Our repair team have stayed on The Mall and are continuing to repair
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We added this message at 21:10 and we'll update it again after 08:00 on Sunday 25th August 2024
Passport of Lotte Rosendahl, issued in 1939. [The Jawne Team / Courtesy of Yael Nemenoff]
There is a variety of history events taking place locally over the next
month or so, which you may not have heard or read about. Martin has kindly
agreed that I can share the details with you, so that you can make the most of
what is on offer, if they are of interest to you.
Already on, in the family space at Willesden Green Library, is a small
exhibition which opened on Holocaust Memorial Day called "Kindertransport
Children in Willesden". It tells the stories of some of the around
10,000 unaccompanied children who were brought to this country to escape the
growing Nazi threat to Jews in German-controlled lands in 1938-39. The passport
pictured above was issued to one of them. This exhibition is only available
to view until 28 February.
Also taking
place at Willesden Green Library, in the Exhibition Gallery on the second floor
from Monday 19 February, is a major Brent Museum / Learning through the
Arts exhibition: “The Road to Freedom – Ending Slavery in Britain”. This
free exhibition will be on until the beginning of September (but if you go in
the opening week, you can also see the Kindertransport exhibition in the same
visit!).
It is only 190
years ago that slavery was finally abolished throughout the British Empire. I
wrote about the inhuman stain of slavery (and the indentured labour which
followed it) on our history, in an article last month about why we should commemorate the centenary of
the British Empire Exhibition.
The title
of Nabil Al-Kinani’s talk on Friday 16 February.
As part of that commemoration, Wembley History Society is welcoming Nabil Al-Kinani, to share a different perspective at its meeting on Friday 16
February at 7.30pm. Nabil’s talk, on “Decolonising Wembley” will
explore the legacy of the 1924 Exhibition, examining the attitudes of the time,
and asking whether the 21st Century developments in the Wembley Park
area reflect a more modern and sensitive take on our post-colonial world. Visitors
are welcome, for a small charge, at the Society’s meetings, which take place at
St Andrew’s Church Hall, Church Lane, Kingsbury, NW9 8RZ.
Liam MacCarthy, and the Liam MacCarthy Cup.
One country which
had recently been given semi-independent Dominion status, within the British
Empire, in the early 1920s was the Irish Free State. Two men, whose names are
now remembered through sporting trophies, for hurling and Gaelic football, are
the subject of a much-anticipated talk at Willesden Green Library, on Thursday
14 March at 6.30pm. One was born in London, to Irish parents, while the
other came to work here as a Civil Servant, and both were heavily involved in the
capital’s branch of the Gaelic Athletic Association. Marcus Howard’s talk on “Liam
MacCarthy and Sam Maguire: The Forgotten Sons of Ireland” will look at
their political, as well as their sporting activities. You can find more
details and reserve your free place for this talk on this Brent Libraries, Arts and Heritage
Eventbrite page.
Sam Maguire (centre, with ball), captain of the London Hibernians Gaelic
football team, 1903.
If you missed
the premier of the film “Brent Women of Renown” last November, there is
another chance to see it at a Willesden Local History Society meeting on Wednesday
20 March at 7.30pm. The three women featured are Kilburn suffragette Violet
Doudney, aviator Amy Johnson and Dame Stephanie Shirley, who came to Britain as
a five-year old Kindertransport child, and grew up to become a mathematician
and pioneer computer engineer at the Post Office Research Station in Dollis
Hill.
Amy Johnson working at Stag Lane Aerodrome, early 1930.
The film will be
presented by its producer Angela Payne, and director Amanda Epe, who will also
talk about the Cricklewood Town Team project which led to its creation. The
meeting takes place at St Mary's Parish Centre, Neasden Lane, NW10 2TS. Non-members
of the Society will be welcome to attend, for a small charge.
Car bodies under construction at Kingsbury Works in 1924.
The last event I
will mention is a free illustrated local history talk which I will be giving
myself, at a Kingsbury Library coffee morning on Tuesday 26 March at 11am.
Kingsbury is now seen as a mainly residential area, but during the First World
War its rural fields provided space for several aircraft factories. “Kingsbury
Works, 1915 to 1980” tells the story of one of these (with lots of
pictures!), and how the buildings there developed after they were taken over by
Vanden Plas coachbuilders in 1923.
