Bruce Kenrick

Bruce Kenrick was born in 1920 and trained for the ministry after wartime service, working in the Church of Scotland and later the United Reformed Church. In the 1950s he spent time with the East Harlem Protestant Parish in New York, an experiment in living among the poor rather than preaching at them, and wrote about it in Come Out the Wilderness, a book that made his name.

Back in Britain he settled in Notting Hill in 1962, at that time a district of crumbling terraces where landlords packed families into single rooms and used threats to get rid of tenants who complained. He went from house to house and found children sleeping in damp basements and sharing a lavatory with a dozen families. Nobody, he concluded, was going to build the homes these people needed, so he would have to.

In 1963 he founded the Notting Hill Housing Trust, raising money to buy houses, convert them properly and let them at fair rents. The trust grew into one of the largest housing associations in the country. But he had seen enough to know that Notting Hill was not unusual, and in December 1966, days after the television play Cathy Come Home had horrified the nation, he launched Shelter with Des Wilson as its first director. Its posters and its blunt statistics changed how the public thought about homelessness.

Kenrick later withdrew from public life, and few of the people helped by the organisations he started would recognise his name. He died in 2007.