History of Kilburn and West Hampstead

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...

Bird in Hand, West End Lane (Dick Weindling, August 2018) No.12 West End Lane was the Bird in Hand, first named in 1831 as a beerhouse run by James Paty, who had just gone bankrupt. He is described in the proceedings as a retailer of beer at Kilburn, formerly a timber dealer and stagecoach proprietor of Paddington Green. From 1840 to at least 1861 the owners of the beerhouse were William and George Verey who ran the Kilburn Brewery in the High Road near today’s Brondesbury Overground station. Members of the same family ran the Bird in Hand for 70 years. It backed onto a crowded set of mainly working-class streets between Belsize Road and West End Lane , with more of the same across the High Road in Willesden. In 1861, Ellen Lovegrove was living with her uncle, a publican in Child’s Hill. She married William Grantham in 1866 but he died three years later at the Bird in Hand where he was almost certainly the beerhouse keeper.  Ellen took over and the following ye...