History of Kilburn and West Hampstead

This is a strange story from 1909. On the afternoon of 9 September, seventeen year old Percy Day who worked locally as a clerk for the Midland Railway, was walking with three friends along the Edgware Road in Cricklewood. They were chatting about football and had just reached the junction with Oxgate Lane (near today’s Wing Yip Chinese superstore) when a cyclist passed them.  A cyclist from the 1900s (Getty Images) He got off his bike, reached into his jacket pocket pulled out a revolver and without warning, fired at the men hitting Percy in the arm. The assailant got back on his bike and cycled off rapidly in the direction of Cricklewood. Fortunately, Percy was not badly wounded and jumped on one of the new electric trams and pursued the cyclist. Cricklewood tram c.1906 When they reached The Crown Cricklewood, the conductor told a policeman on point duty what had happened. Percy and the PC boarded a motor bus and chased after the cyclist, overtaking him in Kilburn and arresting ...

This was a famous stud farm run by the Tattersall family who today are still one of the leading sellers of thoroughbred racehorses. It was part of Upper Oxgate which was off the Edgware Road beyond Cricklewood at the corner of today’s Oxgate Lane. In 1838 the Duke of Buckingham sold 96 acres of the Roberts estate to Edmund Tattersall. He carried out an extensive building conversion of the old houses on the property, some dating back as far as 1670, to create his stud farm. The illustration of the property is by George Tattersall, a talented artist member of the family, from his book on ‘Sporting Architecture’ (1841). Wealthy racehorse owners could send their mares to Willesden Paddocks for 12 shillings a week to be ‘covered’ by resident stallions at the stud: the fee in 1853 was 15 guineas. This area on the outskirts of London was popular for horse breeding and there was another stud farm at Neasden. Willesden Paddocks, George Tattersall, 1841 ‘Voltigeur’ and Sir Edwin Landseer ...

This is the story of how a Cricklewood factory played an important role in exposing a fraudulent spiritualist medium in the 1920s. Photographic Dry Plates To record an image, early photographers used wet plates which had to be processed straight away.   In 1871 Richard Maddox coated a glass plate with a gelatine emulsion of silver bromide. He found these plates could be stored until needed, and after exposure in the camera, taken to a darkroom for development at leisure. Joseph Acworth Joseph Acworth was born in Chatham in 1853 and was interested from boyhood in the experimental sciences. He began working in the laboratories of the Royal College of Chemistry in South Kensington, (now part of Imperial College). Acworth became fascinated by the photographic dry plates which Maddox had invented, and he worked in the labs of the newly created Britannia Dry Plate Company at Ilford. He went to the University of Erlangen in Germany where he...

The beast discovered ‘I was the first one to see it and I was very frightened because I couldn’t believe how big it was. I thought it was a leopard or something. It was the size of an Alsatian and about 4ft away from me’. On a Friday morning in May 2001, cleaner Carol Montague went to the home of Alan and Charlotte Newman in Hocroft Road (not the nearby Hocroft Avenue as generally reported), off the Hendon Way. It was her regular job, but it turned out to be far from an ordinary day, after she spotted the animal in their back garden. She immediately rang the police who didn’t take her seriously. But when she persisted, two policemen showed up and were startled to find what turned out to be a lynx on the Newman’s patio. Down the years in the UK, there have been and continue to be, many reports and photos, of what were described as large cats roaming the countryside. But few have ever been caught. The Hertfordshire area had some sightings in the 1990s, mostly in wooded areas. Then in 199...

George Berthold Samuelson, known as ‘Bertie’ was born in Southport Lancashire in 1889. By 1910 he had started the Royal Film Agency and was one of the first film renters. In late December he had moved the successful business to 270 Corporation Street in Birmingham. With his acquired capital, he decided to make a patriotic film about Queen Victoria called ‘Sixty Years a Queen’ at Will Barker’s Ealing Studio in 1913. The film cost the huge sum of £12,000 to make, but it was extremely popular and made Bertie a profit of £40,000 (worth over £4M today).  With this success, Bertie decided to buy his own studio to make films. The Samuelson Film Manufacturing Company Ltd was set up on 30 May 1914 with £2,000 in £1 shares. He heard that Worton Hall, a 40-room house with nine acres of land in Isleworth, was for sale. Samuelson bought it in 1914 and the official opening of the studios was held on 1 July, where the guest of honour was the famous music hall star Vesta Tilley. Samuelson employed...