Queen's Park E-Book

Steve Crabb

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Dismissed by planners in the 1950s as fit only for demolition and replacement with tower blocks, Queen's Park is now one of London's most vibrant and thriving communities: culturally diverse, with a vigorous campaigning spirit as well as being home to world-renowned actors, writers and musicians. This is its story From ancient Britain to the current day, defiant suffragettes to neo-Nazi arsonists, and First World War fighter aces to the Windrush generation, Queen's Park: A History is a meticulously researched book that brings the past to life. Uncover mysteries, scandals, horrors and heroes – and discover how a London community ebbed and flowed to take the shape it has today.

Leseprobe

This book is dedicated to my parents, Valerie and George Crabb, who showed me how fascinating history can be.

First published 2022

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, gl50 3qb

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Steve Crabb, 2022

The right of Steve Crabb to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 8039 9144 3

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Section 1: The Hundred Acre Wood

1 The Deep Past

2 From the Romans to the Georgians

Section 2: Defining Queen’s Park

3 The Coming of the Railways

4 Paddington Cemetery

5 The First Queen’s Park (a ‘Town for Workmen’)

6 The Royal Agricultural Show of 1879

Section 3: Creating Queen’s Park

7 The Park

8 Building Queen’s Park

9 The First Residents

10 Shopping

11 Faith

12 Education

13 Leisure

14 Work

15 Health

16 Crime and Punishment

17 Politics

Section 4: The First World War

18 Build-up to War

19 The Home Front in the First World War

20 Soldiers and Sailors of the First World War

21 The Appeals Tribunal

Section 5: 1918 to 1945

22 The Interwar Years

23 The Second World War – The Home Front in Queen’s Park

24 Servicemen and Women in the Second World War

Section 6: Post-War Queen’s Park

25 Rebuilding

26 Community Action and the Queen’s Park Area Residents’ Association

27 Post-War Politics

28 Faith in Post-War Queen’s Park

29 Post-War Education

30 Windrush and the New Commonwealth

31 The Jewish Contribution to Queen’s Park

Conclusion

Select Bibliography

Appendix : How the Streets of Queen’s Park Got their Names (Where Known)

About the Author

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The enthusiasm of local people for this project and their willingness to help has been wonderful. Space doesn’t permit me to list all the people who were part of this, but I must thank my wife, Natasha, for her editing and endless encouragement; my children Ellie and Rhydian for their help with research; Adrian Hindle-Briscall for his amazing support, particularly on the mapping side of this project; local historians Alan Hovell, Dick Weindling and Irina Porter for their insights; Mansukhlal Hirani for giving me access to Salusbury School’s archives; Lucy Parker and her colleagues at Brent Archives; Helen Durnford, Christine Maggs, Susan Rees and Anthony Molloy for the archive material they lent me, and all the local people who agreed to be interviewed for this book. Thank you all, and to everyone else who encouraged and supported me along the way. It’s a privilege to live in a community that cares so much about its past, with such a collective spirit.

INTRODUCTION

Any history of Queen’s Park needs to start with a definition of what we mean by ‘Queen’s Park’ – where it is, what it is and even when it came to be.

This isn’t as easy as you might think. After all, there’s a tube and a rail station with the name, not to mention the eponymous park. The prosaic answer is that it’s a district of London, around 4 miles from Charing Cross,1 in north-west London in the Borough of Brent.

Search for Queen’s Park on Google and you’ll learn that Queen’s Park is a family-friendly residential area with quiet streets of Victorian and Edwardian houses surrounding the park of the same name, home to a bandstand, flower gardens, and a playground with a paddling pool. Community hub Salusbury Road is lined with indie shops, gastropubs, cafes, and global eateries. The weekly Queen’s Park Farmers’ Market has organic vegetables, dairy products, and free-range meats.

Which is a pretty accurate description – even if it does leave out half the area.

In fact, the reputation of this little part of north-west London has spread to the point where the Boundary Commission was thinking about creating a new parliamentary constituency called Queen’s Park and Regent’s Park. Not only is Queen’s Park now as famous as Regent’s Park, it takes precedence!2

But try ordering anything online using an NW6 6 address and you’ll be told you either live in Kilburn or Kensal Rise. The postal system doesn’t recognise the existence of Queen’s Park as an area. The local Anglican parish is called St Anne’s Brondesbury with Holy Trinity Kilburn – not a park in sight.

This isn’t helped by the fact that the boundaries of Queen’s Park are surprisingly fluid. According to the Queen’s Park Area Residents’ Association (QPARA), Queen’s Park stretches from the mainline railway out of Euston in the south to the London Overground railway in the north, and from Chamberlayne Road in the west to Donaldson Road in the east. This makes sense as it matches the limits of the local government ward of Queen’s Park (Brent), although in fact that has now been extended all the way to the Harrow Road, far into Kensal Green.

And very confusingly, there is another, older, Queen’s Park immediately to the south, in the Borough of Westminster, with its own history and character. It’s no coincidence that the two share a common name.

