History of Kilburn and West Hampstead

This story begins in West Hampstead in the 1920s and leads to a study of two famous criminals. West Hampstead burglaries In August 1926, West Hampstead Police Station which was then at 90 West End Lane near the Railway Hotel, received a tip-off about an intended local house burglary. Photo of West Hampstead Police Station Detectives Parlett, Heath and Smith went to Fairfax Road and took up observation. After half an hour they saw a powerful Swift motorcar, license plate LM 7311, arrive with three men and a woman with short bobbed hair. She got out and went into No.4 Fairfax Road which was currently unoccupied. Shortly afterwards she returned to the car and it drove away. The police waited and about 20 minutes later the car returned and parked nearby. Two of the men went into the house while one man pretended to be cleaning the car, and the woman kept watch in the street nearby. After a while, the men returned carrying a suitcase and they started up the car.  Just as it was moving a...

In our first book ‘Kilburn and West Hampstead Past’ (Historical Publications 1999), we showed an engraving from Edward Walford’s 1878 ‘Old and New London’ Vol. 5, which was entitled, ‘Hampstead from the Kilburn Road’. At the time we believed the artist’s viewpoint was looking from the Kilburn High Road down West End Lane over the small bridge across the Kilbourn Stream at that point, with St John’s Church in Hampstead on the hill. In September 2020 we found a painting on the Art UK website, entitled ‘Hampstead from the Kilburn Road’ by AW Sharp, 1824. This must have been used to produce the engraving in Walford, but the engraver has made a few changes including the bridge. The painting is in the Camden Local Studies and Archive Centre so we asked archivist Tudor Allen if he would kindly look on the back of the painting for any provenance and check the records. Unfortunately, there was nothing on the back. The only reference Tudor and his staff found was that the Hampstead Library Commi...