enormous profit.
Taking advantage of the new law,
Rachman began to evict white tenants,
replacing them with newly arrived black families
and charging them much higher rents.
I remember the day I met him and I said to him,
"I'm looking for a flat or a room or whatever".
That's how I get to see this man, Rachman.
He was the only man that would have you in his place.
There's about three of us in a room and we pay one pound each.
It was hard. It was damn hard.
But that is what made me very strong.
In a way, Rachman was like, you know,
he was a landlord that took advantage
of the dynamics of what was going on in the borough.
People had come over looking for opportunities
and found something very cold
and much more sinister on the other side,
and it became more of a battle of survival
more than the legend of the streets being paved with gold.
Rachman may have been exploiting the new arrivals,
but, without intending to,
he had created something new in North Kensington...
..one of the first multicultural communities in Britain.
One young black boy, I can remember,
they moved into a couple of rooms
above the greengrocer's around the corner from us
and he came to our school, but it was a novelty.
You know, we'd never seen...
What did they expect?
You know, you wanted to examine him, sort of, you know what I mean?
But not being nasty. I mean, you know,
he was soon part of the gang, you know.
And the main thing was that a lot of us came...
..to be here for five years. That's what we gave ourselves, five years.
"And then we'll have enough money to go back home to live".
But then you start having a life yourself...
..so one thing leads to another and then we had to stay.
But some resented the new arrivals.
They feared a new kind of inequality,
where the immigrants would get the upper hand.
When the first blacks started appearing in Latimer Road area,
tensions started mounting.
They're saying to themselves,
"These blacks are going to take your jobs, your homes.
"You know, that black family down the road, they've got a place,
"how come they've got it?"
And it...and it bred fears that...
..looking back at history,
the fears were foundless, but at the time
they were real, genuine fears.
Then a small group of outsiders arrived here,
determined to exploit those fears...
..and they based themselves around the corner from Alan's house
in what is now an ordinary private home.
This here, notorious with the connections of Colin Jordan.
Don't you think you'll cause trouble
by having your headquarters in this area?
On the contrary, the trouble was here
long before we set up our headquarters in this area.
He thought he could make play
by the fact that there was a lot of local people, indigenous people,
that had been on the housing list for many, many years, some 20 years,
living in appalling conditions
and he could see their plight was going to get even worse
if these people had to be housed.
Well, there are many immediate evils of the coloured invasion,
which are well known to everybody living in this area,
but in our opinion the most important
is the long-term one of mass interbreeding.
That must mean the downfall of the civilisation and culture
of our country, which we hold so dear.
Working with them to stir up racial hatred
was the prominent British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley.
I can remember heckling him
when he was talking from the back of a lorry in Blenheim Crescent.
Local lad, Eddie Adams, found himself facing down Mosley's men.
I sort of heckled him.
I said, "You're talking a lot of rot."
I knew what I was seeing was wrong.
It goes against what I believe in, really.
But Mosley's tactics were working.
Many black residents were now living in fear.
I remember coming from work at the train station,
trying to go home as quickly as possible
because you don't know who would attack you, you don't know.
One night, on Bramley Road,
the very same place where Grenfell Tower stands today,
300 angry white youths gathered together.
Someone's whispered, Chinese whisper,
"A black bloke has just raped a white girl".
The reaction's going to be horrendous
and that's exactly what was happening.
And all of a sudden this bloke was coming through the crowd
and he was saying "Come on, let's get the black bastard."
And...how can I put this? He wasn't working class.
He had a posh voice, yeah, you know,
it was somebody coming in, trying to stir things up.
You knew that any minute they could blast your house down,
do whatever they want to.
So you had that fear, "I don't want them to hurt me".
It's divide and conquer.
It's the old story, divide and conquer.
It took the murder of a young black carpenter called Kelso Cochrane
by a gang of white youths less than a year later
to finally bring a stop to the violence.
I went to the funeral here.
There was a mood of solidarity, yeah,
and the crowd reflected that.
If you see the film of his funeral,
you suddenly see people that were bigoted and racist
suddenly realising, "Whoa, that could've been my son". You know,
"It could've been my husband, it could've been my brother."