So Queen’s Park fluctuates from being a community with a very clear definition in time and space, to one that swells and ebbs, to one that doesn’t appear on some maps at all.

In one sense this is because Queen’s Park is a comparatively recent concept: until the late 1950s, few people called this district Queen’s Park. Most people would have said they either lived in West Kilburn (sending their sons to Kilburn Grammar, borrowing books from Kilburn Library and reporting crimes at Kilburn Police Station, all of which are squarely in what we now call Queen’s Park), or that they lived in Kensal Rise. The destination on the front of the No. 36 bus used to be ‘West Kilburn’, not Queen’s Park as it now is – even though the bus’s route is exactly the same.

From the Middle Ages (as far back as the Norman Conquest), the area was split between three different manors. Until the 1960s, the streets east and west of the park had different councillors. And until the 1970s, Queen’s Park was split between two Church of England parishes, with the dividing line running down Kingswood Avenue.

Far from being the unifying heart of the community, the park itself has historically served as the dividing line between two thriving communities, each centred on their own vibrant high streets, Salusbury Road and Chamberlayne Road respectively, each with its own state primary school.

‘Queen’s Park’ has been used by some people, some of the time, to signify a community (as well as a park) for most of its recorded history. In the 1930s, a Pathé newsreel showing a fire on Salusbury Road refers to ‘Queen’s Park, Kilburn’. Some First World War soldiers from the area gave their address as Queen’s Park, although most said they were from Kensal, Brondesbury or West Kilburn. But these references were sporadic and fairly inconsistent. Queen’s Park as we know it today was largely the brainchild of local estate agents, keen to rebrand a district they thought had the potential to become more upmarket. It took decades, but it has been a spectacularly successful reinvention.

But in another sense the estate agents took the area back to its original roots. Because the park – Queen’s Park – came first. Before any houses were built in the area, and when Chamberlayne Road and Salusbury Road were farm tracks and the other future roads of the area just mud and grass, Queen’s Park stood alone and proud in a landscape of wheat and skylarks, surrounded by a picket fence, waiting for the people who would inevitably give it meaning.

For the purposes of this book, I will use the Queen’s Park Area Residents’ Association (QPARA) definition of Queen’s Park – the land between the railway lines to the north and south, Chamberlayne Road to the west and Willesden Lane/Donaldson Road to the east. I will, though, meander along the way through Kilburn, Kensal Rise, Brondesbury and over the railway lines into the ‘Queen’s Park estate’ (in the Borough of Westminster), as it is impossible to tell the story of one without the others.

Personally, I have come to the conclusion that Queen’s Park should include the land between the railway lines and Kilburn Lane, and the section of Salusbury Road between the Falcon pub and Queen’s Park Station. This was an intrinsic part of the area before it was sliced off by the railways. In fact, it was the only place locally where people lived from medieval times, working the farms on the north side of Kilburn Lane, or ‘Flowerhills Lane’ as it was known in the past. Queen’s Park is incomplete without it.

The area is very obviously divided into three zones: one east of Salusbury Road, one between Salusbury Road and the park, and one west of the park. It was only when I studied the ancient manorial boundaries of this area that I realised that this division isn’t a recent accident of history: it dates back over a thousand years, when the land west of Milman Road was in ‘Chambers’ manor, the land east of Salusbury in ‘Bounds’ and the bit in the middle in ‘Brands’. If Queen’s Park were a Tuscan hill town, we’d call these districts contadas and celebrate them each year with the contadas competing in horse racing or barrel-rolling competitions. I think we should go further and admit a fourth contada of ‘Flowerhills’. Finally building a footbridge over the railway to make it easier for the residents of ‘Flowerhills’ to reach the park (a project that’s been discussed for well over a century) would be another symbolic act. Queen’s Park (as in the actual park) only exists today because of the campaigns mounted by people who lived south of the railway lines. The least we could do in return is make it easier for our southern neighbours to reach it.3

In the course of writing this book, I have discovered, and grown fond of, some fascinating characters I wasn’t aware of before – Violet Doudney, the trainee teacher and dedicated Suffragette who bravely threw a metal weight wrapped in paper saying ‘Votes for Women’ through the window of the Home Secretary’s house, knowing she’d be gaoled for it; Reginald Johns, the First World War fighter pilot ace who was loved by his comrades for his infectious, absurdist sense of humour and basic decency; the 8-year-old Jewish refugee children who came on the Kindertransport and enrolled at Salusbury School. My admiration for characters I thought I knew, like Solomon Barnett, has grown and deepened the more I’ve learnt about them.

I’ve also had to reappraise others about whom I had previously made quick judgments: I had no idea that Reg Freeson, our former MP and a man I knew personally, essentially saved Queen’s Park from demolition, or that Charles Pinkham, the fearsome councillor, magistrate and MP of the Edwardian era, had such a quick sense of humour. I discovered artists, writers, musicians and actors who helped shape Queen’s Park as we know it today, any one of whom could fill a whole book. I hope you’ll enjoy getting to know these characters as much as I did.

