In the run-up to the sixth anniversary of the Grenfell Tower fire, Emma Dent Coad looks at ‘Two Nations’ in Kensington and Chelsea

You would think that a Council that is still very much under scrutiny, having been criticised numerous times over the past six years for its focus on vanity projects preceding the Grenfell Tower fire, and for “behaving like a developer” (as the incoming CEO said in 2017), would show some circumspection.

You would think that a Council under investigation for corporate manslaughter would be careful of ‘optics’.

But no. The Two Nation Tories in charge at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) have re-established the social order that was so very much standard before the fire.

Golborne ward in North Kensington is the poorest ward in the whole of London, and a shameful 8,000 households live in poverty across the borough. Notting Dale, the ‘Grenfell ward’ has just entered this list of shame at number nine, after six years of unprecedented ‘investment’ from national and local government.

Residents in poorer areas are expected to be pitifully grateful to the Council for fulfilling Statutory Duties, such as providing schools, libraries, parks, and homes they can afford on poverty wages, while in wealthy Holland Park they continue to ‘gild the lily’ of Leighton House Museum.

(Let me just say that I love museums; having so many within 20 minutes of home is a privilege I have enjoyed all my life.)

The Golborne Road area is known as ‘Little Morocco’ due to the large number of Moroccans who live there, but I have yet to find a single one who even knew of the existence of this museum with its exquisite décor, Arab Hall and dedication to Moroccan and oriental arts. Not one. The museum, built for the artist Lord Leighton, also has an extraordinary collection of Pre-Raphaelite paintings including several by Leighton. But while some Kensington & Chelsea residents are quite literally destitute, the museum collection has just been embellished with Lord Leighton’s painting ‘In My Studio’, at a cost of a whopping £890,000.

The Council’s obsession with this museum has led to its shortlisting as ‘Museum of the Year’. King Charles visited the building earlier this year and apparently swooned over the building and its contents. But this ‘hidden gem’ has come at vast cost to those who have paid for it but do not know of its existence. Over past years RBKC Council taxpayers have paid, one way or another, for the following:

Phase 1 – £250,000 of maintenance works plus the ‘reinstatement’ of ziggurats on the roof that had never been originally implemented

Phase 2 – £1.6m of rewiring, heating and lighting plus restoration of interiors

Phase 3 – £9.6m for a full refurb of some parts, plus addition of an architect-designed conservation grade extension.

This is in addition to a frankly extraordinary sum of £1.4m in total for Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and the museum continues to acquire furniture and other items whose cost is hard to quantify. So in total we can identify a total of £12.9m spent on a building that would be better managed by the National Trust, as Labour Councillors have suggested over the years, to tackle the annual loss of £328,000.

A recent tussle in the Guardian relating to vanity projects in wealthy wards paid by the Neighbourhood Community Infrastructure Levy and S106 funds led to this riposte by the Tory Leader member: “Art and culture are for everyone.” The museum has reopened after the completion of Phase 3, and now costs £11 to enter, hardly ‘for everyone’.

Let us remember, in the run-up to the Grenfell Tower fire sixth anniversary, that some survivors are still homeless, dozens have not settled and want to move, and many thousands are still struggling with untreated PTSD, preventing recovery.

Let us remember that after years of neglect and lack of any maintenance whatever, the Council saw fit to spend just £8.4m to refurbish Grenfell Tower, a building housing around 350 human beings, after cutting costs by fitting the cheaper flammable cladding.

£8.4m for Grenfell Tower. £12.9m for Leighton House.

So, art and culture are decidedly not for everyone. Not for those in North Kensington and other deprived areas who have paid for it. Not for those for whom £11 entry fee is unthinkable. And not for the 72 who are very much in our thoughts in the period before the anniversary.

We have been asking the Council for years to hand Leighton House over to the National Trust, and to focus on fulfilling their Statutory Duties and caring for our deprived communities, whom they seem to view as an immutable and permanent fixture, and clearly something of a nuisance – or an occasional prop for a patronising Twitter pic.

A Council that would spend £4m more on a museum than on ensuring  residents are safe in their beds, resulting in massive loss of life, should hang its head in shame and not be preening about an award short-listing.

Emma Dent Coad is an Independent Councillor in the RBKC and former Labour MP for Kensington 2017-19. Her book, One Kensington is coming out in paperback on 8th June.

Image: Leighton House. Source: https://www.europeana.eu/nl/item/2026101/Partage_Plus_ProvidedCHO_Culture_Grid_PP0873_KK01. Author: Aitchison, George – Culture Grid, United Kingdom, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.