Grenfell Hope

Gaby and her husband Sean and their four children live in a flat across from Grenfell Tower, and Sean (a Church of England minister) was the first clergy person on the scene. This book stems from personal experience of the impact of the fire. It features the testimony of and commentary on the community that experienced it, and the amazing stories of hope that followed in its wake.

Grenfell Hope will help readers understand what it was like living in North Kensington before and after the fire. It will help engage the reader with poverty issues, to examine attitudes to the poor and to consider how even small gestures in everyday life can change local communities.

In the desperate situation of the fire, God was at work in people’s hearts bringing hope in tiny gestures that mounted up to something enormous. Hope that couldn’t be ignored or even contained. Hope sprang out all over the country.

Gaby was born a farmer’s granddaughter who from the age of 5-18 lived on a farm in rural Somerset with the nearest shops three miles away. Her experience of life was limited to the West Country and she had no desire to stray too far from home.

But when she committed her life to Jesus, this all changed. She decided she would go anywhere and do anything He wanted her to do. After university her faith led her to volunteer in Nottingham in an Urban Priority Area. She wanted to live alongside the poor, a condition she insisted upon when Sean asked her to marry him!

For three years Gaby and Sean worked in a multicultural church in Cricklewood, where she made friends in the Muslim community, before the couple moved to West London.