Childs Hill 1866

In 1866 the Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science By National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (Great Britain) appeared under the names of George Woodyatt Hastings, Andrew Edgar, Edwin Pears and Charles Wager Ryalls. An interesting reference to Childs Hill appears on page 75.

... It is almost impossible under our present laws to initiate sanitary improvement in the villages and small towns of the country. The most gigantic nuisances are allowed to grow up without let or hindrance, and it is only when some terrible calamity visits a place, that any action is taken. The Metropolitan boundary is studded with villages that the Management Act does not reach, and which are a disgrace to our civilisation. Such a village exists at Childs Hill, in the midst of a farm belonging to the Lord President of the Privy Council. I mention this to show how defective our sanitary legislation is at the present moment, so that the representative of all sanitary authority in Her Majesty's Government is helpless to remove nuisances at his very door. ...

This fits with what Mr Poulton later wrote in a piece about the church's early days.

Snippet 12 Background

In 1593 the name ‘Childes Hill’ appears on a map of Middlesex (John Nordon’s). A Tudor hamlet behind the present ‘Castle’ public house was a flourishing centre for pottery and tiles, using local yellow and blue clay. By the mid-19th Century Childs Hill was famous for its laundresses, especially in The Mead. They made good use of the streams flowing from the Heath and the exposed fields for drying the clothes. Clothes washed in London were thought to be susceptible to water-borne diseases, such as cholera and typhoid, and Childs Hill, then still in the countryside was thought ideal.
It was really the opening of the Finchley Road (1826-1829), with a tollgate at the Castle, that started the growth of the community. In the early 1850s a Colonel Evans built houses in a field called The Mead (later renamed Granville Road). In 1868 the Midland Railway came to Cricklewood (originally the station was called Childs Hill Station). In 1884 the Pyramid Light Works, a candle factory, was established, the first factory in the Hendon area.
Housing in Child’s Hill in the 1903 was described as a 'disgrace to civilisation' and in 1914 Hendon Urban District Council built its first council estate, with 50 houses. In 1901 the land between Childs Hill and Golders Green to the north was still farmland, but with the motorised buses (1906), the tube at Golders Green (1907), the trams (1909) and finally the Hendon Way (1927) farmland succumbed to suburbia. For entertainment Childs Hill had The Regal in the Finchley Road (1929), which was first a skating rink then a cinema then a bowling alley. In the early 1960s many of the small Victorian houses in the Mead and around the Castle Inn were demolished and three high rise blocks of flats built.
Both All Saints Parish Church (the third church in the parish of Hendon) and our own church began their meetings in local laundries before the present buildings were erected in 1856 and 1870 respectively. Further extensions were added to All Saints 1878-84. In 1940 the church was so badly damaged by fire that it was substantially rebuilt in 1952.
Evidently both churches were strongly evangelical at first. (The second vicar of All Saints, Rev William H Perkins was a signatory to the Address to the Prelates against the eastward position and vestments.) Sadly, during the time of Rev W D Petter (1893-1933) there was a change to a more Catholic position and this has apparently been the situation over since. Why Mr Petter should have moved from an evangelical position to a more Roman one, we do not know. We ought to give thanks to God that though things have not always been as one would wish with us, a broadly evangelical basis has been maintained. If we think we are standing, let us take heed that we do not fall. How easy it is to begin well but drift.

