Windsor is a very special place for Their Royal Highnesses and they are grateful that their official residence will be on the estate
Kensington Palace confirmed today that The Duke & The Duchess of Sussex will move out of Kensington Palace next year. They’ve been gift with Frogmore Cottage from The Queen and the residence is currently undertaking some refurbishments to turn it back into a family house for them and their baby.
Frogmore Cottage (formerly Double Garden Cottage) is a Georgian mansion half mile from Windsor Castle. It’s been home to many, incl. Queen Victoria’s Indian attendant Abdul Karim until 1901, King George V’s cousin Grand Duchess Xenia of Russia until 1936 and Queen Mary from 1937.
It is a grade 2 listed building so renovations won’t be crazy.
It’s been used by staff most recently in Royal history, and now it’ll become Harry and Meghan’s family home.
Harry and Meghan checking in on each other while greeting the crowds during their first joint appearance together today in Nottingham |- December 1, 2017
Prince Harry & Meghan Markle walk through the Sunken Gardens back to Kensington Palace on the day their engagement was officially announced. | 27 November 2017 (x)
Kat Lister spends a morning with the remarkable women behind the Hubb Community Kitchen as they’re joined by Meghan Markle
It’s 10.30am in the morning, and the kitchen at the Al-Manaar Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre is already buzzing. As the garlic and tumeric wafts from the pots and pans, a petite woman, pregnancy bump discreetly showing, grabs an apron and starts chopping courgettes. Another tosses peppers and carrots in olive oil next to her – behind them, a cacophony of laughing, chatting, pouring and glugging accompanies the soulful sound of Aretha Franklin on the stereo. “That sort of size?” Meghan Markle diligently checks with her cooking partner, as she dices in this tightly packed room – as much a home away from home for the newly anointed duchess as it is for the the 20 women of the Hubb Community Kitchen.
There, inconceivable catastrophe and collective grief has metamorphosed into hope. “When you break bread, you make friends,” Markle shares with her fellow chefs, as they catch up over tea and biscuits – watched on awkwardly by a couple of reporters (myself included) and a few photographers. After being displaced following the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, dozens of women who had nowhere to cook sought refuge at Al-Manaar – a local mosque that became an emergency support centre in the aftermath of a blaze that, burning for 60 hours, caused 72 deaths. Sharing a kitchen two days a week to prepare meals for their families, word spread, numbers multiplied – and, by January 2018, a duchess-in-waiting, settling into her new home, made a quiet trip to the West London mosque to see the multicultural canteen for herself.
Nearly a year later, Markle very much seems a part of the Hubb family (the Arabic word “Hubb” meaning “love”), as I watch her roll both sleeves, tossing Mediterranean vegetables in a bowl with oil and herbs. This isn’t the first time the Duchess of Sussex has returned, since her first surreptitious visit in 2018 – in fact, she’s a vital reason the kitchen was refurbished in September this year, coinciding with the release of a community cookbook, entitled Together. When asked, “Why isn’t this kitchen open every day?” the Hubb women simply replied: “Funding.” Markle’s suggestion was, with her help, to publish a collection of recipes. Through this endeavour, the duchess and the women of Hubb Community Kitchen hope to raise £250,000 to fund the renovation and further outreach. “She meant it,” Hubb member Munira tells me, as we discuss the book’s inception after Markle’s departure, “and she kept her word.”
Munira was on the fifth floor, when the uncontrollable flames consumed her home in north Kensington last year. “I managed to get out with the kids,” she tells me. It would take her husband and his father 20 further minutes to follow them out. “My father-in-law is disabled, so it took him longer to get down from the fifth floor,” she says. “There was no help. I don’t know how my husband did it.” After her family was relocated to a hotel, there was nowhere to cook – which is what first brought her to Al-Manaar. Hubb is about more than simply cooking, she tells me, it’s about the community coming together; an ethos Munira is now putting into practice with a launching project she calls “Yummy Mummies”, providing healthy, organic meals for working and low-income parents. The aim is to cook three meals a day, which is a lot, I remark. “It’s not!” she smiles. “Especially if it’s benefiting someone else.”