A 1935 Kingsbury-built Bentley limousine, which went on a sales tour around
India.
Since I first gave
this talk online during lockdown, I’ve found out even more about Kingsbury
Works, and gathered many more illustrations, so I am looking forward to sharing
this version at a Brent Libraries event. The most recent addition to my information
is the site’s association with vampires (but no need to send for Buffy)! You
can find more details, and book your free place for this talk, on the Eventbrite page for it.
I always enjoy a stroll through Old St Andrew's churchyard in Kingsbury at this time of year as the first signs of Spring emerge. Naturalised snowdrops and crocuses mix with lesser celandine and the first leaves of bluebells.
The flowers had lifted my heart but the amount of litter was truly depressing: beer cans, plastic bottles, fast food packaging and items of clothing were everywhere, even on the less walked paths. Full black plastic bags of rubbish were thrown into the undergrowth and as you can see below even furniture had been discarded.
Walkers on the Capital Ring often take a detour to see Old St Andrew's Church, Brent's oldest buiding and Grade 1 listed.
It is not just the churchyard that suffers there is also regular fly-tipping in the shrubbery outside the Riverside care home and on the verge opposite the Welsh Harp Sailing Club on Birchen Grove. People in cars parked along the road adjacent to the allotments in the evening leave fast food packaging, cans tissues and even used condoms.
Following
on from its successful Heritage
Open Day last Saturday, St Andrew’s Church in Kingsbury is
opening its doors to the local community again next Saturday evening, for a
concert. The Magic Violin String Trio and Mihajlo Stojanov Gruen will be
performing music from along the River Danube, “From Vienna towards the Black
Sea”.
Tickets
are £10 each, either in advance on Eventbrite or at the door, and the proceeds
will go towards the restoration of the beautiful Victorian building you will be
sitting in as you enjoy the music. The concert begins at 19:00hrs (7pm), and
you can find out more and book tickets via the Rekindling St Andrews
website.
St Andrew’s Church, in Church Lane, Kingsbury, is inviting residents and
visitors to a Heritage Open Day on Saturday 16 September, as part of its
Rekindling St Andrew’s project. The beautiful Grade II* listed “new church”
building, with its magnificent interior decoration by top Victorian artists and
craftspeople, will be open to explore between 10am and 4pm. The Grade I listed
“old church” will also be open, but inspection of the inside will only be
available from 10am until 12 noon.
A watercolour sketch of St Andrew’s Church, in 1810 (when it was already
around 700 years old!) (Source: Brent Archives, Naimaster Collection)
There is a programme of events taking place during the Heritage Open
Day, as listed on the programme below. I don’t think booking is essential for
the talks / tours, which are all free, but if you do book it would guarantee
your place, if more people turn up for it than can be safely accommodated. More
details and bookings can be found here.
I am leading the first event, Old St Andrew’s Church, which is a short,
illustrated talk in the “new church” followed by a guided visit to Old St
Andrew’s, just a short walk away. If you would care to join me at 10.20am next
Saturday morning, to discover the history of this fascinating building (Brent’s
oldest), you will be very welcome! The other events will be equally interesting
and informative.
As
part of its Rekindling St Andrew’s project, the whole community is invited to
come and enjoy an Open Day at St Andrew’s Church, Kingsbury, next Saturday 8
July.
There
will be lots of activities for adults and children, music and a barbeque. There
will also be community tables, where you can talk to people who know about
things like the environment and local history, and discover more about these
and other subjects.
Best
of all is the chance to explore the inside of this beautiful Grade II* listed
heritage building and find out more about how it started life in the 1840s in Central
London, and was moved to Kingsbury in the 1930s. The work of some of the best
artists and craftsmen of Victorian times is on show as you walk around the
inside of the church, something that anyone can appreciate, whatever their
faith, or of none. You may even hear the
bells!
St
Andrew’s Church, Church Lane, Kingsbury. (Photo by Des
Blenkinsopp)
It’s
free to come along to this Open Day, between 11am and 4pm, so I hope to see you
there. I will be at the Wembley History Society table for much of the day
(probably in the hall behind the main church building) if you have any local
history questions you would like to ask.
Philip Grant.
Editor's note: And I will be on the Brent Friends of the Earth stall come and say hello.
