New mayor Trisha Leman with Sarah Green from Women at the Well

AS a “lifelong feminist”, Camden’s new mayor knew she wanted to use her year in the robe and chains to support a charity that works with marginalised women.

Tricia Leman grew up in South Wales, moved to London for university and has lived and raised her family here in Camden for more than 35 years.

She said: “My mother took myself and my sister out of an abusive household when I was a baby, and therefore we grew up in a single-parent family, so we experienced what were in those days the average discriminations.

“My mother, for example, wanting to find us a secure home, couldn’t get a bank loan because you needed a male guarantor to sign off the application. So we grew up with a pretty good understanding of the challenges facing women when we were young. My feminism comes, I think, from that family life experience.”

Throughout her career as an educator, her involvement with the trade union movement and, since 2024, as a councillor, Ms Leman has made women’s rights a central feature of her work.

She served on the TUC’s National Women’s Committee and as Camden’s violence against women and girls (VAWG) champion.

It was while on Camden’s VAWG board – a panel of councillors, charity heads and the police – that Cllr Leman got to know Sarah Green, who runs Women at the Well, a charity in King’s Cross that supports women affected by sexual exploitation.

“Women at the Well is working with women on the margins who are so often overlooked,” Cllr Leman told the New Journal of the organisation she has chosen to champion during her time as mayor.

The charity was set up by a sisterhood of nuns 20 years ago, at a time when King’s Cross was one of London’s most infamous red light districts.

It is now the only remaining women’s day centre in central London, and continues to give women both daily support – food, washing facilities, a safe space – and longer-term advocacy with health, housing and other issues.

Chief executive Ms Green said: “We don’t have a model of, ‘you need to be fixed’ or ‘we need to have changed you in six months’. We’re not prescriptive, we don’t judge, and we understand that some women might drop off and then need to come back. The support we give is holistic, while some other services may be more focused on a single issue. But it’s very difficult to sort your housing out, for example, if you can’t get back into the health service for a chronic problem.”

Thousands of women come through the door every year, but the charity’s impact is about more than numbers, said Cllr Leman.

“It’s also the things that don’t happen – literally the women who don’t die, the women who don’t fall back into terrible situations of exploitation. That may take months and years, and sometimes it doesn’t ever happen, but Women at the Well understands that complexity.”

Being the mayor’s charity will mean vital fundraising and awareness raising opportunities for Women at the Well in its 20th anniversary year.

Ms Green added: “It’s ensuring that we’ve got really good relationships in this area so that for the long term, our neighbours will help us keep the doors open. Because the need for what we do isn’t diminishing.”

As well as her commitment to supporting vulnerable women, Camden’s new mayor is a music fan and cinephile, whose interest in film – like her feminism – dates back to childhood.

“I have to admit, my love of cinema comes from playing truant from school,” she said.

“There was a little cinema that showed foreign films, so I found myself sitting there in the dark, on my own, trying to hide my school uniform, and watching Italian and French new wave, Russian films, great classics. It was an education.”

But, she added: “I’m not recommending truancy to anybody, because it’s critically important that young people complete their education.”

She credits her headteacher for keeping an eye on her, phoning the teenage Ms Leman in the mornings to say she was still expected at school, no matter how late it was.

“She understood that we were a single-parent family, and life was not simple,” the mayor said.

“It was quite remarkable. She is one of the reasons, I think, that I went into education and stayed in it. Of course, we were endlessly mean about her but I look back and I think, my gosh, she was a really powerful female role model.”