Munira tells me that she hopes to extend this service to local mothers on maternity wards – “When I had my son, I had no one to bring me a fresh meal in the hospital,” she says. “My husband had to bring me fried chicken and chips after I’d just had a baby.” Her Chicken Cottage supper was a far cry from the nutritious meals she’d seen served in her homeland of Uganda. “After you have your baby, straight away you have porridge and soup – something nice and warm and healthy.” I’m awed by Munira’s benevolence, when she links her cultural heritage back to this kitchen, to countless women she’s yet to meet. “That’s why I want to do this here,” Munira says. And she <is> doing it: a senior communications officer at Kensington Palace informs me that “Yummy Mummies” will start trialling next week.
Ask Leila how many recipes she’s contributed to Hubb’s community cookbook and she’ll answer triumphantly: “Six!” Hummus, tzatziki, vegetarian Lebanese lasagne and even spiced mint tea, “really sweet with honey,” she lists, with a wide grin. Leila loves cooking – and she feels equally passionately about empowering women. Leila knows many people who lived in Grenfell tower, so, when she was invited by a friend, she quickly became a weekly regular. “I want it to be a safe little place where women are welcome to come and share a meal, and their experiences, if they want to,” she tells me. With this is mind, Leila – like fellow Hubb member Munira – has helped set up an outreach project called Thrive, which aims to offer care and support to women fleeing domestic violence. “If you need a hot meal, some new clothes, or just a friendly person to talk to, then join us at the Hubb Community Kitchen,” the colourful flyer reads.
“I know I’m not going to stop domestic violence,” Leila says, “but I can bring women in from the local community so they can have some food and relax and share if they want to.” As austerity measures continue to cut unforgivably into women’s services, I venture that women have fewer and fewer places to go right now, fewer places to be heard, making Leila’s project incredibly vital. “Places are overcrowded, staff are overwhelmed,” she replies. “There’s not that support anywhere – so, if they can come here for a few hours and take some food away with them…”
Leila tells me that, over the last year, she’s learned about cultures she previously knew nothing about. “It’s amazing when you get to talk to someone and learn about their country,” she enthuses. “You learn from each other.” Minutes before our conversation, I’m learning from Ahlam, an Iraqi woman with a master’s degree in chemistry who now considers the kitchen her laboratory. “What goes with Iraqi green rice?” I ask, as she chops and smiles. My reply comes swift and fast – cucumber, dill and yoghurt sauce, of course.
Though these are tentative steps, the Hubb Community Kitchen’s ambitions are limitless. And out of the darkness, on this crisp November morning, there is lightness and laughter and hope. “It can’t take away what has happened but it’s helped us to move forward,” Munira says, as she revists the day she lost everything. From Algeria to Morocco, India, Italy and Iran – this tiny kitchen, on an unassuming street in West London, is defying a harmful post-Brexit narrative that tells us we are wholly divided by our differences.
Just before Meghan leaves the Al-Manaar kitchen, she tells her fellow chefs that it all starts from one idea – and from this one idea, many more can flourish. For women like Munira, her words signify change and renewal. “I tell myself every single day that I will try and reach everyone in the community,” she says, “one day at a time.”
The Duchess of Sussex visits the Hubb Community Kitchen to see how funds raised by the ‘Together: Our Community’ Cookbook are making a difference at Al Manaar, North Kensington. || November 21, 2018
The Duchess of Sussex embraces kitchen co-ordinator Zaheera Sufyaan as she visits the Hubb Community Kitchen to see how funds raised by the ‘Together: Our Community Cookbook’ are making a difference at Al Manaar, North Kensington || November 21st, 2018
I’m proud of what Meghan help the Hubb ladies accomplish a bestselling cook book, a newly renovated kitchen that can be open 7 days a week. It’s awesome how close she is with those ladies that she has made some unannounced trips there since the cookbook launch event. I can’t wait to hear about her taking baby Sussex there in the future because I doubt she will take a her baby there with a whole bunch of media around maybe when he or she is older and can help out too.
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