Because they were no different than us in everything.
All right, colour, yeah, obviously,
but in poverty and everything like that.
It's boiled down to,
"We're all the same, but we're still poor in this area".
We're not listened to, that's the fact.
You'll have had the race riots
and then those people will have had their children,
they would have been the children of people who fought the race riots,
who came through the race riots
and so they're not just going to be ordinary parents,
they're parents who have fought that adversity,
come through that adversity for you, and that strength is genetic in you.
It then becomes genetic in you
because it's a feature of the area
and part of our ingrained history.
It's innate in that sense.
It's no different to us now.
We're still going through the same as what our parents went through,
so we've learned to be survivors.
That's our skill, we are survivors,
so that is where our history is.
We know how to survive.
And no matter how much they tear us down,
we will always get up and fight.
By the early 1960s, having overcome so many of the divisions,
a new kind of community began to blossom in North Kensington.
Everyone was friendly because we all played out on the street.
Your front doors was open, you know,
nobody had keys and you didn't lock up and all that.
INTERVIEWER: The good old days or not?
Well, in those days, it was the good old days.
But when you look back at it, it wasn't all right.
It wasn't.
Whether black or white,
many were still living in miserable conditions.
You know, like the big Victorian houses,
you had like one, two, three, four families to a house,
so you had two rooms each...
..and one shared bathroom.
There was ten of us in one bedroom.
We never had no bath, no bathroom.
Two outside toilets.
Chickens, chickens, you know, down in the yard.
You know, we thought we lived a life of luxury.
Growing up and living in that, you didn't know any different.
You know, you make the most of what you have.
But, looking back...
..they were dumps.
Real dumps.
But now, as part of a bold national movement
to tackle inequality once and for all,
a plan was drawn up to tear down these slums...
..and replace them with something better.
I'll probably swoon with nostalgia looking at these, I love them.
This is one of the few surviving copies of the plan.
This map is really a culmination
of the London County Council's effort
to put together all the sites that needed to be rebuilt.
Peter Deakins was a young architect
who would go on to create the first designs for Grenfell Tower
and the Lancaster West Estate.
North Kensington was certainly pretty terrible.
Very neglected and very crumbling properties.
Huge swathes of North Kensington were to be demolished and rebuilt.
Blue areas were to be knocked down within 15 years,
while red was to be bulldozed within five,
but the big homes of Notting Hill were to be spared.
It was a very optimistic time.
It was all part of trying to create a new world,
trying to make a much better place for everybody to live in.
I could never see any reason
why poor people shouldn't have good quality housing,
just as much as rich people.
By the mid-'60s,
the demolition of old 19th-century streets in North Kensington
was in full swing.
And at the heart of the area to be demolished was Testerton Street,
where Pat Matthews was born.
So what happened to Testerton Street?
Well, they blew it up.
SHE LAUGHS
But all I remember, honestly, as much as I loved it, they were rank.
You know what I mean? They were rank.
Peter Deakins was put in charge
of designing the huge new council estate
that would replace Testerton Street and others around it.
I was 29 when I first became involved in Lancaster West.
Yeah, it was a fantastic time,
one of the most exciting times of my life, I think, really.
I'm an architect,
I like designing things and here's a nice project,
and I thought was doing a good thing.
We all thought we were doing a good thing.
And we were determined to make a much better world.
And, yeah, I was...
I wouldn't say fanatical exactly, but extremely enthusiastic.
Peter's original plans for the estate featured swimming pools,
a school, a public library, a shopping centre and shared gardens.
I don't see it as utopian, really,
because it was clearly very achievable.
But the Kensington Council housing committee
were less than impressed with Peter's grand plan.
They seemed, from all the newspaper reports, to be quite horrified
because it was so new and not what they expected.
It was not, you know, the neat and tidy
cheap little council estate that they were expecting.
Peter's vision of the estate was rejected.
He left the firm soon after.
But eventually, a reduced version of Peter's plan did go ahead.
The scheme that now is built at Lancaster Road, in my view,
falls far short of what we originally hoped to achieve.
All the amenities weren't there and the shops weren't there,
the workplaces weren't included.
And essentially, people don't want to spend their tax money
on helping other people.