I’ve learnt more about the racism, sexism and other forms of bigotry that were an overt and ugly part of everyday lives for many people in Queen’s Park for most of its history, and that continue today in (mostly) more hidden forms.

I’ve also seen a ‘golden thread’ of compassion for refugees and people fleeing persecution that has run through the history of this area since the very first days, when Jewish people fleeing racism and economic hardship helped build this area and made their home here. It continued with the welcome the area gave Belgian refugees in the First World War, the shelter Jewish children received when they arrived on the Kindertransports in the 1930s, the work that Salusbury World has done for refugee children from around the world since 1999 and at the time of writing, the fundraising that local children are doing for people in war-torn Ukraine.

I hope you’ll enjoy reading about how Queen’s Park came to take shape – literally and figuratively – as much as I did researching and writing it.

Steve Crabb March 2022

1 Charing Cross is the spot from which all London distances are measured. When you see a motorway sign saying ‘this many miles to London’, it really means ‘this many miles to Charing Cross’, not ‘this many miles to the edge of Greater London’.

2https://boundarycommissionforengland.independent.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Queens-Park-and-Regents-Park-BC.pdf

3 I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the three zones of Queen’s Park match the medieval boundaries. I’ll return to this later.

SECTION 1

THE HUNDRED ACRE WOOD

For most of recorded history, the land that is now the area of Queen’s Park was a 100-acre wooded hill, gently sloping down towards the River Thames, devoid of any buildings and visited only by foraging pigs and the odd wood-gathering local. Queens and great nobles passed close by, ownership of the land was contested by important families and human development expanded in every direction, but the woodland kept itself to itself, unperturbed by the history swirling around it. Chapters 1 and 2 will therefore tell the story of Queen’s Park largely through development of the villages and roads that surround it, framing the future community of this corner of north-west London.

This map, created for this book by Adrian Hindle-Briscall, shows the manor boundaries (the thicker lines), field boundaries and major roads and farm tracks as they were in 1816. The railways, Queen’s Park and Paddington Cemetery have been added for context. This is drawn from multiple maps and illustrations from the nineteenth century. Adrian Hindle-Briscall

1

THE DEEP PAST

It’s not easy to read London’s landscape today, since so much of it is covered with buildings. Underneath all the brick, slate and concrete though, there are gently undulating hills and valleys that were shaped millions of years ago.

Queen’s Park is no exception; it reveals its secrets if you look closely enough. Although much of the area may look flat, the land rises steeply south to north as it heads up to the peak of the Brondesbury Ridge at Mount Pleasant. The highest point in Queen’s Park is the corner of Chevening and Salusbury Roads, just below Brondesbury Park station, at approximately 49m above sea level. The lowest point is the corner of Brondesbury Villas and Woodville Road, nearly 20m lower. Although the north–south gradient is clear and consistent, east to west is more complicated. At the top of the park, on Chevening Road, the land declines gently between Salusbury and Peploe Roads, then rises again as it approaches Chamberlayne Road. At the bottom of the park, Harvist Road looks flat enough to have been laid out by the Romans, but there’s actually a 3.5m difference between the west and east ends of Harvist road. You can trace this in the rooflines of avenues like Montrose and Summerfield, which are stepped to accommodate the falling ground. There’s even a small hillock on the south side of Harvist opposite the old Lych Gate entrance to the park. The number of steps up to the front doors suddenly increases, and drops off again just as quickly. The small mounds in the park itself at the bottom end and east of the bandstand are modern creations though: spoil heaps left from the excavation of land drains to prevent flooding.

This undulating landscape is topped with a thin layer of loamy soil, and underneath that is the London Clay. Next time you pass deep roadworks or a basement extension in progress, take a moment to look at the blue-grey clay, deposited in the London basin 50 million years ago at the bottom of what was then a tropical sea. The teeth of giant sharks that once swam above our heads were found in the clay in Islington. If you are lucky, you might find the fossilised remains of a palm tree. On sites between Chamberlayne and Salusbury roads, you are bound to find some of the tons of broken bricks that were poured into the liquid mud in 1879. I live in hope of one day finding a long-lost pocket watch or Victorian penny, but so far the clay has held fast to its treasures.

At its deepest, the London Clay runs to a depth of 150m (492ft), providing a secure bed for tube lines like the Bakerloo, which emerges from the darkness at Queen’s Park. The clay’s capacity for expanding and shrinking according to the weather is prodigious, which is why London had few skyscrapers until new building techniques were invented relatively recently.

In this part of north-west London, the clay is 330ft deep. Below that there’s 12ft of sand and pebbles, and underneath that, chalk and flints.

The London Stock bricks that most of Queen’s Park is built with are moulded from London Clay, probably produced at the brickworks at the top of Chamberlayne Road. Fine though the houses, shops and public buildings of Queen’s Park are, we are still living in homes made of baked mud with roofs of wood and stone that would not have been entirely unfamiliar to our ancestors millennia ago.

