The Labour candidate who seized the Tory stronghold of Kensington on Friday night after three nail-biting recounts said she had harnessed a decade of rising anger at some of London’s most extreme gentrification.

Emma Dent Coad said her win over Victoria Borwick by just 20 votes demonstrated that despite its reputation for wealth, the constituency was riven by widening inequality with some of the poorest parts of London nearly side by side with billionaire homes.

Roman Abramovich owns a £125m house in Kensington Palace Gardens while David Beckham and hedge fund billionaires live in the stucco mansions of Notting Hill. Even former council housing blocks, such as Erno Goldfinger’s Trellick tower, have become expensively chic.

But the 62-year-old mother of three said: “We have areas of extreme poverty. Golborne ward, with the fabulous Trellick tower and Golborne market and all its trendiness, is the joint poorest ward in London. People are getting poorer, their income is dropping, life expectancy is dropping and their health is getting worse. There is no trickle down in Golborne ward and there is no trickle down anywhere in Kensington.

A property in Kensington Palace Gardens. Photograph: Alastair Grant/AP

“If trickle down worked we wouldn’t have people desperately poor and queuing up for food banks which we do. A lot of Conservatives are also very uneasy about that and can’t stand the inequality. Some of them said they’d vote for me.”

Dent Coad is an architectural historian and writer who has campaigned against gentrification in the area for the last 11 years as a councillor for the Golborne ward on Tory-controlled Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea council.

She is putting her PhD on the architecture of Franco-era Spain on hold, and has rooted her politics in planning and housing. It delivered her a victory that left her “in shock”.



The architect Richard Rogers, a constituent and Labour peer, applauded her “wonderful win” on Sunday. “We have to look at housing completely anew,” he said. “We have to look at it as a social service. It needs a really radical shakeup.”

Dent Coad said her campaign was “about where planning and people meet and the bad outcomes. Planning has been really skewed towards developing and improving areas and nothing to do with the people.”

The Trellick tower is in a council ward of extreme poverty, but flats in the building have become expensively chic. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

As a result, the borough masks its poverty well, she said. “You can’t always see it by walking around because the council sanitises it by sweeping the streets, pruning the trees and planting hanging baskets. But we have one estate, Henry Dickens Court, that is poorer than the Gorbals and 58% of children live in poverty.”

At the last census in 2011, the borough ranked first in England and Wales for the percentage of residents who assessed their health as very good, but in Golborne 9.2% of people said their health was bad or very bad, compared with 4.9% across London.

Regeneration plans for another estate, Wornington Green, have “been breaking my heart for the last 11 years”, Dent Coad said. She has campaigned against the approach taken by Catalyst housing association to demolish blocks, replace them at higher density and with more housing for sale. She has described the construction standards as appalling and said residents were being offered houses several miles away in Hillingdon, near Heathrow airport. Some “old and vulnerable people are being unwillingly decanted”, she said.

She has also campaigned against investors and the super-rich buying up new luxury homes in the constituency and leaving them empty, and said her stance had won support among Conservative voters concerned about the erosion of the area’s social mix.

In Queen’s Gate ward, just south of Kensington Palace, the home of Prince Harry and the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, one in five homes are empty or second homes, she said.

“I strolled from Warwick Road down Kensington High Street and I photographed all the buildings to see if the lights are on,” she said. “There is an entire block, bought by one family, and they are never there and it is completely empty. In another block, One Kensington, there are 97 super-luxury flats and there are only four that ever have lights on.

“Planning should be about people, not about making money for developers, and we have lost the plot on that. I am going to be shouting loud and hard about that in my role.”