Royal Crescent in Holland Park was built in 1846, a sedate semicircle of six-storey, stucco-fronted terrace homes that its builders hoped would mimic the earlier, larger crescents in Bath and Regent’s Park. These days, the rumbling traffic of Holland Park Avenue immediately to its south means the crescent is rarely tranquil, but it remains an impossibly grand address, where small flats sell for more than £1m, and entire homes for several times that.

The Guardian view on the Grenfell Tower fire: never again | Editorial Read more

To the north of Royal Crescent runs the broad, tree-lined boulevard of St Anns Road, flanked on either side by ornate brick villas. Walk along this street for just 10 minutes or so, however, and the scene alters dramatically. At the top of the road, past Latimer Road tube station, it meets the dark concrete underpass of the Westway. And it is here, outside the Latymer community church, that hundreds of distraught family members and neighbours have gathered this week to plead for news of their loved ones, overshadowed by the charred, shocking ruin of Grenfell Tower.

It has become commonplace, since Wednesday morning’s fire, to note the appalling irony that it was in the richest borough in Britain that unknown numbers of poor people burned to death, in a tower block that they had repeatedly warned was perilously unsafe.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Royal Crescent. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

Little illustrates the contrast between Kensington’s two communities more starkly, however, than a walk along the road that both links and divides them. London has many roads like this, where comfortable property owners live cheek-by-jowl with lower-income, less secure communities, crammed into densely packed social housing.

As crowds gathered at St Anns Road’s northern end this week, however, embracing neighbours or handing out bottles of water or stopping reporters to tell them, with an urgency that at times felt desperate, what they had witnessed, the uneasy coexistence between the capital’s rich and poor felt under strain like rarely before.

Soran Karimi, 31, is a security guard who moved with his family from Kurdish Iraq more than two decades ago. From his own flat in Dixon House, a similar tower block on the opposite side of St Anns Road, he watched the first clouds of smoke starting to rise, before running downstairs to try to help. From there, he saw 10 or 15 people in different flats screaming for their lives, and at one point witnessed what he was shocked to realise was someone dropping from a window.

Karimi fears desperately for friends in the building whose whereabouts are unknown, but he also fears for his own family. “We have never felt safe in our flat,” he says. “It’s had millions of problems, millions of complaints to the council.” The building, run by the same tenant management organisation as Grenfell Tower, similarly has no sprinklers, no alarm system. Some of the walls have wide cracks in them, he says, and there are unboxed gas pipes in the corridors.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest People collect donations for the families affected by the Grenfell Tower fire. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

Normally, he says, this part of Kensington is “a nice place. The people who live around here are very friendly. But in the past few years they have cut down a lot of the spending for this area. A lot of the clubs where children used to play, the clubs for the elderly; they have all been shut down.”

Like many others in this part of the street, Karimi blames the council. He says: “If you go to different areas in Kensington, you can see a lot of money being invested in that area, but whatever we have here, they cut it. And everything they build here is private. If you go further down this road, it feels like you have gone into a different world.”

Carina Ferreira, 48, lives a little further south on St Anns Road, in an unlovely, low-rise concrete block above a row of shops. Her cousin was one of those evacuated from the blocks adjoining Grenfell Tower, and she knew people who escaped from the 13th floor.

That’s not unusual, says Ferreira, an office manager whose family are originally from Portugal. She says this is a very tight-knit community. “Everyone knows each other, our children go to schools together, or we see each other church or playing sport.”

All the same, it’s a “really weird” area, she says. “You have got flats which are all council, and then you have got David Beckham living around the corner. You have all these rich houses everywhere. This is one of the richest parts of London, isn’t it? And we’re in 2017. How was it allowed to happen?”

As long-term residents of this area know, St Anns Road has always been mixed. Alongside the grand villas at its southern tip, and the elegant townhouses of St James’s Gardens - surely one of the loveliest garden squares in the capital which sits just to its east - the street also led onto the notorious mid-19th century slums known as the Potteries and the Piggeries.

Mary, an elderly woman who stops to chat while carrying a bag of shopping up the street, says she was born in a tenement building in Runcorn Place, just to the north-east, and now lives in sheltered accommodation in “one of the posh streets” just off St Anns Road.

Even when she was born, 81 years ago to a family of Irish Catholics, this was an area of divided communities, she says. Despite living so close to so many grand homes, Mary shared a bed with her mother until she married at 23. “It’s always been like that,” she says. Did the two groups ever mix? “Oh no. We worked for them.”

Like many others in the neighbourhood, Mary spent the day after the fire volunteering in one of the reception centres, and her voice cracks as she recalls some of the stories she heard. “I worked with lots of Muslim youngsters yesterday and I was very touched at how lovely and so keen to help they were,” she says. She doesn’t meet a lot of Muslim young people in her day-to-day life, she admits. So in a way this disaster is bringing different communities together? “Oh, terrifically.”

Amanda Frame, who lives in St James’s Gardens, would agree. As chairman of the Kensington Society, a community organisation focusing on the area’s heritage, she knows all about the historical divide between rich and poor streets in the area. “It doesn’t just feel like two Kensingtons,” says Frame. “It is.”

Nonetheless, this tragedy has felt very close even to the borough’s richest residents, she says, with many of the organisation’s 700 members very eager to help. One member, a princess, emailed repeatedly asking the best way to donate money. Another phoned in a panic after accidentally pressing too many zeroes and giving a local charity £100,000 (she was advised to call and explain the mistake). “I think that something like this is a Katrina moment,” says Frame. “It has brought the whole community together.”

That is clear just across the road, in the centre of the garden square, where volunteers have spent two days inside St James’s church sorting huge piles of donations dropped off by parishioners’ boxes. They’ve been given Ralph Lauren bedding, Prada coats, Gucci handbags, says Doreen Patterson, a member of the congregation who is coordinating the response, while other locals have been sending their housekeepers to Primark with a credit card to spend hundreds of pounds on new clothing.

“We’ve never had any snobbery. All that people have ever asked around here is, ‘How can I help?’ Even though they are all going to their country homes on Friday. That’s fine. The fact is, they all came in to help on Thursday.”