Back in February 2020, I
wrote about an exhibition of this name which had opened at Kingsbury
Library. I was meant to give a talk in conjunction with that display, but then
Covid happened! Three years later, and I’m finally able to resume giving free
local history talks for Brent Libraries, and at last local residents will have
the chance to see my illustrated presentation about Ernest Trobridge, and his
remarkable legacy of architectural designs.
3
& 5 Buck Lane, Kingsbury.
Who else would have thought
the answer to providing comfortable and affordable “homes for heroes” after the
First World War was to construct them of local timber, and give them thatched
roofs? Trobridge didn’t just think it, he developed and patented a method of
doing so, and built them.
Then, in the 1930s, he took
the idea that “an Englishman’s home is his castle” to new dimensions. But as
well as helping the occupants of his castle flats to feel protected, he gave
them comfortable homes with a variety of convenient features. The central
turret of this “castle”, at the corner of Buck Lane and Highfield Avenue,
conceals the chimneys from bedroom fireplaces, while the battlements to either
side are part of the deckchair cupboards on their roof gardens!
The
front entrance to the upstairs flats at Highfort Court, Kingsbury.
My talk will take place at a Kingsbury
Library Coffee Morning, on Tuesday 28 March from 11am to 12noon. This is a free
event, but if you would like to attend, Brent Culture Service ask you to book
on their Eventbrite
page for “Ernest Trobridge – Kingsbury’s Extraordinary Architect” (I
think this is so that they know how many people they need to provide coffee, or
tea, and biscuits for!)
I’ve been looking forward to
sharing this talk with local residents for more than three years (although I
have been lucky enough to have had some extra pictures from 100 years ago
shared with me in the meantime, which have found their way into the 2023
version). If you are interested in discovering more about the man behind
Kingsbury’s cottages and castles, I look forward to you joining me for the talk
on 28 March.
Affinity Water informed customers registered with its text service early this morning that following a mains burst in Fryent Way, Kingsbury that water had been cut off. The repairs team is has been working at the site and had repaired by about 12.15pm when I visited the site. Seemed to be a great working relationship with the foreman fist bumping the repair gang as they completed the repair and started to fill in the hole with a mountain of London clay.
Unfortunately a secondary burst was discovered in the same area and was still being worked on this afternoon. Water in Wembley is still lower than normal pressure.
For latest information go to LINK where you register for text updates.
This is the latest I have. Repair carried out and testing progress - supply restored soon .
Thank you to everyone who had a go at last weekend’s Wembley History Society Christmas Picture
Quiz, 2022. It was a chance to take a short
break from a number of more serious issues covered by “Wembley Matters”, and I
hope you enjoyed it.
I included a clue, ‘in 1923’, in question 2, so hopefully at least those
of you who remember the original Wembley Stadium (demolished twenty years ago)
will have spotted that the men in the photograph were building one of Wembley’s
“twin towers”.
Workers building the concrete walls of the Stadium, winter 1922/23. (Screenshot from an old film)
Next year will mark the centenary of the building which made the name of
our district famous around the world. We will celebrate that in 2023, but I
wanted to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the workers who built this
reinforced concrete landmark in just 300 days (without the benefit of modern
machinery, or hard hats!).
Were there a few of the pictures that you didn’t know the answers to? If
that’s the case, you have the chance over the Christmas / New Year break to
discover more about Wembley’s past. I’ve included “links” with most of the
answers, which will take you to illustrated articles giving more information,
if you want to take advantage of them.
If you were feeling competitive, you can now see how many of the
questions you got the right answers to. There are no prizes, but if you want to
publish your score out of ten (just to let others know how well, or badly, you
did), you are welcome to add a comment below – only honest claims, please!
For the past two years, “Wembley Matters” readers have been invited to
have a go at the Wembley History Society Christmas Picture
Quiz. If you fancy testing yourself
(gently) with this year’s quiz, the “question paper” is attached below.
There are ten photographs again this year, but only one question with
each. All of them are to do with the area covered by the former Borough of
Wembley (which from 1934 included the previous Urban District of Kingsbury),
which the Society was set up to promote the history of in 1952.
A stained glass window with the Borough of Wembley’s coat of arms,
which was in the Council Chamber at the Town Hall at Forty Lane until 1965.
See how many questions you know the answers to. Share the quiz with
friends and family living locally, if you think they’ll enjoy it too.
The quiz is just for fun (no prizes!), and you’ll get the answers on
this blog site in a few days’ time. And as before, the more questions you don’t
know the answers to, the more you’ll discover then about Wembley. Good luck!
