Kensington & Chelsea: a palace next door, and a school run that must look like everyone else’s.

Kensington & Chelsea does an unusual thing: it puts one of the most protected addresses in London around an entirely ordinary family life. Kensington Palace Gardens, ringed with embassies and patrolled accordingly, sits a few minutes’ walk from the South Kensington museum quarter, where the same families who might warrant protection queue for the Natural History Museum on a wet Saturday like everyone else. The borough’s schools cluster tightly between Holland Park and Sloane Square, and its mornings run on a rigid, well-known choreography: same run, same time, same faces at the gate. That predictability suits parents and drivers trying to keep a household on schedule. It is also the first thing hostile reconnaissance looks for — and the half-term museum queues that make a childhood ordinary are exactly where an unfamiliar face is hardest to place, which works in both directions.

Our coverage here is built around that rhythm rather than against it. Protection officers and drivers who vary the school run enough to break the pattern without making the school day feel any different to the child. Discreet cover for museum and gallery outings, where blending into a Saturday crowd matters more than looking capable of anything. Evening movements along the King’s Road strip handled without drawing a second glance, and residential cover for the garden squares and mews behind it. And drivers who actually know the borough’s low-traffic neighbourhood schemes and resident-permit zones — which closures are seasonal, which cameras enforce access rather than merely record it — because a driver who has to stop and check a map here has already told a watcher something.