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-kicki...

These adjoining houses in West Hampstead, which were built in the 1890s, have an interesting history. The Caerthillian Nursing Home first opened in No.87 about 1925, and ten years later expanded into the premises next door. The principal, Edith Wyatt was the daughter of one of the first owners of the houses. This advert from 1938 mentions the recently introduced Minnittis Apparatus, which was a nitrous oxide gas and air mask to help the mother during delivery of the baby. Before the NHS, middle class parents paid to have their children born in a private maternity home.  The writer Jackie Collins, sister of Joan, was born there in 1937 while her parents were living in Hillcrest Court at the top of Shoot-Up Hill. Dusty Springfield (real name Mary O’Brien) was born at the nursing home in 1939. The O’Brien’s had lived locally in 104 Sumatra Road from about 1933 to 1938. Her birth certificate says Mary was born 16 April at 87 Fordwych Road. When her father registered the birth on 23 May...