‘I get to represent all 168,000 people in Kingston’: Up Close with the Mayor of Kingston for 2025/26
Councillor Noel Hadjimichael, who was elected as Kingston's mayor for 2025/26 in April, has lived in Kingston for over nine and a half years, having moved to the UK from Sydney, Australia after his wife secured a job in the city.
In an exclusive interview with Kingston Nub News, Cllr Hadjimichael said: My wife, Mayoress Carol, and I emigrated to the UK in March 2016, just a couple of months before that Brexit thing and everything started getting really exciting in the papers."
Speaking to me in the Mayoral Parlour, dressed in a suit and his mayoral regalia despite the heatwave of Tuesday (1 July), the mayor is calm and collected, with a tinge of humour and an ability to speak in a clear and matter-of-fact tone that is ideal for a town mayor.
He explained that the Mayoress had been headhunted for a job in the city as a lawyer and so he left his job as the CEO of a national charity "to become effectively the handbag".
He said: "And that was the first time in about 45 years that I'd actually not been really busy. However, it was lovely to support her and make the change.
"But we did leave all our adult children back in Australia, and now they come and visit us, act like good tourists and spend money in Britain, and then we take them on the SL7 to Heathrow, and we send them back. So that's how it works."
Speaking about why he chose to live in Kingston despite his wife getting a job in the city, he said: "Well, you have to blame me. My wife wanted to live in London because she didn't want to commute from the home counties.
"She has a busy job in the city, often starting at nine-ish, but often going until eight-ish in the evening, and she has more than 50 lawyers under her located in places like Belfast and Manchester and London.
"So, she has a very busy life, and I wanted somewhere that was about half an hour from the city, from Waterloo Station, from getting into central London."
He continued: "I also had been following British politics all my life. My parents were British overseas citizens, so I grew up a very British-Australian person, and I'd noticed that Kingston, this little corner of southwest London, stood out.
"It had a really good reputation, it had history, it had a very well-regarded NHS trust. I did my research and even though we didn't have kids, I knew it was an area with excellent schools.
"And it was also an area that, because of some of the work I'd done, I knew that a lot of people who had an eye on safety and security, such as police officers, said Kingston's a good corner of London to live in.
"So, we came here, we went down to the local real estate and said, these are the five streets we want to live in Kingston. That was on day three. By week three, we were in our flat on steadfast Road, and it's been Kingston ever since."
Cllr Hadjimichael, who took over Cllr Liz Green as Kingston's Mayor, has been a councillor within the borough for just over three years, having been elected to the council in 2022.
He was elected for Canbury Gardens, as he lived in the area, "just north of the railway", after he and his colleague, Cllr James Mantel, had put themselves forward for 16 "very, very busy" weeks going out three times a day, putting leaflets in letterboxes as we "do in Britain", according to Cllr Hadjimichael, and also doing a lot of old-fashioned knocking on doors.
Both men were then elected to the council.
The Mayor added: "As James is from New Zealand, we were an interesting sort of couple, and it was an interesting experience."
Cllr Hadjimichael joined the Navy when he was 16 and later worked for the government in Australia.
Speaking about why he agreed to join the council, he said: "So sometimes I had jobs in which I couldn't be involved in politics. But when I had jobs in which I could, like a local country town solicitor or a university lecturer, or working for a business chamber of commerce organisation, I could be in politics.
"I was just an ordinary member. I was active and I followed politics; it's a bit like some people follow football. I'm going to tell you a terrible admission; at the age of 12, I chose my football team. It's not a London team. I have to admit that. It's Portsmouth. And for 50 years, the boys have played, let's say, somewhat inconsistently. They've had some very good years, and they've had some very, very lean years."
Cllr Hadjimichael continued: "So, it's the same in politics. I followed politics. I was always someone who was impressed by people who gave back to the community. I've always been a volunteer.
"Whenever that's been available, I've always also supported the idea of people having a job, having a family, but doing something else to help other people. And I had a cup of coffee with the leader of the council, Cllr Kirsch - never go to Cllr Kirsch's backyard, you have a cup of coffee, and you come home telling your wife, 'Guess what? I'm going to be a candidate for the council'.
"That was an event for a cup of coffee. And I just felt that we'd been adopted by Kingston. We'd made friends. We really loved living in the community here. I was at that stage also volunteering at Kew Palace for historical palaces. So, I felt very close to southwest London as I still do.
"And so, it seemed natural to put myself forward. It also helps that there was nobody else that really put their hand up, so I felt a sense of responsibility."
Cllr Hadjimichael added that despite many of Kingston's councillors being of different political parties, they are all friendly with each other.
