History of Kilburn and West Hampstead

Kilburn derived its name from the ancient stream which passed through the village until the 1860s. The stream was part of the Westbourne, which started in Hampstead and flowed down the hill through the village of West End (now West Hampstead) to Kilburn.  In ancient documents, Kilburn is spelt in various ways such as, Kyllbourne, Kelebourne, Kilebourne, Kilbourne, Kulleburne. The meaning of the name has been the cause of much debate but is probably derived from the Anglo-Saxon Kyle (cold) and Bourne (water). The stream was never a large river, and the locals called it a brook or a bourne. It went through what is now the Grange Park and ran parallel to the High Road along what is today’s Kingsgate Road, before passing under the High Road (the Edgware Road) at Kilburn Bridge. In November 1860 a deputation from Kilburn presented a letter to the Metropolitan Board of Works which complained that the lives of the inhabitants were jeopardised and the value of the property was most serious...

Background In the Victorian era diseases like smallpox, TB, syphilis, and ‘King’ cholera meant that infant mortality was very high, and children were lucky to reach their fifth birthday. The average life expectancy for a middle-class man was 45, but for working-class men this halved.   The Silent Highwayman (Punch July 1858) The ‘Great Stink’ in the summer of 1858 when the Thames was contaminated with untreated sewage forced Parliament to cover the windows with curtains soaked in lime. The government finally decided to fund Joseph Bazalgette’s scheme to build a system of sewers. The initial cost was £2.5M, but the final cost was £4.2M (today worth about £400M).    Work began in the early 1860s in Kilburn as he worked his way across London putting some of the rivers and streams, such as the Kylebourne, in underground culverts.    The huge construction, which was not completed until 1875, carried the sewage to treatment centres and out to the Thames at Beckton in ...

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...