On the night of 14 June, musician and community leader Niles Hailstones was preparing for an event marking 40 years since the release of Bob Marley’s Exodus album. He had the keys to a space, Bay 56, in Acklam Village near Portobello Road in west London. “When the Grenfell fire happened, I made a call to the person at the Westway Trust who had given me the keys and I said, ‘You see what’s going on, we need to use this space,’” he says. “They said, ‘Do what you’ve got to do.’”

With local and national response almost nonexistent in the days that followed the fire, the community filled the void. The Westway Sports Centre was the focal point for people to get information about missing family members as volunteers grappled with lists and clipboards. Beds were set up there for people to sleep in. Community centres, churches and mosques in the area received mountains of donations, and the streets were full of people trying to help.

Bay 56 at Acklam Village, a small space with a weekend market a short walk from Grenfell Tower, became the central point for local donations. “A lot of the other community centres that were helping were right in the middle of the smoke and the debris, so this was close but a little out of the way,” says Hailstones. “We could use this as a safe zone, we could offer counselling, therapy, stuff like that.”

Niles Hailstones: ‘That’s the key – self-empowerment, an uplifting story six months after the fire.’ Photograph: Alecsandra Raluca Dragoi/The Guardian

Since 14 June, Hailstones has held on to the keys, and the space has become a symbolic hub for the community. “We each had our breakdown moments in here,” says Emzee, a community volunteer. With trust severely damaged between the community, the council and the media, Bay 56, known locally as “the Village”, became a healing space. Throughout July it was full of boxes and local volunteers sorting them. Six months on, they have been cleared away to make room for meetings, film screenings and other events.

“The trust came up to see what we were doing,” says Hailstones. “They said it’s great work you’ve been doing, then they asked me how long is a piece of string, and we explained to them we can’t answer that but we’re going to be here for a little while.” For five months, Hailstones even slept at the Village, watching over the space. Hailstones was born and grew up in the area and has been involved in community activism in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) for decades. He has chaired the Westway 23 community group for several years, seeking to protect the 23 acres of land below the Westway for communal use, rather than see it turned into retail space, as happened in Brixton and Shoreditch.

Lots of younger people in the area respectfully refer to him as “uncle”, and seek his advice – so he was the first point of call when Nii Sackey, who had been volunteering at one of the walls in the area where residents documented their experiences of the fire, came forward with a new space. He knew of a former Kensington and Chelsea college building at Maxilla Walk, close to Ladbroke Grove and in the shadow of Grenfell, that was unoccupied. Sackey and his friend had been to look around. “As it happens,” says Sackey, “all the doors were open for us as we got here and we found the box of keys when we went into the office so we didn’t have to force entry.”

That happened at the beginning of October, and since then, many of the people who were involved in the Village have been working across the two sites. Rubbish has been cleared from the yard, repairs have been done to the inside of the building and community members of all ages are helping develop the occupied space. A sign at the entrance reads: “This is not a squat.” It’s referred to locally as “the City” and is a work in progress.

A recording studio has been decorated with materials donated by Ms Dynamite. There’s a space where yoga classes are held. Several rooms have been labelled as community spaces and local people are regularly passing through to help.

Photograph: Alecsandra Raluca Dragoi/The Guardian

Senait, 28, lost family in the Grenfell fire and is one of the people working in the City. “People haven’t been reached out to,” she says of the government response. “There’s been no followup on my mental health, nothing. For me, my healing was in Acklam Village. I was traumatised and it was the community who helped me get through that.” Now, the new space is helping to fill the “big gap in what the community needs”.

These feelings are echoed elsewhere in an area where trust between the council and those most affected by the economic disparity in the area has completely eroded. The RBKC’s deputy leader, Cllr Kim Taylor-Smith, was invited along to the City by those working on it several weeks ago. Following his visit, on 28 November, Taylor-Smith wrote an email to Hailstones in which he said that, while the council intended to seek a court order to protect its interests, it did not intend to take enforcement action. He wrote: “I was impressed with what has been achieved in such a short period of time and there is something that we can work on.”

“It’s too late to shut us down after all the work we’ve done now,” 24-year-old Usama says.

At Acklam Village. Photograph: Alecsandra Raluca Dragoi/The Guardian

“Each and every one of us here wholeheartedly believes that what we are doing is right,” says Senait. “We’ve got no money motivation; our motivation is strictly the enrichment of our community.”

The current circumstances have presented an unprecedented situation. “We’re getting to some of the harder-to-reach people in the area,” says Hailstones. “We’ve got them engaged, working together in an intergenerational way painting walls and building this space for the community. Something very special is happening here and preventing that from happening will only be detrimental in the long run, because those same people are not happy with the situation that they’re living in, and they do still want justice in terms of what happened at Grenfell, so they’re not going to be fobbed off.”

In a statement, Taylor-Smith admitted that the council faces a dilemma. “People have taken over a large council building that is designated to be a purpose-built adult social-care hub ... On the one hand we have squatters who have set up a community-led but unregulated operation. On the other, we have vulnerable young adults, some with severe disability, for whom we had dedicated this space to support their needs.

Inside the City community space. Photograph: Alecsandra Raluca Dragoi/The Guardian

“We have lots of requests for community space and so we have commissioned an independent review in the borough to see how this can be provided in an organised and coordinated way, rather than in an ad hoc fashion. I have met the groups occupying the former college twice and am discussing the options with them so we can find the right way forward for all of the community.”

This Thursday marks six months since the Grenfell fire, and the first formal sessions of the inquiry began this week. Four out of five families made homeless by the fire still don’t have homes, and, according to the support group Grenfell United, 118 households will still be in emergency accommodation or with friends over the holiday period.

A silent march is planned on 14 December after which the doors of the City will be fully opened to the public. Hailstones and the others working in the space are keen to show people what they have achieved by themselves. “That’s the key, self empowerment, an uplifting story six months after the fire that it’s not all failure, it’s not all what isn’t getting done, that this community is taking control of its destiny and making sure that there’s a different future.”