The Grenfell-born kitchen Meghan Markle turned into a feel-good royal success story has reportedly gone quiet, reminding us that charity projects have life cycles, even when we’d rather freeze them in a glossy cookbook.
The community kitchen that helped introduce Meghan Markle as a “different kind” of royal has, by all accounts, gone dark.
The Hubb Community Kitchen in west London, created by Grenfell Tower survivors and turbocharged by Meghan’s star power, has reportedly stopped operating, quietly, without a big farewell, a tribute post, or a final photo op.
And of course, instead of asking what that means for the community, the conversation instantly turns into: What does this say about Meghan?
The Moment
According to a recent report citing a spokesperson for the group, the Hubb Community Kitchen has “stopped” operating at its base in the Al Manaar mosque in west London, where it began in the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire in June 2017.
The kitchen started as a simple, powerful idea: women, many of them survivors or bereaved families, cooking for their neighbors after one of the worst residential fires in modern British history. It was informal, multi-cultural, and very much not born in a palace boardroom.
Meghan, then a newly minted duchess, visited the women, cooked with them, and in 2018 helped turn their recipes and stories into “Together: Our Community Cookbook”, her first solo project as a working royal. The book came with a foreword from her, glossy photos of her cooking and hugging volunteers, and the full weight of royal promotion behind it.
The cookbook quickly shot up the charts, and, according to figures shared at the time by the project’s partners, raised hundreds of thousands of pounds to refurbish the kitchen and expand its hours.
Even after Meghan and Prince Harry left full-time royal life in 2020 and moved to California, she stayed in occasional public contact, appearing on video calls with the women to mark the fire’s anniversaries, most recently in 2022.
Since then? No public updates, until now, when a Hubb spokesperson is quoted as saying simply that the “Hubb community kitchen has stopped,” declining to comment on the Duchess of Sussex personally.
The Take
There are two stories here, and only one of them is actually interesting.
The boring one is the predictable framing: Meghan’s big royal passion project is “over,” so let’s score it like a reality show. Did she stick with it long enough? Was it all just branding? Who “wins”-her fans or her critics?
The more honest story is this: grassroots projects are living things. They surge after a crisis, evolve, split, merge, go dormant, or quietly end. That’s not scandal; that’s community work.
We love the before-and-after montage-the devastated survivors, the smiling duchess in an apron, the bestselling book, the refurbished kitchen. We do not love the messy, unglamorous middle where volunteers burn out, funding dries up, people move on, and priorities shift.
And because Meghan is Meghan, any change gets folded into the never-ending culture war about her: saint, villain, or savvy brand-builder, depending on which team you’re on.
We treat royal patronages like wedding vows-“’til death do us part”-but most community projects are more like limited series than long-running soaps.
Should Meghan have been more present, more vocal, more involved after 2020? Maybe. But we also have to be honest: her initial involvement did what a celebrity is supposed to do at their best. It poured money, attention, and infrastructure into a tiny kitchen that otherwise would’ve struggled for any of that.
If the Hubb Kitchen has now run its course in its original form, the real questions are local, not royal. Did the women involved get what they needed from it: healing, skills, connection, income? Are there successor projects, formal or informal? Those answers may never come in a neat press release, because that’s not how real life works.
But we could all stand to stop pretending every famous-backed charity is a forever institution. Sometimes it’s a chapter, not the whole book.
Receipts
Confirmed
- Origins: The Hubb Community Kitchen was created by women connected to the Grenfell Tower fire of June 14, 2017, working out of the Al Manaar Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre in west London to cook for affected families, as described in contemporaneous statements from the mosque and project partners in 2017-2018.
- Meghan’s involvement: In 2018, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, made the kitchen her first solo project as a working royal, appearing in the kitchen, cooking with the women, and authoring the foreword to “Together: Our Community Cookbook”, as confirmed in royal household and publisher materials from 2018.
- Cookbook impact: The book was published with the backing of The Royal Foundation and Penguin Random House in 2018; official materials at the time noted that proceeds were directed to refurbishing the kitchen space and extending its opening hours for the community.
- Later contact: Meghan’s continued public connection to the group, including at least one video call marking an anniversary of the Grenfell fire after she moved to the United States, was shared in 2020 and later via official Sussex-related channels and partner organizations.
Reported / Not Widely Corroborated
- Closure of the kitchen: The claim that the Hubb Community Kitchen has “stopped” operating, attributed to a spokesperson for the group, has been reported by a single UK outlet in February 2026. As of now, there is no fuller public statement from the kitchen or its partner institutions explaining the reasons, the timing, or whether activities have shifted elsewhere.
- Level of Meghan’s recent involvement: It’s accurate to say there have been no widely publicized engagements with Hubb from Meghan since 2022. What cannot be confirmed from public information is the extent of any private support, contact, or behind-the-scenes involvement since then.
Backstory (For the Casual Reader)
If you weren’t following every royal headline in 2018, here’s why this kitchen mattered.
The Grenfell Tower fire was a catastrophic high-rise blaze in west London that killed 72 people and became a national trauma in the UK. Questions about housing safety, class, and government failure turned the tower into a symbol of neglect as much as tragedy.
Into that landscape walked Meghan Markle, American, biracial, divorced, and newly married to Prince Harry, trying to define what kind of royal she was going to be. Her work with the Hubb Community Kitchen landed as a refreshing contrast to the usual ribbon-cutting: real women, real food, real grief, and a very concrete result in the form of a cookbook that raised money and visibility.
For a while, it was the go-to example for anyone arguing that Meghan brought something modern and hands-on to the monarchy. Now, with reports that the kitchen itself has gone quiet, we’re left with a more complicated, grown-up truth: good projects can end, and the value they had doesn’t vanish just because the cameras do.
Your turn: Do you think it’s fair to expect royals and celebrities to stay publicly tied to grassroots projects for life, or is it enough for them to help launch something powerful, even if it eventually runs its course?
Sources
- Royal Foundation and palace communications describing Meghan’s 2018 support of the Hubb Community Kitchen and the launch of “Together: Our Community Cookbook” (2018).
- Publisher materials from Penguin Random House outlining the purpose and proceeds of “Together: Our Community Cookbook” (2018).
- Publicly shared video and statements marking anniversaries of the Grenfell fire featuring Meghan and members of the Hubb Community Kitchen, released via Sussex-affiliated and partner channels (2020-2022).
- February 2026 report citing a Hubb Community Kitchen spokesperson stating that the kitchen has “stopped” operating.
Comments