The first humans arrived in Britain around 800,000 years ago. If they visited Queen’s Park, they left no traces that have yet been discovered. For most of the period since then, humans have been playing a cat and mouse game with the environment, occupying Britain and retreating again when the weather turned foul. Half a million years ago, in the Pleistocene ice age, gigantic glaciers over a mile from top to bottom edged south as far as the M25, diverting the Thames from its old course through Hertfordshire into its current channel and carving out the valley of the River Brent. It’s only in the last 10,000 years – a mere blink of the historical eye – that humans have permanently occupied this land. However, it’s not too fanciful to think that prehistoric humans hunted and gathered here: flint tools from the Lower Paleolithic (from 2.5 million years ago to 200,000) were found in Dollis Hill,1 while both Acton and Hampstead Heath are rich in Stone Age remains.

Around 4,000 BC, settled farming replaced the hunter-gatherer way of life. The first surviving written description of Britain, by the Greek traveller and explorer Pytheas of Messalia (around 320 BC), says the people were farmers who lived in thatched cottages and were ruled by kings who lived in peace with each other. David Miles (former Chief Archaeologist for English Heritage) describes how the Lower Thames Valley was intensively settled and farmed during this period, with defended enclosures dominating ‘each block of intensively exploited land’.2 It may be that the heavy clay soil of Queen’s Park was less attractive to prehistoric farmers than the free-draining gravel higher up the valley, but Brent Council’s 1988 archaeological survey of the area notes that ‘there are settlements of one or more periods on all the … hills in the area’,3 so perhaps there were farmers in Queen’s Park, protected by a long-vanished hill fort. The London Encyclopaedia identifies the Brondesbury Ridge just above Queen’s Park as the possible location of such a fort.4

Queen’s Park is part of the only London borough whose name dates back to pre-Roman times: Brent. The borough is named after the River Brent, a tributary of the Thames that rises in the Borough of Barnet and flows in a south-west direction before joining the Tideway stretch of the Thames at Brentford. The river’s name means either ‘high’ or ‘holy’ in the Common Brittonic tongue – the ancestor of modern Welsh, Cornish and Breton – which was once spoken throughout Britain.

1www.brent.gov.uk/media/16403320/summary-of-archaeological-excavations.pdf

2 Miles, The Tribes of Britain, p.96.

3www.brent.gov.uk/media/16403320/summary-of-archaeological-excavations.pdf

4The London Encyclopaedia, p.104.

2

FROM THE ROMANS TO THE GEORGIANS

At the dawn of the historical era, when the Greeks and Romans first began to record the history of Britain, two well-established highways passed close by Queen’s Park: the Edgware Road and the Harrow Road, as we know them today. Bronze Age remains have been found near the places where these roads crossed the River Brent: funeral urns dating back to between 1800 BC and 600 BC were discovered at the Welsh Harp reservoir, where the Edgware Road meets the Brent, and a hoard of axes was found near where the Harrow Road crosses the Brent at Stonebridge.1

Streams and rivers were of great symbolic importance in pre-Roman British culture, often being used to deposit items of great value as offerings, and this area is surrounded by running water. The Westbourne rises on the Brondesbury Ridge above Queen’s Park before running down to Kilburn, where it meets other tributaries from Hampstead, crossing the High Road by West End Lane and then flowing down to the Serpentine via Kilburn Park Road. One branch started around Willesden Lane, running down through the grounds of today’s Paddington Cemetery and feeding ponds in the Queen’s Park area before joining the main river south of Kilburn Lane. Most winters, the ghosts of these ponds reappear on the eastern side of the park, despite multiple attempts to eliminate them.

To the north and west, the River Brent follows a line now copied by the North Circular before joining the Thames at Brentford. Counter’s Creek rises in the magnificently Victorian Kensal Green Cemetery (within walking distance of Queen’s Park) and heads due south to Fulham. All of these ‘lost rivers’ have now been forced underground into culverts and storm drains for most of their course, and the only votive offerings the River Brent receives is the odd shopping trolley, but they have not been vanquished – they will carry on pushing against our attempts to contain them, until one or the other concedes.

Roman Rule

By the time the Romans arrived, regional kingdoms had developed. Julius Caesar noted that what is now outer north-west London and Hertfordshire was ruled by the ‘Cassi’ when he invaded Britain in 55 and 54 BC. They were a rich and powerful tribe whose leader Cassivellaunus led resistance to the Romans. When the Romans returned in AD 43, the tribe again provided stiff opposition under their leader Caratacus.

Among the many remarkable things that Julius Caesar noted about the locals was their use of war chariots (a weapon that was considered archaic by that time in most of the ancient world) and their love of animals: hares, geese and other fowl were sacred to them. He also described how they liked to cover themselves in woad (a blue dye extracted from plants), giving them a terrible appearance in battle. The word ‘Britain’ probably comes from the word ‘Pretani’, meaning ‘painted ones’ or ‘tattooed ones’. ‘Picts’ has the same origin.

The Romans made a lasting impression on this part of London by ‘metalling’ (meaning they paved it with small pieces of gravel overlaid with flints) the Edgware Road, which they called ‘the Second Route’. Surviving stretches of the road are between 7.5 and 8.5m wide. When you consider that the average Roman chariot was around 1.5m wide, that’s the equivalent of a four-lane highway with space for a central reservation.

