The 2025-2026 Kensington Society annual has arrived

The Kensington Society annual for 2025-2026 has just been sent out to all members. Beside a foreword from our president, Lord Carnwath, where he talks about his walks in Holland Park; a report from our chairman, Amanda Frame; a summary of the 2025 AGM; the financial statement for 2025; 14 pages of planning reports; and 17 pages of reports from 20 of our affiliated societies; it contains the following special articles:

• A fascinating article about the Chinese-born writer Jung Chang, best known for her autobiography Wild Swans, which has sold over 10 million copies worldwide but is banned in China. She arrived in Britain in 1978, aged 26, and has lived in Kensington for over 40 years.
• An article about Kensington’s most well-known example of brutalist architecture, the two-building Czechoslovak Embassy in Notting Hill Gate, which was opened in 1970 and split into the Czech and Slovak embassies in 1993, when the two countries amicably separated.
• An article about the painter Francis Bacon and his little house in Reece Mews in South Kensington, where he lived and worked from 1961 until his death in 1992.
• An article celebrating the 11 glorious Biba years (1964-1975), when the young Barbara Hulanicki built an empire for girls with loved fashion but had limited means, which over nine years and four address changes moved from a small dilapidated chemist’s shop to the enormous Derry & Toms building (with its enormous roof garden on top). But two years later, the Britain’s dire financial state put an abrupt stop to the dreams.
• An article about the K+C Foundation, which through various projects tries to address the widening social divide in Kensington and Chelsea, where 25% of children live in poverty, school exclusion is the worst in all of London and where there is a 17 year life expectancy difference between the richest and the poorest communities.
• An article about Kensington and the Spanish civil war. This summer it will be 90 years since the start of Spain’s devastating civil war, in which some 700,000 died and half a million fled abroad, with more fleeing during the 36 year long dictatorship that followed. Against the British government’s wishes, 4,000 Brits went to fight for the Spanish government and 4,000 Basque children were eventually allowed to come here, resulting in the establishment of a small Spanish colony in north Kensington. That war and those British volunteers and refugees are commemorated in a large mosaic, located where Portobello Road runs under the Westway.
• A very interesting article which puts the Natural History Museum’s new evolution garden into a global perspective, as similar efforts are also being undertaken by other leading natural history museums around the world, as part of an effort to show nature’s interdependence with earth’s atmosphere, oceans and land.

Missing society report added
After the annual had gone to the printer, we realised that the report from the Cornwall Gardens Committee and Residents’ Association had unfortunately been forgotten, so while it regretfully isn’t part of the printed version, it has been included in the digital version.

The digital version of the 2025-2026 annual be found among all the previous annual reports in the Archive, or directly by clicking this link.