Rag and Bone men in Kilburn

Do you remember rag and bone men, or totters as they liked to be called, coming around Kilburn with their horse and carts, shouting out the unintelligible ‘Raaa-Boon’, or 'Any Ol' Iron'? Or perhaps you remember the TV series Steptoe and Son, or does it only conjure up today’s singer Rag’n’Bone Man (Rory Charles Graham).

 

Rag and Bone man in Streatham 1985 (Tony Rees, Wikipedia)

In 1966 Brent Council, which had been formed the year before, caused a local outcry when they moved 14 rag and bone men from South Kilburn to their yard in Dyne Road near the old Willesden Town Hall. 
 
The previous Willesden Council had compulsory purchased two short roads in South Kilburn called Cambridge Mews East and Cambridge Mews West in 1934. The small mews had been built about 1870 on either side of Cambridge Road, when it provided stabling and accommodation for the carriages and coachmen of the middle-class and professional people who lived in the surrounding streets.

Cambridge Mews shown with Red dots in 1936 OS Map

But the area had changed, and the large houses had become multi-occupied and the carriages had long gone. The Medical Officer of Health constantly reported problems with unsanitary housing and eventually the Council bought up the properties in the Mews.

In 1940 the Council was asking for applications from local street traders to rent the stables in Cambridge Mews East (10 shillings per week) and the garage accommodation in Cambridge Mews West (5 shillings). 

Then in the 1960s they planned the large-scale redevelopment of South Kilburn and so wanted the rag and bone men to move from Cambridge Mews to Dyne Road. They gave them over a year’s notice and told them they would have to move in July 1966 when the bulldozers would arrive.

That month, the local people around Dyne Road formed a protest committee of over a hundred people. They held a public meeting in a local scout hall, saying ‘The noise, smell, and junk of the rag and bone men would lower the tone of the neighbourhood’. But as the Times and the Daily Mirror reported, the meeting was disrupted by the rag and bone men, or as the Mirror called them ‘The Steptoes’, themselves. Their leader Frank Butler shouted, ‘What’s our business got to do with you? The horses don’t smell, and there are no rats with horses!’

 

Old Willesden Town Hall and council yard in Dyne Road, 1954

Because of the disruption, the meeting broke up and the protest group sent a petition to the Council, but despite this the totters moved into the council yard in Dyne Road where they stayed for a few years.

 

Willesden Town Hall, looking up Dyne Road. The council yards are not shown in this view.

The old Town Hall and yards which had been built in 1891 and enlarged in 1900, were demolished in 1972.