Snippet 11 Prehistory

The district now known as Childs Hill formed part of the ancient Manor of Hendon with which St Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury (d 988), endowed the Abbey of St Peter at Westminster in 959. In 1150 Abbot Gervase de Blois (illegitimate son of King Stephen) gave the land away. By 1295 the land was in royal hands again until Edward I gave it to Westminster Abbey as soul alms for his dead queen, Eleanor. In 1316 the Abbey exchanged the land for the Manor of Hodford and later in the same century Sir Richard le Scrope, 1st Baron Scrope of Bolton, some time Lord Chancellor, held them before exchanging them with Richard II for lands in Yorkshire. Hodford and Cowhouse were again ceded to Westminster Abbey in soul alms for Richard and his first wife Anne of Bohemia, in 1399. At the dissolution of the monasteries in 1550 the property came to the shortly-lived Bishopric of Westminster and from there into the hands of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners via the Dean and Chapter of Westminster.
Two other dates worth mentioning are 1301 when Richard de Gravesend (Bishop of London) granted Walter de Wenlock (Abbot of Westminster) licence to celebrate ‘Divine service’ in the chapel which the monks of Westminster had built on their Manor of Hodford, provided that the consent of the Rector of Hendon be first obtained.
Then in 1321 The Black Book of Hendon included the name of Richard Child. It is from the Child family that Childs Hill derives its name.
Thus from quite early times Childs Hill was subject to the attentions of professing Christians. Sadly the state of the Mediaeval church was such that one wonders if any peasants in the area would have heard the gospel from the monks. We do not know, but God knows and one day in Heaven may be we will find that even in ancient times God had a people in this same area.

More Background

Childs Hill. A district on both sides of the Hendon-Hampstead border, Childs Hill took its name from Richard le Child, who in 1312 held a customary house and 30 acres, probably on the Hendon side. A similar estate was held at the same time by Richard Blakett, who gave his name to Blacketts well, which in 1632 was one of the boundary markers in the area and in 1801-2 was disputed in ownership.

By the mid 18th century the Hampstead part of Childs Hill was divided in two by the road later called Platt's Lane, which ran from West End and Fortune Green to the heath, Hampstead town, and Hendon. It was entirely occupied by two estates, both of which may have originated as land of the Templars. A farmhouse on the edge of the heath in the north part of the larger estate had apparently become detached from the farmland before 1811, when it was enlarged by Thomas Platt as a 'pleasing and unostentatious' brick house set in well wooded grounds.

The arrival of the Finchley road lessened the area's isolation. A house called Temple Park was built on the smaller Temples estate probably in the 1830s by Henry Weech Burgess, a prosperous Lancastrian. About the same time farm buildings were erected on Platt's estate fronting Platt's Lane. In 1843, on the western portion of Childs Hill estate, T. Howard built Kidderpore Hall, a stuccoed Greek revival house with a slightly projecting colonnade, side pediments, and a semicircular bay, for John Teil, an East India merchant with tanneries in the district of Calcutta from which the house took its name. The grounds became a private park and two lodges were added, one on the Finchley road in 1849, the other on Platt's Lane in the late 1860s. On a field of Platt's estate which jutted westward south of Teil's estate, four houses fronting Finchley Road were built in the 1840s in the district called New West End.

By 1870 the farm buildings at Platt's Lane had been replaced by a house. Two cottages were built in Platt's Lane by P. Bell of West End in 1875 and 13 houses, mostly by George Pritchard, between 1884 and 1886.
From: 'Hampstead: Childs Hill', A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 9: Hampstead, Paddington (1989), pp. 73-5. URL: here

Cricklewood Childhood 3

This is the final part of the Wardley article from the same source as the previous two. Nothing about the chapel as such.[Pic: The Avenue Cricklewod Lane]