According to the Roman writers Tacitus and Dio, Boudica and her army travelled up the Second Route on their way back from torching much of London in AD 60. Although their estimate of the size of her army (230,000!) is an obvious exaggeration for polemical purposes, they must have made an impressive sight for any proto-residents of Queen’s Park as they marched past with their booty-laden carts and war chariots.

Despite the charming remains of what some locals believe to be a Roman fort opposite Kilburn’s Royal Mail sorting office, there’s little evidence of permanent Roman settlement in the area. The ‘fort’, it turns out, was the imaginative creation of a local stonemason in the 1970s.2 The nearest place to Queen’s Park where any Roman remains have been found is Neasden.

The Middle Ages

Over time, recognisable villages developed in an arc around Queen’s Park. Neasden (‘Nose-Shaped Hill’) and Harlesden (probably ‘Herewulf’s Farmstead’) are both mentioned in a ship’s register around AD 1000. Willesden (‘Hill of the Spring’) appears in the Domesday Book of 1086. Kilburn (either ‘Cow Stream’ or ‘Royal Stream’ depending on your preference) isn’t recorded until 1134 and Kensal (‘King’s Wood’) not until 1253.

In a charter dated from the year 939 (now widely regarded as an eleventh-century forgery), King Athelstan supposedly granted ten manors in this area to the monks of St Erconwald’s Monastery, which later became St Paul’s Cathedral (which is how the council maisonettes called Athelstan Gardens on Willesden Lane got their name 1,000 years later). However they came about it, the monks of St Paul’s certainly owned extensive property in the area by the time of the Norman Conquest. Much of the land to the south, on the other hand, was controlled by the monks of Westminster Abbey.

In 1086, the Domesday Book records that the hamlet of Willesden was owned by the canons of St Paul’s and had a population of twenty-five villagers and five smallholders. Surrounding woodlands contained 500 pigs and the land was worked by eight plough teams. Harlesden (also owned by St Paul’s) had twenty-two villagers, 2.5 plough teams and 100 pigs in nearly woods.3 Between them and the third population centre in Willesden – Twyford – they account for around 2,800 acres of land that the Domesday surveyors could put a value on, out of a total land area of 5,000 acres. The rest, according to local historian Len Snow, will have been ‘wasteland, marsh and common-land not identified with any particular ownership’.4 This included the Great Marsh and the Little Marsh, where the Mitchel Brook still flows off Brentfield Road today.

St Mary’s Church in Willesden is the oldest church in north-west London, supposedly dating back to Athelstan’s grant of land to the monks of St Erconwald’s in 939. The first documentary reference to it is from 1181, and the oldest surviving fragments of the building (a font and part of a window) date from that period. It is built on the site of a holy well – almost certainly the spring on the hill that gives Willesden its name – and may well have been a sacred site from pre-Christian times.

An audit of the church in 1249 refers to two large sculpted images of the Virgin Mary, and by the 1500s we know that the Black Madonna of Willesden was attracting pilgrims. The wife of Henry VII, Elizabeth of York, paid a pilgrim to visit the church in 1502 and Sir Thomas More visited it.5, 6 At a distance of just 7 miles from central London, the round trip to the shrine could easily be done in a day, making it very attractive for time-strapped penitents and a handy alternative to Canterbury or Walsingham until the shrine was destroyed in the Reformation in 1538. It was, however, a dangerous journey: the local woods were known as a haunt of bandits.

Willesden Lane (also known as Mapes Lane) must have connected Watling Street with the village of Willesden since at least the 1100s, bringing developments right to the edge of Queen’s Park. Kilburn Lane (also known as Flowerhills Lane for part of its course) is also very old. It started at the junction of the Harrow Road and today’s Ladbroke Grove, and ended on Kilburn High Road near the start of West End Lane. Presumably it was part of a bigger communication system, possibly extending up to Hampstead.

Two other major changes occurred during the later medieval period: the beginnings of development in Kilburn, and the spread of the manorial system in Willesden.

At the time of Domesday (1086), there is no record of any occupation along the stretch of Watling Street now occupied by Kilburn High Road. Sometime before 1134, a hermit called Godwin set up his own religious establishment near the crossing point of the Kilburn stream (then called the Cuneburna) and the main road, near today’s Belsize Road. Godwin transferred the hermitage and adjoining fields first to the abbot and monks of Westminster Abbey, and then to a trio of Augustinian nuns, reportedly named Christina, Gunilde and Emma. The resulting priory, dedicated to St John the Baptist, survived for 402 years, until it was dissolved by Henry VIII and its lands given to the Knights of St John. According to Edward Walford’s Old and New London,7 the priory lands covered 45 acres, or half as much space again as today’s Queen’s Park (the park, not the district).

