The Monopoly board game has enshrined Mayfair as the most gilded neighbourhood in London: home to oligarchs, bankers and Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, and host to swanky townhouses, glitzy hotels and luxury shops. It now also has, for the first time, a Labour councillor.

Pancho Lewis’s unprecedented victory in Westminster council’s West End ward (which also includes Fitzrovia, Soho and Oxford Street) was a standout result on a mixed local election night for Labour in May. It triggered some wonderment and curiosity: if Labour can win in Mayfair – where a home costs an average of £18m and where even Rees-Mogg has apparently been “priced out” – could it win anywhere?

Local Conservatives regard this quirky, cosmopolitan economic powerhouse in the centre of the capital as the “jewel” in the council’s crown. The ward was created 40 years ago and has been solidly Tory since 1990. Labour has contested it in recent years, but has never been in sniffing distance of winning. So how did Lewis succeed in this “unwinnable” ward? (Labour’s three candidates took just one seat despite between them winning 2,858 votes to the Tories’ 2,831).

“We refused to accept the assumption that the West End always has to be Conservative, and as soon as you [do that] you pave the way for things to be done differently,” he says.

Lewis has amusing stories of campaigning outside Claridge’s hotel wearing his red socialist rosette, and door-knocking Rees-Mogg (he wasn’t in). But his success came on the back of two years of hard graft: he and his fellow Labour candidates became de facto councillors, meeting residents and immersing themselves in the unglamorous minutiae of ward business, from noise nuisance to street litter.

‘If Labour can win in Mayfair – where a home costs an average of £18m and where even Jacob Rees-Mogg has apparently been “priced out” – could it win anywhere?’ Photograph: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images

His campaign arguably took off, however, after it tapped into wider resident perceptions that the distinctive heritage of the area was being destroyed by unbridled commercialism. There was unhappiness that property developers were seemingly dictating local planning decisions, that corporate interests were encroaching on public space, and that Westminster council was in thrall to both.

Labour highlighted the “hotelification” of the area (a glut of faceless new high-end hotels), the relentless development of luxury flats (often bought as “financial deposit boxes” he says, by non-resident overseas investors), and the driving out of well-known local shops and businesses by steep rent and business rate rises (such as the iconic Gay Hussar restaurant), to be replaced by bland multinational chains.

Traditional Tory voters told Lewis when he was campaigning that they felt taken for granted and ignored by a remote and arrogant council. That view was seemingly confirmed by the resignation of a Conservative West End councillor just months before the election. Paul Church claimed that he was “bullied, silenced and threatened” by colleagues when he tried to stand up to domineering property developers.

A lot of residents felt that a very privileged elite were doing things without consulting with the community

Soon after, the council’s deputy leader (and one-time chair of the planning committee), Robert Davis, resigned after revelations that he had received hospitality and gifts from developers on hundreds of occasions. “A lot of residents felt that a very privileged elite were doing things without consulting with the community, or taking the views of local people seriously,” says Lewis.

He is an enthusiast for the grassroots campaigning approach often associated with Labour’s Corbynite wing. But he accepts that his campaign was fundamentally conservationist in nature. The Westminster Conservatives were presented as brutal freemarketers. Whereas, he says with a wry smile, “we were the ‘small-c’ conservatives who say change has to be gradual.”

The idea of the West End being plundered and spoiled by commerce is not a new one – laments for the decline of Soho, in particular, have been a constant for decades. Arguably it also fails to reflect that for all its “character”, the wider West End is no stranger to dynamic capitalism: its shops, bars, theatres and offices create more wealth than the City of London, according to some estimates.

Lewis’s success reflects a wider trend, points out London watcher and journalist Dave Hill, who runs the OnLondon.co.uk website. Grassroots campaigns that give voice to “local anxiety and unease” over large-scale property development, gentrification and estate regeneration schemes, often in opposition to local councils, are in their different ways gaining traction, from Lambeth to Haringey and Walthamstow.

Lewis’s pragmatic localism has put him on a collision course with Labour’s London mayor, Sadiq Khan. West End Labour aligned with local residents and Westminster council Conservatives to kill Khan’s ambition to pedestrianise Oxford Street, the huge shopping destination in the north of the ward.

Lewis says his first few weeks as a councillor have been frustrating. After he asked officials for an urgent licensing review of a Mayfair nightclub following allegations of racist door policies (the club denies the allegations) he was told it couldn’t be done. “That’s not good enough. If it was a case of alleged drug dealing, they’d be on to it immediately.” So what could local politicians in general learn from Lewis’s victory? “Speak to people, engage with people, show them you are taking them seriously and can take action,” says Lewis. “Prove to people that things they thought weren’t possible, are possible. It’s a lot of hard work and it’s often not particularly glamorous. But that’s what it takes to win in places where people say you can’t win.”

Curriculum vitae

Age: 30.

Lives: Westminster.

Family: Engaged.

Education: The King’s school, Canterbury; Edinburgh University, anthropology BA; Cambridge University, politics and education MA.

Career: 2018-present: partnerships and business development, Too Good To Go (a food waste app); 2016-18: Helped found Fairbnb; 2015-18: consultant at The Campaign Company (social research and community engagement consultancy); 2013-15: Researcher to an MP, House of Commons; 2006-07: Full-time busker in Australia and south Asia, playing saxophone and guitar.

Public life: 2018: elected Labour councillor for West End ward, Westminster; 2016-18: prospective Labour councillor for West End ward. In 2012, while working as an English teacher in Spain, helped to mobilise for a national strike as a result of austerity imposed by conservative prime minister Rajoy.

Interests: Music (all sorts apart from classical), pubs, cycling, reading.