A typical English Church Bell. (Image from the
internet)
If you think you’ve heard church bells ringing recently, you might have
believed you were imagining it. But the chances are that you were hearing the
chimes from the bells at Saint Andrew’s, in Church Lane, Kingsbury. After being
silent for around twenty years, the eight bells in the tower above the church
are ringing out again, especially on Sundays.
St Andrew’s New Church, Kingsbury.
The peal of eight bells was cast by C.J. Lewis of Shepherds Lane,
Brixton, in 1880. They were a gift to the church from Mrs Imbert-Terry, in
memory of her daughter. The Imbert-Terrys were from a French landowning family,
who lived at Chester Terrace on the edge of Regent’s Park, and worshipped at St
Andrew’s. It was then a fashionable Victorian church in Wells Street, in
London’s West End. If you don’t know the story of how the church, with its
bells, came to be where it is today, you can read my article about Kingsbury’s Recycled Church on the Brent Archives local history website.
A record of some notable bell-ringing events on the St Andrew’s bells in
Victorian times. (From “St Andrew’s Church, Wells Street,
1874-1897”, reprinted in the 26 November “Order of Service”)
Musical bell ringing, or change ringing, has been going on (mainly in Britain or countries
with a British tradition) for centuries, and is now a hobby for pleasure as
well as part of church life. It needs a team of ringers, and a fellow Wembley
History Society member, now living in the USA, recently wrote:
‘I was an avid Church Bellringer when I lived in
the UK.I learned to ring while at
University, and rang at Kingsbury, St Andrew’s during the University vacations,
and also for the year I still lived in Kingsbury after I graduated.When I rang there in the 1980s the bells were
“rough-going”, and I heard that they’d subsequently become unringable.’
I believe the reason why the St Andrew’s bells stopped ringing was that
the structure of the church spire was found to have become too weak. The whole
“ring” of eight bells weighs 4.25 tonnes, with the largest “E flat” tenor bell
weighing more than a ton. They could not risk any bells becoming dislodged, and
falling on the bellringers far below!
So that the bells could ring again, they’ve been fitted with an
electronic chiming mechanism. This allows them to be rung by a hammer hitting the
bell, rather than the original manual method of pulling on the bell rope, and
the bell being swung round on a large wheel. The bells were rededicated by the
Bishop of Fulham, following a Mass for the Feast of St Andrew on Saturday 26
November.
The Bishop rededicating the bells at St Andrew’s on 26 November 2022. (Photo by Irina Porter)
A peal of bells was rung straight after the rededication, and will ring
out every Sunday at around midday, after the main morning service at the
church, and on other special occasions. Every day, at 8.30am, 12noon and 6pm, a
single bell will ring the “Angelus”. This is a call to prayer, common in the
Catholic Christian faith, and also followed by some C. of E. “Anglo-Catholic”
churches like St Andrew’s. The Angelus is three chimes of the bell, rung three
times with a short break between each, to remind the faithful to say three prayers,
three times a day.
Martin has kindly recorded the peal of bells at St Andrew’s, and put it
into a video, so that you can enjoy them, even if you are not within earshot of
the church when they are ringing.
Towards the end of the video, you will also hear singing from the
Romanian Orthodox congregation at St Andrew’s Old Church. If you don’t already
know the long and fascinating history of that heritage building, hidden away in
the churchyard just behind “new” St Andrew’s, you can read it in this illustrated article on the Brent Archives local history website.
A team of church bellringers, ringing a “change”. (Image from the internet)
It is hoped that work can be carried out to strengthen the spire at St
Andrew’s, so that the bells can be rung manually again, as well as
mechanically. This would allow anyone, from whatever faith, or none, to come
and learn the art of bellringing, and enjoy this traditional musical hobby (and
way of keeping fit!).
The church has recently been awarded a grant from the National Lottery
Heritage Fund, and will be launching a project, “Rekindling St Andrew’s” aimed
at sharing the church’s history and facilities with the wider local community.
I’m sure that many people will enjoy the chance to take part in secular
activities within the beautiful Victorian interior of this Grade II* listed
building – and some, in time, to have the opportunity of making the bells ring,
in teamwork with new friends.
Look out for news of this project in 2023, and in the meantime, enjoy
the bells of St Andrew’s!