Little is known about the history of Kilburn Priory other than that the establishment was so hard-up during the time of Edward III that the nuns were granted a dispensation from paying taxes. The importance of this lies in the reason why the king showed such generosity: the priory ministered to the needs of travellers, and above all to pilgrims on their way to St Albans (and no doubt to Willesden too). We know the priory had a hostium (guesthouse), probably on the site of the current Red Lion public house. The Old Bell public house on the other side of Belsize Road (and now on the other side of the railway lines too), is supposed to be the site of another part of the priory complex, which in total consisted of a church, hall, brewhouse, bakehouse, buttery, pantry, cellar, larder-house and various accommodations. The Old Cock, further up Kilburn High Road, also claims to have held a licence since 1486. By the end of the Middle Ages, Kilburn was clearly becoming an important rest stop on the way into and out of London, if not a go-to entertainment destination in its own right.

In the rural hinterland of Willesden, the division of the land into manors accelerated in the early 1100s under Bishop Maurice of London (1085–1107), when the parish was sub-divided into eight ‘prebends’ (a prebendary being a canon of St Paul’s who was given a specific manor to manage). The key ones in this case were Brondesbury (or Brands, or Brownswood), named after a canon named Brand; Chamberlain Wood, or Chambers, named after canon Richard de Camera (Richard of the Chamber); and the manor of Willesden (also known as Bounds). This area was split between all three. Chambers included all of Queen’s Park west of Peploe Road (approximately – the boundary snakes through the gardens between Peploe and Milman), Brands everything between Salusbury and Peploe (today’s Salusbury Road was the manor boundary), and Bounds all the land east of Salusbury. The most notable prebend of Bounds manor was the Archbishop of Canterbury, Roger Walden, in 1397.

Some of these prebends were managed from substantial manor houses; Brondesbury’s stood until the twentieth century. Willesden/Bounds’ more modest manor house was demolished in 1825. Mapes also had a significant manor house, on Willesden Lane (which is why it was also called Mapes Lane). It also survived until the twentieth century. The Chambers estate was smaller and doesn’t seem to have had a manor house as such.

The freeholds to this land were owned by St Paul’s until 1840, when all the church land in Willesden was transferred to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. The one exception was a period between the end of the English Civil War and the Restoration, when the land was sold off by the victorious Roundheads. However, it wasn’t managed by the church; tenants leased and worked the land.

In the early 1400s, a substantial amount of land in the Kensal area (west and south of today’s district of Queen’s Park) was sold to Thomas Chichele, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1414 to 1443. He used this to endow All Soul’s College, Oxford, which he founded the year he died – hence Chichele Road, All Soul’s Avenue, College Road and the continuing involvement of the college in the life of the community even to this day. When Brent Council closed Kensal Rise Library in 2012, the property reverted to the college, which leased it out on condition that space for a library is provided rent-free for 999 years.

Early Modern Times

When Elizabeth of York, Henry VII’s queen and the mother of Henry VIII, sent an emissary to pray for her at the shrine of Our Lady of Willesden in 1502, he would have travelled on dirt tracks through a sparsely populated landscape dotted with the occasional small village or farmstead. By 1547 there were around 240 communicants in the parish of Willesden (ie people old enough to take communion in church, which at that time was between the ages of 14 and 16), so the total population can’t have been much above 600.

Edward Harvist

Edward Harvist, after whom Harvist Road is named, was a London brewer and grocer, who was clearly a very successful businessman. In 1601 he bought a 20-acre package of land in Islington, described as ‘two closes or parcells of meadows called London Fields’, just above today’s Emirates Stadium, and the following year he bought the manor of Thriplowe in Cambridgeshire from Queen Elizabeth for the sum of £1,162 and 10s.

On his death in 1610 he bequeathed his Islington property in trust to the Brewers’ Company, on condition that they used the income to maintain Watling Street from Tyburn (Marble Arch) to Edgware, including the 1.1 miles of the Kilburn High Road. This legacy is still managed by a charity, The Edward Harvist Trust, which gives grants to organisations in Barnet, Brent, Camden, Harrow and the City of London for the benefit of children, young people and the elderly through the promotion of health and well-being, arts, culture, science and sport, and poverty relief.

The land that would eventually become Queen’s Park would still have been at this time a mixture of pasture and woodland, the latter supporting a population of pigs and providing local people with whatever fungi, fruit or firewood they could harvest by hand (thought to be the origin of the phrase ‘by hook or by crook’).8

This was no wilderness, however. A series of beautiful maps were made for All Souls College in 1597 by Thomas Langdon on behalf of Robert Hovendon, the master of the college; they show the college’s holdings in the Queen’s Park area in incredible detail.

From these maps we can see that roads that still exist today were already there: Chambers Lane was there and named, as was Shoot-up Hill (where the Kilburn High Road starts to rise towards Cricklewood); what is now the Harrow Road was called ‘London Waye’. Kilburn Lane is also visible; south of today’s Queen’s Park, where the Queen’s Park Estate in Westminster (see Chapter 5) now stands, was a field called Flowerhills, and that that was the section of Kilburn Lane called Flowerhills Lane.