Whether you call that a betrayal or not, you know, if you...
If you think we are all in it together,
like we were during the war, it's a betrayal,
isn't it, really?
The building programme in London is being greatly accelerated
and the new homes will have bigger rooms, central heating,
and pedestrian walks safely away from traffic.
The Lancaster West Estate was part of a great wave
of council house building that had transformed the skyline of London.
You know, you think, "My God".
And then you see them going
as if they're going to touch the sky, you know. It's like New York.
It was the beginning of a new dawn, or so people thought.
By 1975, when the estate was finally finished,
families who had been living in slum housing for years
were at the top of the waiting list for new flats.
It wasn't excited, it was sort of thinking, "Would I get one?"
You don't know.
Waiting, just waiting, you know,
to get a letter to say you've got a flat.
Where we were moving from, I was living in two rooms,
myself, my husband and three children.
And then suddenly we got this place
and, when we came in to visit,
the children were running from room to room, downstairs, upstairs.
And we thought, "Well, we couldn't leave this," so we had to take it.
So we went and signed up.
It's like your whole hand was shaking, like, you know?
"Oh, got somewhere at last."
I loved it, I tell you.
And at the heart of the estate was Grenfell Tower.
I moved in there the second day they opened,
but the flats were out of this world.
You know, to what we'd been brought up in,
it was a palace.
I can't give you the dimensions of the sitting room
because it was huge.
You know? It was huge.
It was like walking in Buckingham Palace, I suppose, to us, you know?
Compared to what you've left,
you weren't sharing kitchen,
you weren't sharing a bath
with a whole set of other different families.
It was luxury.
It really was luxury.
I had the best childhood.
I grew up playing on these walkways.
We used to play Knock Down Ginger
and you could hide and seek really well in these flats as well.
This is where I grew up, this is where my heart is,
and this is where I always want to be.
Grenfell Tower and the Lancaster West Estate opened
at a unique moment in British history.
When the residents first moved in,
the country was more equal than it's ever been -
before or since.
By 1979, 40% of the country lived in council housing,
including both high and low earners.
The optimism was that we were going forward.
We were looking forward.
Grenfell was a symbol of hope.
Hope for a better life,
if we did have a better life there.
Well, looking at it now...
..words fail me.
Where has the hope gone?
Where's the optimism?
Just where that lift's coming down,
it's just passed my flat, where I was.
Grenfell Tower was one of the last high-rise council blocks
to be built in Britain.
As I say, I loved it.
But don't seem like they've done anything else since, have they?
You know? Haven't built any other houses or anything around here.
From the beginning,
what we had in the beginning when we first moved here,
42 years ago, it was good
and then it went downhill.
Within a couple of years of moving in, problems began.
Yeah, the novelty did wear off after a while
because walls are cracking
and this isn't working and that isn't working.
I mean, at the beginning, things were good
because you were new and everything was new and didn't need fixing.
But then afterwards, you know,
you started to see your place in North Kensington,
how much you didn't matter in North Kensington.
It was, you know, like them and us.
The council and us.
So we were having, like, a lot of problems.
Cockroaches and mice.
It wasn't much different to what we'd left behind.
Then we had red ants and black ants and all these other ants.
The cockroaches, right?
You know, every morning.
I'd leave my husband bleach and everything on the side
to get rid of them, you know, because you had white tops up there,
and they would be just black in the morning
where they'd come out in the night, like, you know,
all baby ones and, oh, they were awful, awful.
But cockroaches weren't the only problem.
It was all open, so we used to roller-skate through
but then you could also get mugged at one end,
so it was like my gran got mugged
going to church walking through there.
It wasn't a nice place in the evenings.
Pat Matthews was even attacked getting out of the lift.
As the door opened, I went to step out and they rushed at me...
..and I said "Whoa!" You know, like you sort of shout,
as far as I can remember,
and obviously, they wanted to mug me.
I said, "Listen, all I've got on me is empty boxes. Here, have 'em"
And I threw them at them. That much, I can remember.
But I probably shouldn't have done that
because that sort of set them off hitting me, you know.
I know I was knocked out
and I got myself back in the lift and I thought,
"Oh, no, it's going to be like mugger's paradise in here", you know?
