History of Kilburn and West Hampstead

Background In the Victorian era diseases like smallpox, TB, syphilis, and ‘King’ cholera meant that infant mortality was very high, and children were lucky to reach their fifth birthday. The average life expectancy for a middle-class man was 45, but for working-class men this halved.   The Silent Highwayman (Punch July 1858) The ‘Great Stink’ in the summer of 1858 when the Thames was contaminated with untreated sewage forced Parliament to cover the windows with curtains soaked in lime. The government finally decided to fund Joseph Bazalgette’s scheme to build a system of sewers. The initial cost was £2.5M, but the final cost was £4.2M (today worth about £400M).    Work began in the early 1860s in Kilburn as he worked his way across London putting some of the rivers and streams, such as the Kylebourne, in underground culverts.    The huge construction, which was not completed until 1875, carried the sewage to treatment centres and out to the Thames at Beckton in east London. Although th

To look back in time we searched the British Newspaper Archive to see what the papers said happened in Kilburn in 1920. Some of the stories are tragic, others are comic and we present them in chronological order across the year. The attack by the Kilburn Lads While on patrol in the Kilburn High Road at 10.30pm on New Year’s Day, PC Burrows came across two men and two women who were quarrelling. When he asked them to stop, John Henley a 23-year old carman, hit the policeman in the face and called upon the ‘Kilburn Lads’ ‘to do him in.’ A large crowd of about 300 people had gathered and about 40 men attacked Burrows as he lay on the ground. Fortunately, PC Wright came to the rescue and saved his colleague from being kicked to death. He picked him up by his belt and at the same time managed to grab hold of Henley’s hair. The mob then turned on PC Wright and Henley escaped. Henley was known as a member of a local ‘gang of roughs’ and was arrested at his home in Granville Road Kilburn. In c