He said: "It is very much a Kingston thing. People respect each other, and that reinforced why I like living in Kingston, because there's a lot of glue that holds us together even though we may have differences of opinion."
Speaking about being elected as mayor, Cllr Hadjimichael said: "They [Kingston Council] voted me in as the candidate for mayor. It's traditional and conventional that the mayor, the person who's chosen as mayor, often is elected unanimously, unopposed, because you're not representing one team or one tribe or one rosette.
"You're there to serve the council, you're there to serve your colleagues presiding over the meetings. Mayors also, luckily, get to choose their deputy mayors, and I've said this publicly and officers will smile because they've heard it thousands of times, but I had only had one person in mind and that was Cllr Sue Ansari.
"I wanted somebody who I respected, I wanted somebody who was from a different part of the borough geographically, but I also wanted somebody who understood why I was doing it.
"I feel that as it's my fourth year on the council and having served in responsible roles for the first three years as a portfolio holder and then as the head of a committee, serving as mayor is an enormous privilege."
He added that being elected as mayor is "very humbling" because he gets to engage with thousands of people, including volunteers "who assist, who care for people, and who are the beating heart of the raw borough of Kingston".
Speaking about why he was excited to take on the role of Kingston's Mayor, Cllr Hadjimichael said: "Well, I think it's very much the case that having come to Kingston, having chosen Kingston, I want to give back.
"It's no different to when I was 16 and joined the Navy as an officer cadet. I didn't join to sit on a patrol boat fishing off the Barrier Reef. You join because you want to give back.
"It was a responsible job then, all the jobs I've held have been of some responsibility, but I think it's an absolute privilege. I live in Kingston, and I love Kingston. The Mayoress and I are very proud of Kingston. We never tell people we live in London. We always say we live in Kingston Upon Thames."
He continued: "And in some ways, the job makes you realise that you are playing a role to help the ecosystem of Kingston be as healthy as cohesive and as positive as it can be.
"And you could never say no to being asked to be mayor, but you need to be able to give the time and to approach it in the right way. The most important person in any room, at any event, is not you."
For example, the Mayor explained that when he attended the Korean War Veterans event in Fairfield earlier this year, he stood behind the 15 veterans, aged 90 – 95, in the event photo because it was the "right thing to do".
He said: "It doesn't matter if you go to All Saints for a music performance, or you go to the local mosque, the local synagogue for a women's event, you go to a school assembly, the mayor, whilst being very important in terms of the historic role, you're there serving the community. It's the young men and women, it's these old veterans, it's the volunteers, they are the reason why you're there.
"And I think that's what I've had confirmed to me in the last seven weeks with the mayoral team as we have engaged in more than 70 events. We've probably been surrounded by more than 45,000 people. We've probably spoken to around 600 people, but it's not about us. It's about Kingston, it's about community."
Cllr Hadjimichael says that his time as mayor so far has been "busy", but he has a great team behind him that helps juggle his calendar.
He has been hosting coffee mornings to bring together people of all ages from the borough who might be feeling isolated. He aims to host 40 coffee mornings in 40 weeks, which he says, "people thought was me trying to be terribly ambitious". However, in the seven weeks he has been mayor, he has hosted eight.
During one of these events at St Luke's Hall, Cllr Hadimichael was pictured doing the washing up; a job he had previously done many times as a councillor.
He said: "It was just nice to feel that having become mayor, I hadn't changed. I was still councillor, I was still the Australian from around the corner, and that was really pleasing."
Speaking about attending events outside of the borough, he said: "I get to represent all 168,000 people in Kingston. That is very humbling."
"And you never introduce yourself as who you are. You introduce yourself as 'hi, I'm Kingston' to the other mayors because they introduce themselves as 'hi, I'm Barnet' or 'I'm City of London' because we're doing a job, we're doing a job for our communities."
Cllr Hadimichael said that his goals for his term as mayor are centred around a theme of "resilience".
He said: "It's all about personal resilience as we individually through our families, our work, our communities, our neighbourhoods, deal with the ups and downs of life, the stresses and pressures, and also community resilience as we form part of, London, part of Britain."
However, he says he will not be doing any crazy stunts for media attention.
As part of his role as mayor, Cllr Hadjimichael has chosen two charities to support.
These are Learn English at Home (LEAH) and the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, which are both women-led and women-focused.
The Mayor says he chose these charities because: "I think both of these charities impressed me by the fact that they were led by women and gave women the dignity of being on the front line to improve our society.
"They have that personal resilience and that community resilience, and I couldn't think of a better combination for this year.
"So, I'd love for Kingston to be seen as a good role model, and maybe down the track, others will go, 'we need to tackle this resilience challenge ourselves'. So, I'm very proud that Kingston may be able to help others."
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