By the 1980s, the reputation of the Lancaster West Estate
and council estates everywhere was suffering.
Shops have closed down,
ground floor windows are boarded up, crime has flourished.
Those facts of life are uncomfortable...
They urgently needed investment,
but the new government proposed a different way to tackle the problem.
A nation of homeowners will be self-reliant, independent,
and able to do what they want with their own lives in their own homes.
Margaret Thatcher started offering council tenants
the chance to buy their flats.
Properties were now more than just homes, they were assets.
Some on the estate took up the offer...
..but they weren't the only ones entering the market.
Now, the rundown Victorian homes of Notting Hill
also began to attract new buyers.
Notting Hill was not only not very fashionable,
it was distinctly...dodgy.
My mother, who lived in London in the late-'50s,
was distinctly worried by the fact
that we were moving to this part of town
because it had the reputation from the race riots, from Peter Rachman.
What was it that attracted you to the Notting Hill area?
We were a young married couple, we didn't think twice about anything.
Yeah. So...
Hanover Lodge was first bought in 1855...
..but just over 100 years later, when the Du Canes moved in,
it was worth less than £300,000 in today's money.
Houses like Hanover Lodge were very run down.
Well, when we moved in, yes, it was pretty...
Very damp down in the basement when we first moved in.
In the basement level, it was dark, damp,
and the mushrooms loved it.
I mean, I think we fitted the sort of profile
of a lot of people who moved in at that time,
in the sense that we were not rich
in the same way as people moving in now are rich
and we were young, bringing up our family,
and, as I think with many young families at that stage,
nothing is impossible.
The Du Canes gradually began to do up the house,
turning it back into the single-family home
its Victorian builder had always intended it to be.
What I've got here is an estate map for the Ladbroke estate.
It is, I think, probably unique.
The freehold estate of Felix Ladbroke, Esquire,
in the parishes of Kensington and Paddington
in the county of Middlesex.
What this shows is, it's a snapshot
on the history of the estate as at 1847.
And that is Hanover Lodge.
I think, in many ways, this is the beginnings
of modern day Notting Hill.
There it is, just round the corner.
As more and more of the Victorian houses
were restored to their former glory,
the makeup of North Kensington was changing once again.
The wealthier were returning
to reclaim the grand homes of Notting Hill.
Notting Hill, through the '90s,
attracted many bankers who had done well in London.
Undoubtedly, it was referred to as gentrification.
But I think it's too...
..it's too polarising to say gentrification bad.
Yes. I think there's always been a bit of a divide,
but perhaps it was less so
than it seems to have become more polarised in recent years, perhaps.
So it changed. The '90s then changed the whole area.
Everyone wanted to be in Notting Hill
and all the stars then started moving in,
and it became more like the place to be.
At first, these posh new neighbours up the hill were a bit of a novelty.
I remember all the art galleries on Portobello Road
would have wine nights
and you'd go and go, "Yes, oh, I like that one,"
just to get the wine, let's be honest!
It wasn't like I was arty.
But you know, like, you just went just because everyone...
..it was the thing.
You know, and all the pubs started to change
and everyone was, "We need to go and drink..."
"..Sol." Sol.
That was the thing with a piece of lime in it, you know.
So it changed, the '90s then changed the whole area.
It was good fun. I'm not saying it wasn't good fun.
We had good fun, but that's when I think more,
it became more, you know, noticeable that there was an inequality
because all of a sudden you were seeing people right next to you
that had more than you.
The Bishop of Kensington finds the wealthy in his own diocese
often fail to comprehend the reality of poverty,
even when it's a stone's throw away.
On that side of the road over there,
there are houses that must be changing hands
for about half a million.
Here, on this side of the road,
we have, just a couple of hundred yards away,
a block of council flats
which was described in the local paper this week
as a tower of despair.
As the surrounding area got richer,
estates like Lancaster West
became a byword for crime and anti-social behaviour.
There was an outside reputation, where people used to say,
"Oh, Lancaster West is bad."
But we couldn't see that because we knew the people that were in it,
and so we didn't understand why other people thought that.
It's the mentality around social housing and estates.
