Kensal House is one of several progressive, modernist housing schemes built in Britain in the 1930s, but unlike the Lawn Road Flats and Highpoint One, these flats were not inhabited by middle classes intellectuals. Completed in 1937, Kensal House marks the point in the story of British Modernist architecture when the social/political ideals of the early modernists come to the fore. British cities in the 1930s were in desperate need of housing reform. Heavy industries still dominated and workers, and their families found themselves crammed into tiny apartments with little or no amenities.