Barry Quirk, recently named the second most influential person in British local government.
Our AGM is held in the Town Hall’s Great Hall, as usual. You can click on the plus sign at the right for a closer view.
New date and speaker:
The Kensington Society AGM 2018
Monday 21 May 2018, 6:30 for a 7:00pm start
Kensington Town Hall, the Great Hall, Hornton Street
Due to circumstances out of his control, the previously announced guest speaker at the Kensington Society 2018 annual general meeting, the new V&A director Tristram Hunt, cannot attend. We have therefore been forced to change both our speaker as well as the date of the meeting.
The AGM will now be held on Monday 21 May and our guest speaker will be Barry Quirk, the new chief executive of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Dr Quirk, who had been the chief executive of Lewisham council since November 1993, joined the borough on a permanent basis on 11 September 2017, after having jumped in as interim chief executive on loan from Lewisham following the sudden departure of Nicholas Holgate in the wake of the Grenfell Tower disaster in June.
He has worked in local government for some 40 years, with experience in five London councils. He is a leading local government chief executive nationally, involved in the improvement of public services across the UK. Between 2004 and 2009, he was the government’s national “efficiency champion” for local government and in 2007 he produced a landmark report for the government on the potential transfer of public assets to community groups.
Barry Quirk is a qualified teacher with an academic background in public policy – he has a PhD in social and political geography. He is a visiting fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is an associate at the Institute for Government. He was awarded a CBE in 2001 for services to London local government. He is also an author and regular speaker on localism, public policy and public management. According to his 2011 book, Re-imagining Government, there are three key purposes of government: the necessity of solving community problems, securing welfare and having the legitimacy to determine common good. He argues that this legitimacy comes from discussion between leaders and communities, based on a set of core ethical principles.
Update: On 16 January 2018, the LGC100 powerlist named Barry Quirk the second most influential person in British local government, before people like Sajid Javid (5), Greg Clark (12), Jeremy Hunt (15), Sadiq Khan (18), Andy Burnham (20) and Dominic Raab (29), beaten only by the NHS England boss, Simon Stevens.
The AGM will begin at 7:30 with doors opening at 7:00. The mayor, Councillor Marie-Therese Rossi, has invited all attendees to join her afterwards in the Mayor’s Parlour for a wine reception.
Kensington Society members attend for free, while non-members wishing to attend are kindly asked to make a donation towards the costs for the event.
Please use our online booking system to register. Members simply select required number of free tickets, while non-members select tickets matching their desired donation.
Those not wishing to book online can download the postal booking form, found below the online booking.
Online bookings
If booking online, non-member donations are paid through PayPal, with credit card, debit card or a PayPal account. You do not need a PayPal account to do so.
Unfortunately, our ticketing system doesn’t allow donation amounts to be set or modified by the end users, so we have created a few popular donation amounts to choose from.
PLEASE NOTE: Due to a glitch in our payment system, when you reach the page for payment options (after having entered the names and email addresses of those attending on the previous page), you MUST press the PayPal button under “Method of Payment”, although PayPal is the only available option, BEFORE you press the “Proceed to Finalize Registration” button. If you don’t, you’ll get an error message. However, if that happens you should be able to proceed anyway by closing the error message (just click on the X in the upper right-hand corner of the message window) and then selecting the PayPal button before you once again press the “Proceed to Finalize Registration” button.
Postal bookings
Download and complete the booking form below and, if you’re a non-member, send your donation to the Kensington Society by cheque or bank transfer.
Page updated 24/01/2018