It, you know, it just goes without saying,
"Oh, they're an estate child", or, "They're off an estate".
Each estate has its own culture but nobody cares to look at that -
it's just an estate and it's a big estate -
so, because it's so big, we've got to be rough, unruly poor people.
In fact, figures from the time showed
that the crime rate on Lancaster West Estate
was one of the lowest in North Kensington.
Because we are also close to very affluent areas,
we have those sorts of people to look down on us
and probably that's where it originated from.
They probably felt,
"Oh, we can't walk through there" - because of their own hang-ups
and that manifested into our deviance.
Prices in Notting Hill kept on rising.
By the 2000s, if you owned a house there,
you'd earn more from it in a year
than most of the residents in Notting Dale could earn
by working for 20 years.
W11 is the place to live because of the '90s,
so then it was like the yuppie thing,
and then it was the place to live
so we had a bloody film, Notting Hill, all that rubbish,
and it's like this is the place. And everyone started moving in,
and then you could...
..then the prices just...
..it was just... something that we thought...
Even today, I go, "What the hell? Like, what?!"
These last 17, 18 years, mate, it's gone bonkers.
The money at the top is just so ridiculous.
Like, these people are buying £75 million houses, like,
looking over the whole estate, kind of like thing, you know.
It's like, what? And no-one even lives there,
you know, it's just like... And then we're all over here
and people's families are struggling to pay rent,
but they work three jobs and they can't afford to feed their kids
and using food banks. It's like...
Yeah, the 2000s is when I can say
money at the top was just bonkers, innit?
Homes that had been called slums not that long ago
were now some of the most desirable properties in the country.
This is my home, the first address I remember learning.
You paid for a room, you rented a room, so we rented three rooms.
There was four of us in the bedroom - my grandma...
..my grandad, my mum and myself.
Yeah, and look at it now, wow.
It looks like one house. Wow.
I walked past this and dreamed about buying this for years...
..and I will, one day.
It's all right, love,
you can walk down my road.
I feel like I shouldn't walk down this road, you know?
People probably look at me like, "She's not wearing Prada.
"She shouldn't be in this part of Portland Road."
Probably everyone that lives here...
..would never have thought that I used to live here.
Let's be honest, because they probably don't know
how it was social housing as such.
Oh, sorry. I was just looking. I'm from here, as a child.
So sorry.
So sorry, sir.
You're very welcome to come in. I used to... We used to...
..my grandmother and my mother used to rent rooms.
We could only afford three rooms,
so this was the kitchen and that was our front room.
But it's just...I was just looking at it.
I always say, when I win the lottery,
I would love to buy my home. Well, you can't buy it because I love it.
Oh, well, that's good. I'm glad you love it.
That's all right, then.
We've had several people who lived here in the past.
Yeah. I've lived here now for a very long time.
It's such a lovely area.
Lovely. That's good, I'm so glad you love it.
I'm so glad you love it.
You're welcome any time. Thank you very much, thank you. Take care.
I did feel like I was trespassing...
..but...but he was very lovely.
It is two worlds.
I feel like these people wouldn't come over to Henry Dickens Court.
It's sad for them that they're missing out on such lovely people
on the other side.
If they want to join our community...
They've moved into our community, but no-one wants to join it.
To this day, it's like, obviously, the affluent part matters.
Those are the votes that this council goes for,
those are the votes that are important to this council,
and those are the people that this council
feel most of their duty towards.
By 2010, Kensington was officially the most expensive place to live
in the country.
Oligarchs and billionaires were moving in.
But in Notting Dale,
residents started to feel like second-class citizens.
It was really around the quality of life that we have.
There was no money, really, put into any, sort of,
even community or social building.
We were just left.
The maintenance of the estate was badly let down.
You know, you have to go down all guns blazing
for something to be done.
You have to go three, four, five, six times,
then something will be done about it.
It shouldn't have to be.
When this estate was new, it was like, "Oh, a new place to live."
For us, it was something nice.
But then the more we saw money going into other places,
respect going into other places,
the authorities' attention being put in other places,
it perpetuates that thinking that, "You're nothing,
"you are worth nothing and we are investing nothing in you."
