Kensington Square Therapy

Kensington Square Therapy is a counselling practice at 23 Kensington Square in West London, and the editorial home of The Parent Book. The practice was founded in 2025 by Sam McManus, a UK counsellor working with children, adolescents and the parents around them since 2010.

The clinical foundation

The practice's professional positioning is straightforward and traceable. Sam McManus is a Registered Member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (MBACP) and an Accredited Member of the National Counselling and Psychotherapy Society (NCPS Acc.), holding a BA in Counselling and an MA in Humanistic Counselling Practice, both from the University of Nottingham. He has been in continuous practice since 2010. The clinical territory the practice knows best is the one this publication is written into: the independent school sector in West London, families navigating high-expectation environments, accelerated developmental pressures, and the gap that can open between a child's outward functioning and her inner experience.

The approach is humanistic and integrative. The position the practice works from is that children are not problems to be fixed but individuals whose inner worlds deserve careful, respectful understanding, and that parents are the people best placed to support that work when they have the right company around them.

The Parent Book

The Parent Book is published from Kensington Square Therapy and is the practice's editorial arm. It was founded in 2026 on a single editorial position: the importance of helping parents to support their children. The publication is a counsellor-written subscription for thinking parents, written by qualified counsellors at the practice, registered with the BACP and the NCPS, and anchored to NHS guidance, the Anna Freud Centre, and the BACP and NCPS ethical frameworks. It takes the long, careful view and points generously to the wider network of services and clinicians an honest single practice sits alongside.

The library is six half-termly editions a year. Each edition collects a small number of chapters on the questions that tend to come up in parents' lives at that point in the calendar. The chapters are not how-to guides and are not lists of five things to try tonight. They are written more like letters: long enough to make a thing land, short enough to read in a sitting, with the practical handles where the practical handles belong and the long view threaded through.

The Parent Book exists because we believe two things at once. First, that there is no single book that can tell you how to parent your child; the work is too particular for that. And second, that parents deserve access to careful, considered, therapeutically-informed writing: a shared library of the conversations we have in the counselling room, organised around the questions we are most often asked. Our job is not to be the authority. It is to think alongside the parent who is the authority.

The institution, in plain detail

Kensington Square Therapy Ltd is a private limited company registered in England and Wales, Company No. 16707111, trading from 23 Kensington Square in West London. The practice is registered with the Information Commissioner's Office under registration number ZC022097 and complies with UK GDPR. Sam McManus is the sole director and clinical lead.

The character of the practice

The practice is small, considered, and clinically careful. It takes the parent's reality seriously, anchors itself to professional best practice rather than political debate, and writes from the position that the slow, daily work of being a careful adult in the company of younger people is the work that matters most. The Parent Book is edited from that position.

Clinical lead: Sam McManus, MBACP, Accredited Member NCPS, MA Humanistic Counselling Practice.