Emma Dent Coad greets me in the civic reception of Kensington town hall. It is where she has been making herself a thorn in the Conservative council’s side since her election as a Labour councillor in 2006. At the time, she had been an architecture journalist for 30 years (she is now 67), and she is passionate about this 70s building, showing off the debating chamber before leading me to her office. Her enthusiasm is contagious; by the time we are done, I too am awed by the space, which looks like a mini UN – even the chunky door handles are lovely.
This is a point Dent Coad stresses in her forthcoming book, One Kensington (subtitled Food Halls, Food Banks and Grenfell: Inside the Most Unequal Borough in Britain) – that there is nothing contradictory about fighting for social justice and having a passion for aesthetics. One of the tacit precepts of Labour rhetoric is that only elitists care about architecture, while authentic people care about putting roofs over heads. That has enabled a parallel narrative – that social tenants don’t deserve beautiful housing, let alone in affluent areas. This is the attitude she fights the council on constantly, whether it is trying to relocate sheltered-housing tenants from Holland Park to East Molesey in Surrey, or expecting Grenfell survivors to be grateful that they have been rehoused.
