History of Kilburn and West Hampstead

There were many tributes to this well-known actor who died yesterday, aged 95.  He spent some of his childhood in West Hampstead which he wrote about in his autobiography ‘I must be in there somewhere’ (1989) Hodder & Stoughton. Born Sidney Edmond Jocelyn Ackland in 1928, Joss Ackland was three years old when his family moved from North Kensington into the basement flat at No.86 Hillfield Road. He wrote: ‘I was a young boy in West Hampstead where I could travel from my house to the foreign lands of Mill Lane - to the outer space of my primary school (Beckford) with the exciting knowledge that the great planet of West End Lane was in the distance, and my spaceship was eventually able to take me by bus to the fantastic world of the cinema, near Golders Green’.  Then there was the massive State Cinema on Kilburn High Road, where the film was preceded by an hour’s variety show of ‘ventriloquists, high wire acts, musical saws, conjurors and always lines of beautiful high-kicking girls’

Many of our blog stories have recalled the hardship and pain caused by the tough living conditions among Victorian working people in Kilburn and Willesden, where illness, poverty and poor housing were the norm for many streets. For some people, the festive season over Christmas made little difference to their lives and may even have made matters worse. James and Ellen Doggrell In December 1893 (George) James and Ellen (Eleanor) Doggrell were at 10 Steele Road off Acton Lane, close to the Grand Union Canal. They had no children and rented a single room on the ground floor of the small terrace house which has since been demolished. James was born in 1858 in Bath, Somerset. His father George was an agricultural labourer and he had moved his family to Acton by 1881, to a district generally referred to as ‘Lower Place’. It’s hard to imagine Willesden or Acton and Harlesden as rural neighborhoods, with country lanes and fields divided by hedges or ditches. But that was the case in the 1880s