Volunteers organise donations near Grenfell Tower in west London, Thursday, June 15, 2017. (AP Photo)
London: It's been called a "tale of two cities": London's Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, with its billionaires' homes, neat rows of embassies and a royal palace, is known around the world as the wealthiest place in Britain. Yet it's also home to some of the capital's poorest, most ethnically diverse neighbourhoods — including the one where an apartment block went up in flames this week, leaving at least 17 dead and whole families missing.
The shock of that tragedy, the worst of its kind London has seen in decades, has mobilised residents to set aside the extreme inequalities of the borough and come together in an outpouring of grief and support.
Churches and mosques near Grenfell Tower were inundated with donations for victims of the fire, many piled so high with boxes they had to turn away a steady stream of residents who kept appearing with food, clothing and other supplies.
Strangers stopped each other in the street to catch up on which items needed to go where, offering their bikes for transporting donations.
"We've all got compassion. We've all got children who went to school with the kids who lived in that building," said Kirsteen Malcolm, who has lived in north Kensington for 20 years.
Malcolm was helping at a makeshift collection station under an overpass, where affluently dressed Britons and headscarf-covered Arab women alike jumped in as volunteers, forming a spontaneous human chain to load cases of bottled water into a van.
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