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No, you were correct in your first understanding. It is a relatively small section of London, but in say, Notting Hill, you have large estates mostly divvied up semi ethnically e.g. Somali, Carribbean, Moroccan, cheek by jowl with £15m townhouses.
The road David Beckham lives on for example, is less than a 10 minute walk to multiple estates, and less than 20 minutes walk to Grenfell tower itself. This is (as far as I'm aware) a uniquely (West?) London thing, where the houses by Ladbroke Grove station will be £10-20m and yet 1 road next door will be a very poor housing estate. I used to think it was great, as an example of semi-integration (Ghettoisation leading to say bad shops, bad services). Nowadays, I'm ambivalent, but I appreciate its uniqueness.
There are relatively few places in London with $10-20m houses as standard (and as you say those are often concentrated in West and North London - Holland Park, Notting Hill/Westbourne Grove, Little Venice where the best villas border the Paddington Green estates, all the way up to St John’s Wood especially on the northwest side as you get up to Swiss Cottage, then also Belsize Park and Hampstead), but on a lesser scale it happens with $2-5m properties in Islington in the north, around King’s Cross, in Hackney and Shoreditch, and in parts of the south like parts of Wandsworth and Dulwich to some extent. There are relatively few prime and semi-prime parts of London that aren’t close to relatively bad estates. Possibly the Chelsea-South Ken-Belgravia-Mayfair continuum, although even there there are exceptions.
Interestingly, in 2011 the more spread out West London estates contributed much less to rioting than the outlying, arguably more Parisian ones in the south in Brixton/Lewisham and to the north in Tottenham.
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