Does the North Kensington Community Centre still exist in some form? Just curious, as I've worked with lots of local organisations and was wondering if it evolved into one I know.
Entirely possible. But in a completely different incarnation. The building that my dad ran was both called the North Kensington Community Centre AND the Alexander and Seventh Feathers Youth Club. It was a very solid, very large building built in 1936 with a five aside football pitch on the roof of ONE part of the two story club. The other part had a massive hall with rooms and rehearsal spaces behind it. The BBC used to hire out the hall for various things: Legs and Co rehearsed there early in the week ready for their TOTP gig and at other times it would be things like Three of a Kind, That's Life etc. We lived in a three bedroom, freezing flat on the second floor at one end and there was a one bedroom flat downstairs that was inhabited by a very dodgy man who at one point had been a kind of caretaker. That building was demolished and replaced with a much smaller one, sometime in the early nineties I think.
My dad's friend ran the Third Feathers which was in a swanky building on a posh square in Earl's Court which was where we stayed before moving to the NKCC and the flat above the club. It was a world away. The Sutton and Peabody Estates that NKCC sat on had quite a few really obnoxious racist families and the club was overrun with skinheads with swastika or similar tattoos who thought nothing of Zeig Heiling in the disco. I genuinely laugh at the idea it is a desirable area, particularly around Little Wormwood Scrubs. Because we moved there from Scotland and weren't English we were considered absolute scum by a fair few of the local residents and I remember being told by some "friends" that when the National Front got in power we'd be deported back home.
The lovely Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea council used to like to segregate their estates back then so people of colour, Vietnamese boat people, my Irish schoolmates were housed in the Latimer estates or Trellick more often than not and the nicer homes/estates were more white... That was when Trellick was a dump and not considered a modernist masterpiece with prices to match. The flats tbf were fabulous inside.
Ladbroke Grove was a gentrifying area but slowly because historically it had been very much "no blacks, no Irish, no dogs" in the southern end and very different at the northern end." The North Kensington part was more racially diverse but there were serious race tensions back in the day. My mum once came home saying she'd seen one of the skinheads called John on Barlby Road claiming he was off down the lane (Portobello Road) to shoot some black people, although of course he used a very racist slur. I couldn't wait to leave the area as I was bullied for a large part of my teens for being both Scottish and wanting to do well at school. I also (after the shit school) went to a school in Kilburn and had a black boyfriend which as you can imagine went down pretty badly with the local North Kensington racists.
I found a few of the he Steve McQueen anthology films in the Small Axe series really evocative of that time in West London. I went to a fair few house parties where I spent hours slow dancing to "Silly Games" and Lovers Rock...
Fuck me that was an essay. Anyway, this all explains why me and my family I find multi million pound houses around North Kensington a hilarious matter. We were desperate to leave.