But I think that was the catalyst
for our community becoming so strong.
We lived in that vein where,
"Everyone thinks we're crap, but we know we're not."
But the more neglected the estate got,
the further apart these two worlds became.
You could just see.
You'd go out and our shops became delis,
pubs became bars and it slowly was like, "Hold on a minute."
And then a pub became Waitrose and, you know, it's like,
"Hold on a minute, everything's sort of becoming for...
"..not for us anymore, for the people that have moved in."
Now, for the residents,
the changes to the area didn't just seem strange,
they started to feel threatening.
North Kensington was a rundown, Dickensian craphole.
Now they suddenly see there's money,
it's got the golden postcode, West 11.
That will sell.
We're sitting on a pot of gold, the land that we're sitting on.
It's worth so much money to them that I think they just want to,
they don't really want social housing in this area.
They know they can make money and so they'd like to get rid of us.
70% of homes in Notting Dale were still social housing...
..but that number was starting to fall.
By 2015, a two-bedroom flat in Grenfell Tower
that had been bought under right to buy
was worth a quarter of a million pounds.
Then the council began to clad the tower.
I was on the board when it started coming about to do the cladding.
Some residents had said no.
The residents wanted it left how it was.
But then again, you had, like, a lot of the well-to-do people,
the wealthier side, saying it was an ugly thing to look at.
So, no matter what way we were going, we weren't winning.
The residents in the tower, even when the works was going on,
they've had, you know, blowouts and little fires and things like that.
You know, their television
and computers and that would blow up and things, there was problems,
but they just continued doing the work.
They weren't even listening to the residents who were living in there.
It was like, "We did tell you several times,
"you didn't listen and you still chose to just carry on."
And so it's like, "They really don't matter."
North Kensington felt
like it had become two very distinct worlds once again.
By 2016, with the work now completed on the tower,
the gap between the incomes of the richest
and the incomes of the poorest was the same as it had been in 1850.
Inequality had come full circle.
If you're just joining us, good morning, welcome to you.
There is a fire in west London.
A block of flats in the Lancaster West Estate...
One of my sons sent me a text with a picture of a tower block on fire...
..and I looked at it...
..and I thought, "My God..."
I lost friends, I lost a whole family there.
I know their friends, my son lost friends.
Some nights I go to bed and I think I'm in a dream,
so when I wake up in the morning and look out it'll be like it was.
It hurts that, you know, the anger, it's like, it's not even...
I don't even know if it's anger.
I'm just, like, hurt that no-one listened.
It breaks my heart that my area is broken, you know,
my community is broken, their hearts have been broken.
Grenfell is the culmination of the disrespect, the neglect,
and the way that we were never listened to
and our voice was never important.
Grenfell would have never happened if there was some respect,
even just some respect, for our voice.
Especially when you know it could have been avoided.
That is the most hurtful thing,
that you become so powerless, there's nothing you can do about it.
They were hell-bent in doing what they wanted to do.
It's just heartbroken, we're all heartbroken,
but it's given us the strength to say, "Right, enough is enough.
"We've had enough of what you've been doing to us.
"We are going to be the ones that's calling the shots now."
It's started change.
It's started change, mate. Young minds are woken.
Young minds have been awoken,
but now young minds have the drive behind them now, innit?
The fire gave some people drive, innit?
I think this has made us...
..we've always been strong within North Kensington,
but I think this has just made us more stronger.
That was the mentality.
It's like, "Not this community. We are going to hold this together
"until they are able to deal with their trauma and come back."
We don't collapse and die.
We don't fall down and go, "Oh, it's all too hard."
We just come out fighting.
We are a community that has been dismembered
and it's about putting the pieces back together again
in order to keep that thread going...
..and that it can pass on from generation to generation,
the culture, tradition, who we are, what we have done,
who we are going to be.
Things have to change.
Things must change for us.
We all can't afford to be in our own homes.
We cannot afford to own something
that, you know, substantial for ourselves.
And if the local authorities are going to do all this,
they have to do it right.
It cannot be continuing to do it the way it is, it's no good.
It has to happen, it must happen.
Grenfell has to be a symbol of hope for everyone...
..for everyone.