The 2025-2026 winter newsletter is in the mail – but also here

This year’s main feature is about our GPs and the NHS. One article is about the enormous change that Kensington’s GP services have gone through in the past 20 years. In 2007 the borough had 43 NHS affiliated GP practices, serving 180,000 patients. More than half of them were run by a single GP and only 7 hade three GPs or more. Today, we have only 27 practices, handling 231,000 patients. 93% of them have at least three GPs and there are no “single-handed” practices left. This is part of a major reorganisation of the NHS, where the GPs are becoming local health centres that can do many of the things we previously had to visit hospitals for.

Another article looks back at the creation of the NHS, 77 years ago. The fact that the country’s economy was in crisis, with the national debt being a staggering 200% of GDP and with almost all doctors hating the idea, didn’t deter the politicians from pushing through the reform, which also included most dentists. While the workload for the GPs didn’t change that much, the dentists now had to cope with an enormous workload, as a large portion of the population had never been able to afford visiting a dentist before, so 70% of the adult were toothless and 80% of 12-year-olds had “significant decay”. When the dentists’ service suddenly became free, their previously rather empty waiting rooms were suddenly overflowing with patients. 9,200 dentists in England and Wales were suddenly handling 8.5 million cases per year, mainly pulling teeth, fitting dentures and doing basic fillings.

We also take a look at the the now classic London redbrick mansion blocks, mainly inspired by the luxury apartment buildings being built in Paris in the second half of the 19th century, but designed to resemble English country mansions. After a couple of not so successful attempts in the 1850s and 1860s, a mansion block next to Royal Albert Hall was completed in 1879 and it became an enormous success. So architects and builders were soon building similar blocks all across the more affluent parts of western London. The mansion blocks were ideal for a section of London’s new, wealthy middle class who didn’t want to live far outside the world’s largest city, which between 1851 and 1901 grew from 2.4 to an astonishing 6.5 million residents. But many traditionalists hated this “foreign” housing idea and insisted that Londoners should live in terraced family houses, a house type introduced 200 years earlier after the Great Fire of 1666.

Another article is about a memorial plaque in Notting Hill Gate, unveiled in 2018 but removed last year, as it sat on one of the buildings torn down to make place for the new Newcombe House complex. It was a memorial of violent death 50 years ago, when an IRA bomb killed a bomb disposal expert. Will the plaque come back? Time will tell.

We also have an article about the large Kensal Canalside application, which was approved by the RBKC planning committee in November although the council’s own planning officers have previously concluded that the site is unsuitable unless it gets much better public transport – and there are currently no such plans. It is now up to the London mayor to decide if it should be accepted or if the developer first must fix the transport issues.

There is also the usual planning report and reflections by our chairman on the value of the word “We”.

You can find the new newsletter in our archive or via this link.