History of Kilburn and West Hampstead

This story originally appeared on the West Hampstead Life website several years ago, but we have been asked to re-publish it. Ghost stories associated with Kilburn and West Hampstead are rare and the phenomenon short-lived. We have found a couple of hoaxes, a poltergeist and an innocuous clergyman.  One man thought otherwise: ‘Kilburn is the most haunted district in London’ declared the Irish writer Elliott O’Donnell. He specialised in the paranormal, and today his books are generally regarded as fiction rather than fact.  In his 1920 book ‘More Haunted Houses of London’, O’Donnell included ‘A haunting in a Kilburn Studio.’ The narrator talks about the importance of ‘atmosphere’, concluding that there were many reports of hauntings in low-lying districts: ‘When we come to London, there is Kilburn. There is no air there, the soil is clay, and the atmosphere is crammed as full as it can hold with stale thoughts – some of them deuced bad ones. ’    After a ...

Recently I found that Ludovic Charles McBean, known as L.C. MacBean in the film world, lived at several local addresses. Unfortunately, we have not been able to find a picture of him. Although born in Glasgow about 1875, six years old Ludovic McBean was living with his aunt in Lewisham by 1881. Ten years later in the 1891 census he had moved to 33 Maygrove Road in Kilburn, and aged 16 he was working as a clerk for a mining office. When he married Ida Esther Wood in 1905, he was at 113 Iverson Road Kilburn.  Three years later they had moved a short distance to 22 Agamemnon Road in West Hampstead, and he was now working as an electrical engineer for Hampstead Council in Lithos Road, off Finchley Road. They moved yet again to 77 Cricklewood Broadway by 1911. He and Ida had two daughters; a third child had died as an infant. In April 1919 they moved back to West Hampstead and were living at ‘Lyndale’ 124 Broadhurst Gardens (now demolished), where they stayed a few years. They moved out...

Cyril Stapleton was a famous band leader who from about 1957 to 1965 lived at Flat 157 Cholmley Gardens in West Hampstead.  Here he is with his wife Sheila and their three young children in Cholmley Gardens in 1957. Later he moved to 6 Meadowbank, Primrose Hill where he died aged 59 on 19 June 1974, leaving £31,741.     Horace Cyril Stapleton was born in December 1914 in Mapperley, Nottingham. A talented boy, he began learning the violin from the age of seven, and when only 12 years old he made his first broadcast from the local Nottingham radio station. To improve his technique, Cyril went to Czechoslovakia to study under Sevcik, the famous teacher of the violin. Cyril’s early professional career found him playing in the pit orchestra of a cinema to accompany silent films. At 17 he won a scholarship to Trinity College of Music in London, and while there saw a newspaper report that Henry Hall was forming a dance band at the BBC. He passed the audition and started playing ...

  Today on Remembrance Sunday, the work of the First World War poets like Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sasson are still well known. In this story we look at a war poet from Kilburn who is forgotten. In 1889, Leslie Coulson was born as Frederick Leslie Allen-Coulson at 173 Loveridge Road Kilburn. His father Frederick Raymond Coulson came from a poor family in Bury Lancashire who moved to Mile End in east London. Frederick had hyphened his surname and called himself Allen-Coulson by 1883 when he married Ada Mary Ann Emery on Christmas Day in St Mary’s Stratford Bow. In 1887 when their first son Raymond was baptised in Christ Church Brondesbury, they were living in three rooms on the first and second floors of 173 Loveridge Road Kilburn (this was probably later re-numbered as today's No.70). Frederick was a warehouseman. At the time of the 1891 census, they had moved across the Kilburn High Road to 9 Dunster Gardens. Frederick now aged 26, was a shipping clerk and Ada was...

Sean Connery died peacefully in his sleep at his home in the Bahamas on 31 October 2020 aged 90. His son Jason said he had been unwell for some time. In this story we particularly focus on his time in Kilburn and West Hampstead. Growing up in Scotland On his father’s side, Sean, or as his birth certificate records Thomas Connery, had Irish roots. His dad was Joe, a jobbing labourer in Edinburgh who married Effie Maclean in 1928. Tommy was born two years later in Fountainbridge, Edinburgh’s industrial district, where the grime and smoke had gained it the nickname, Auld Reekie. There wasn’t much money and Tommy had a tough childhood. He got his first job when he was nine years old; helping on a milk round before school, with an evening shift as well at a butcher’s. He was a physically strong boy, fit and good at sport, but he was restless, and keen to leave Fountainbridge behind. So, he joined the navy when he was seventeen. Although he signed up for seven year’s active service, he was i...