From these sixteenth-century maps we can see the name of every plot of land and the individual hedges that enclosed the fields. South of Kilburn Lane were Turnors (sic) Fields (both Great and Little), Bushefielde in Chelsey and the aforementioned Flowerhilles in Chelsey, and the wood of Bushefielde’s Grove. West of Chambers Lane were Highe Fielde, Ponde Fielde, Brooke Fielde and Long Reddinge.9 There were small woods south of Kilburn Lane and up in Kensal Rise.

Thanks to the notebooks of the Victorian antiquarian FA Woods, who wrote up ancient charters in the archives of St Paul’s Cathedral by hand, we can also identify the boundaries of the fields that covered Queen’s Park in Tudor and Stuart times, and even name them. I have been able to identify the name of a long-forgotten track that ran through the middle of the area, linking Brondesbury Manor with Kilburn Lane: it was called Long Cross Lane (see map, p.14). The lower part of the park was a field called ‘Butchers Leaze’, the northern part was ‘Great Kiln Field’.

These names were settled by the 1640s, and their names and boundaries changed very little between then and the time they were built over. The field where Woodville Road runs today was called ‘Tanners Meade’ in 1649 and ‘Kilburn Meade’ in 1840. ‘Great Kiln Field’ in 1840 was ‘Great Keelefield’ in the 1640s.

Long Cross Lane cut through the park on the eastern side. An ancient gnarled tree in the park, today surrounded by a protective metal fence, was part of the hedgerow than ran alongside the lane. When the park was first built, many more of these trees were still standing from both sides of the lane, and some of them survived until at least the 1950s. The bandstand sits in the middle of the route of the old lane – I am absolutely certain this was done as an intentional tribute to the ancient path.

We also know the names of all the tenants, from the 1100s to the point when the farmland was finally built over. The first recorded prebend of Chambers manor, from 1088, was called Robert de Lymeses. The first listed prebend of Bounds was a priest called Uctred. We don’t know the date when he took charge of the property, but we do know that in 1115 it was handed over to Hugh, son of Generus. Brands manor first appears in the history books in 1104, when a priest called Ailwardus Ruffus was made prebendary.

By 1538, the area of Brondesbury (just north of Queen’s Park) had a moated manor house, tenanted by a succession of absentee landlords and local gentlemen farmers. A family called Marsh worked the land from the early 1600s, and bought the freehold from the Cromwellian government in 1649. Although they had to hand the freehold back when the Stuarts were restored to power, they retained the leasehold until 1749.10

Bounds (or Willesden) manor was more modest in scope than Brondesbury and never had anything as fine as a moated manor house. Its nerve centre was a brick farmhouse known variously as Willesden Manor House, Kilburn Farm or Bounds Farm, down by where Kilburn Park tube station is today, between Cambridge Avenue and Oxford Road. It was leased to a wide range of tenants in the Tudor and Stuart periods, including City of London distiller John Heath (1694) and Southwark brewer Sir John Lade (1737). During the Interregnum after the Civil War, the freehold to the land was sold off, like Brondesbury, this time to a Willesden yeoman called Ezechiel Tanner.

The manor of Chambers was the smallest of them all, and never had anything remotely approaching a manor house. It did, though, have a manorial farm: what became known as Chamberlain Wood Farm, on the north side of Kilburn Lane where the Noko building and Banister Road (named after its last tenant farmer) stand today. As the land would have needed working from the earliest days of the manor in the 1100s, and this is the only logical place for a manor farm (it would have needed to be by a road so the produce of the farm could be taken out and supplies brought in, and Kilburn Lane was the only road that crossed the manor until the twentieth century), it’s reasonable to assume that today’s district of Queen’s Park has been continuously occupied for a millennium, and this is where our predecessors lived. A survey of the manor by the Church of England in the 1840s describes Chamberlain Wood Farm as ‘ancient’.

During the Stuart era, Chambers manor was in the hands of the Roberts family, who bought the freehold as well during the Cromwellian fire sale.

Although the land was well managed, it continued to be sparsely populated throughout the Tudor, Stuart and Georgian eras. By 1831, there were still only 358 houses in the entire parish, and Willesden was attracting artists keen to paint rural idylls, including George Morland, Paul Sandby and Julius Caesar Ibbetson.11

In Kilburn, there were just ten houses and five cottages along the whole of Kilburn High Road and Shoot-up Hill by 1646. When a ‘medicinal’ well was discovered in 1714 down near the site of the old priory,12 pleasure gardens were laid out, competing with fashionable spas such as Sadler’s Wells (1693) and Hampstead Wells (1698). The water was described as ‘a mild purgative, milky in appearance [with] a bitterish taste. It was said to be more strongly impregnated with carbon dioxide than any other spring in England’13 and to be ‘good against all scorbutic humours, blotches, redness and pimples in the face, for inflammation of the eyes and all impurities of the skin’.14

Joseph Wyld quotes the following ‘panegyric’ from an unnamed eighteenth-century magazine:

Where sweet sequestered scenes inspire delight,

And simple Nature joins with every art;

At Kilburn Wells their various charms unite,

And gladly all conspire to please the heart.15

However, the spa did not stimulate the development of Kilburn the way that Hampstead’s did; by 1762 there were still only ten houses on the high road, the number of cottages had increased from five to seven, and there was now a tollgate down by the Old Bell pub and a blacksmith’s, plus several other public houses.16 Very little had changed in 120 years – serious development in Kilburn only really began in the 1820s.