When Mother was a girl she said she seldom had meat to eat. We had it once week - a glorious sirloin of beef, hot on Saturday, cold on Sunday, made into shepherd's pie on Monday. For Sunday breakfast we had Dad's home made sausages, the most delicious things you can imagine.
Grandfather was a preacher in the 7th London Circuit of the United Methodist Free Churches. We have a photo of him with 28 other worthies. His heart was in his preaching and not in business, and he liked nothing better than travelling on horseback to preach.
When he died in 1899 he left Father with debts. The folk in the large houses thought nothing of running up large bills, and not paying them. Costers in the cottages were cute, sending their children to buy one ha'porth of pickle in paper or a ha'porth of jam, and the scales in those days did not balance but must go down.
I remember when Princess Christiana (of Schleswig Holstein, sister of the Princess of Wales, who was later Queen Alexandra) came to open the newly built Institute (June 30, 1896). Dad made an archway of greenery from Granville House to our Corn Shop (what was the Men's Institute in Cricklewood Lane is now Childs Hill Library).
I remember going in the wagonette to take Grandma and Grandpa to the Wesleyan Church opposite Willoughby Road. We went along the Finchley Road, up Frognal and through to Church Row, where we had to pay at a tollgate. We walked over the West Heath three times on a Sunday to go to Heath Street Baptist Church and Sunday School. As we walked up from The Castle to the top of the Sandy Gallop the fields belonging to Mr Rickett of Sunnyfield were on our left. (Mr RIckett was a JP and a benefactor of the churhc in the early days). The Hermitage (pulled down in 1974) was on our right, followed by the horses' drinking trough (very much needed, specially on the nights before Bank Holidays when the fair people with their caravans and swings and roundabouts moved slowly up the hill) and Telegraph Hill on which was Miss Schroeder's cottage. My eldest sister had an allotment on the top of that hill, where the artist Sir Frank Salisbury later built Sarum Chase.
Grandpa died in 1899, aged 80, and Grandma in 1904, aged 92. Our family consisted then of Gordon 3, Winifred 5, Bernard 9, (darling twins had died in between), Alfred 12. I was 15, Alice 17, Grace 20. Winifred remembers walking with Gordon down Cricklewood Lane to a private school in Elm Grove called Sparkbrook College. A sweet shop opposite The Tavern sold "wiggy waggy toffee" at 8 oz a penny. You could get a good-sized bag of the black wafery stuff for a farthing. Further down, on the left, was the Home of Rest for Horses.
In 1908 the trams came down to Cricklewood, and Granville House was pulled down to widen the Lane into a road. Trams with open wooden-lath seats and open tops ran down the Lane. Later they went all the way to Barnet. Horse buses went along Finchley Road from The Castle, all the way to Oxford Street for 4d. In 1974 the shops opposite Granville House were pulled down. Our house and garden at Ridge Road is now part of the site of two rows of maisonettes with a road in between. Our house and long garden next to the Hermitage, where we lived after Ridge Road, is now the site of a large block of greyish Council buildings. But I still see things as they were.

Background Material

The following info is found here on a Barnet local government site

The settlement at Childs Hill is certainly medieval, possibly the 10th century settlement Codenhleawe and later called "Cowhouse". Although a John Knot de Childes Hill is associated with the Peasants' Revolt (1381), the earliest known use of the place name Child's Hill is in 1593. The name is probably taken from a family called Child in the 14th century. The Castle Inn was first recorded in 1751, when Child's Hill was a centre for brick and tile making during the second half of the 18th century, supplying material for building Hampstead, and run by the Morris family.
Being more than 259 feet above sea level (at the Castle Inn), Child's Hill is visible for miles around. From 1808 to 1847 there was anoptical telegraph station, one in a line from the Admiralty to Great Yarmouth. Only the name, Telegraph Hill, remains.
An Act of Parliament in 1826 allowed for the construction of the Finchley Road (completed by 1829) with a tollgate at the Castle Inn. In the early 1850s a Colonel Evans built houses in a field called The Mead, where the Morris brick works had been. The road was later called Granville Road.* In 1856 a new church, All Saints', was built. In 1940 the church was so badly damaged by fire that it had to be substantially rebuilt in 1952.
By the 1870s a number of laundries Childs Hill cleaned clothes for people in the new suburbs of West London and Hampstead. Clothes washed in London were thought to be susceptible to waterborne disease, such as cholera and typhoid, and Childs Hill, then still in the countryside, was supplied by a series of small streams coming off Hampstead Heath. In 1884 the Pyramid Light Works, a candle factory, was the first factory in the Hendon area. Victorian Childs Hill was a "very low" place, with cock-fighting, drunkenness, vice, and housing in Child's Hill in the 1903 was described as a "disgrace to civilisation" and in 1914 Hendon Urban District Council built its first council estate, with 50 houses.
With the motorbuses (1906), the tube at Golders Green tube station (1907), the trams (1909), and finally The Hendon Way (1927) farmland succumbed to suburbia. For entertainment Childs Hill had The Regal in the Finchley Road (1929), which was first a skating rink then a cinema then a bowling alley. In the early 1960s many of the small Victorian houses in the Mead and around the Castle Inn were demolished.

* The chapel is here (now in Mortimer Close). It was built in 1870.