History of Kilburn and West Hampstead

We have collected several odd stories from Kilburn which will intrigue and amuse you. Stealing a baby’s clothes In July 1867 Jane Cox, who lived at 15 Bridge Street in Kilburn (now demolished), left her two-year old child sitting on the step of nearby Number 7. But when she looked again the child had gone. Some time later a gentleman riding his horse found the baby, naked and crying beside a pond. He took the child to the police who returned it to a grateful Mrs Cox. But what had happened? Two children, Mary Anne Taylor aged 10, and Mary Rogers aged 9, were responsible for kidnapping the two-year old. In court, it was said both girls had respectable parents and lived at 3 Alpha Place, a section of Canterbury Road in Kilburn. After undressing the baby, the girls went to Charles Tilley, a marine store dealer at 2 Carlton Place, and threw the clothes they had stolen onto his scales. The girls told Tilley that their mothers had sent them to sell the clothes to buy soap, and he gave them a ...

In 1847, Thomas Hickman, his wife Harriet and their six children, aged from 16 months to 12 years old, were living in Penton Villas, a two-room cottage in Middle Row Kensal New Town.  The open countryside around Kensal Green began to change at the turn of the nineteenth century, with the building of the Grand Junction Canal to Paddington (1801) and two years later, the first burials at Kensal Green Cemetery. A large gas works opened south of the canal in 1845 while the Great Western Railway line started running trains from Paddington in 1848. Subsequent street and house building had to adapt itself to these early developments.   1870 OS Map An area of land sandwiched between the railway and canal was developed from the late 1830s onwards, with narrow streets lined with small houses. Named Kensal New Town, the properties soon became overcrowded and insanitary. The area was called ‘Chelsea in the Wilderness’ because it was distant from, but nonetheless under the local government...

The writer Leslie Thomas died at his home in Lymington near Salisbury on 6 May 2014, aged 83. He wrote over 30 books including an autobiography, ‘In My Wildest Dreams’, (1984). His books always show his great sense of humour.  In the 1950s he lived in Willesden and his Dangerous Davies books are set here.   Leslie Thomas 1991, by Kevin Beaty, Getty Images Leslie was born in Newport on 22 March 1931 and had a happy, but poor childhood. In March 1943 his father, who was serving in the Merchant Navy, was a fireman on the SS Empire Whale. It was part of a convoy when it was torpedoed by the German submarine U662 in the South Atlantic. His father aged 52, was one of the 47 people who died, there were only 10 survivors. In October the same year his mother died of cancer, and Leslie aged 12 and his nine-year old brother Roy, were sent as orphans to Dr Barnardo’s Homes, first in Devon and then to Kingston in South London.  When he was leaving the Superintendent of the orphanage a...

Walking through the park today, I thought how fortunate we are to have this green space in Kilburn.  One hundred and ten years ago, on 1 May 1913, the gates to Kilburn Grange Park were thrown open to the public for the first time, but without any fanfare or celebration. The fact that we have the park owes more to good luck than careful planning, as this story shows.  The park takes its name from a large mansion, The Grange, which was built in 1831, despite claims about it being a much older property. The house stood facing Kilburn High Road, where the Grange Cinema, now used by the Universal Church, stands today.    Kilburn 1893 showing The Grange and its grounds The Peters family were there from 1843. Thomas Peters was a successful and wealthy coach builder who made coaches for Queen Victoria. The last occupant was Mrs Ada Peters, the widow of his son John Winpenny Peters. Ada died in the house on 5 February 1910. For more information about Ada and her lover the Mar...

This is a story about the creator of the famous Bentley car, and the Cricklewood factory they built on the corner of Oxgate Lane and the Edgware Road.  Walter Owen Bentley, or as he liked to be known ‘W.O.’, was born on 16 September 1888 at 78 Avenue Road, a large 14-room house in Hampstead. (It was destroyed by a landmine in 1940 and the site has been absorbed into the school complex at the corner of Avenue and Adelaide Roads). Walter was the youngest in the family of six sons and three daughters of Alfred Bentley, a successful businessman and his wife, Emily Waterhouse who was born in Adelaide. Her father was a Yorkshireman, who had gone to Australia and made his fortune in mining and banking before returning to England. After prep school in Bracknell, Walter, like his five brothers, attended Clifton College, an independent boarding school in Bristol. In 1905, aged sixteen he left to begin an apprenticeship with the Great Northern Railway locomotive works at Doncaster. He and his...

    This weekend the death was announced of Murray Melvin, activist, actor and archivist. Those of you familiar with our books describing the history of Kilburn and its residents, will know he lived on the Kilburn Gate Estate in the 1960s. But his links with Camden go back to 1932, when he was born in what was then the Borough of St Pancras. His parents, Hugh Victor and Maisie Winifred Melvin, were living at 2 Marquis Road, off Camden Road. Next, they rented in Mornington Crescent and then Delancey Street in Camden Town.  Murray left school at the age of fourteen, unable to master fractions but as head prefect, a qualification he said he gained by always having clean fingernails and well-combed hair. He started work as an office boy for a firm of travel agents off Oxford Street. A short-lived job followed as an import and export clerk in a shipping office, during which he inadvertently exported quantities of goods to destinations that had not ordered them. After WWII, Hug...