In the hinterland, the remaining woodland was gradually being cleared in order to grow wheat and then, from the 1700s onwards, hay.

In 1788, Brondesbury Manor was bought by Lady Sarah Salusbury, along with the manor of Bounds, uniting everything east of Peploe Road under one management. The Salusbury name is Welsh, and not a misspelling of Salisbury as is often thought. Sarah’s late husband, Sir Thomas Salusbury, had been a judge in the Admiralty high court. She had the manor house remodelled in fashionable Gothic style, commissioning designs from William Wilkins, architect of the National Gallery, while the acres of walled parkland were laid out by the famous landscape designer Humphrey Repton, who produced one of his celebrated ‘Red Books’ for the project. The new estate was named ‘Brondesbury Park’. The house stood where Manor House Drive sits today; the grand entrance was on Willesden Lane, with the aforementioned service road (Brands Causeway) linking it with Willesden Green for the use of servants and tradespeople. All that remains of the estate today is its orchard, which is in the grounds of today’s Malorees School. The manor house became a girl’s school before being demolished in the 1930s.

The land where the district of Queen’s Park is now was all pasture for cows in this era, apart from a small section of arable land down in the south-east corner. The land on the Brondesbury estate was managed by Bounds Farm, down by Kilburn High Road, and Brondesbury Lower Farm, on the north side of Kilburn Lane (also known later as Higgins’ Dairy Farm). The Lower Farm was next door to Chamberlain Wood Farm, which looked after the Chambers estate for its leaseholders, the Godfrey family from Paddington (1755–1823) and the Harpers (1823–60). The cows of the area produced much of the milk consumed by West London, according to petitioners opposed to the construction of Paddington Cemetery.

Meanwhile, the last of the common land in Willesden was being appropriated by wealthy families and parcelled up into fields and building plots, thanks to legislation that allowed landowners (often aiming to maximise rental from their estates) to lay legal claim to land that had previously been shared by a local community. The Enclosure Acts passed by Parliament (as the result of lobbying by landowners) between 1760 and 1870 transformed 7 million acres (about one sixth the area of England) of common land to enclosed, privately owned land. Millions of people had their customary access to lands – where their livestock could graze or they could collect firewood, or cut turf, for example – stripped from them, depriving them of their livelihoods and driving many to the developing cities to find work. Landscapes that had lain unchanged for centuries were altered almost beyond recognition.

Around 800 acres in total were privatised in this way across the manors of Brondesbury, Mapesbury, Chamberlayne and Willesden, which surround modern-day Queen’s Park.

In the 1800s, the population of Willesden finally began to grow, doubling between 1801 and 1821 from 750 to over 1,400. This was just the start of things to come.

1www.brent.gov.uk/media/16403320/summary-of-archaeological-excavations.pdf

2https://twitter.com/lifeinkilburn/status/1161339959934107649

3https://opendomesday.org/book/middlesex/03

4 Snow, Willesden Past.

5www.thetablet.co.uk/blogs/1/1440/canterbury-walsingham-and-willesden-4

6https://andrewpink.org/2017/04/17/willesden

7 Walford, Old and New London: Vol. 5, p.243.

8 Snow, Willesden Past, p.12.

9http://library.asc.ox.ac.uk/hovenden/hovenden.php

10www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/middx/vol7/pp208-216

11www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/middx/vol7/pp182-204#anchorn14

12www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/middx/vol9/pp47-51

13The London Encyclopaedia, pp. 431–432.

14 Snow, Willesden Past, p.10.

15 Wyld, The London and Birmingham Railway Guide, p.9.

16www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/middx/vol9/pp47-51

SECTION 2

DEFINING QUEEN’S PARK

The boundaries of today’s Queen’s Park were established in a forty-year period between the 1830s and the 1870s. To the north and south, the area is defined by railway lines; in the east and west, roads do the work. But the boundary roads of Queen’s Park only join up convenient crossing points on the railways. The railways came first; they are the reason there is a park in Queen’s Park, and they still define the area today, for good and for ill: they are a magnet for new residents looking for a home with great transport links, but also the source of the traffic bottlenecks that blight the area.

3

THE COMING OF THE RAILWAYS

At the start of the 1830s, the final decade of the Georgian era, the fields of today’s Queen’s Park were surrounded by country lanes, the land used for pasture for animals. Although the sprawl of London was beginning to spread and engulf surrounding villages, this part of Middlesex was still deeply rural.

But change was coming.

The London and Birmingham Railway Company was established in 1830 – following the success of George Stephenson’s Liverpool and Manchester line – to build a railway linking the capital and England’s second city. Stephenson senior passed on the opportunity to build the line, but recommended his son Robert to do the job.