CORRECTED DATE: Launch of new public art paying tribute to the history of the Welsh Harp reservoir. May 16th 2.30pm - Booking essential

 

Wembley Matters has reported on the history of the Welsh Harp AKA Brent Reservoir in a series of illustrated articles by local historian Philip Grant. See LINK

 

Now there is a chance for local people to attend an event that reflects that history. Attendance is limited so it is important to book in advance. LINK

 

 BOOK HERE

 

This striking new sculpture, created using historic pulley wheels from the original dam, offers a powerful tribute to the reservoir's industrial past and its continuing importance in our community.

Please arrive between 2:30- 3 pm for a prompt 3 pm start.

The event includes:

 🔹 A chance to meet and hear from the artist behind the sculpture

🔹 Light refreshments and a moment to connect with fellow local history and art enthusiasts

Whether you're a history buff, art lover, or just curious, this will be a memorable and meaningful afternoon by the reservoir.

 

How many affordable homes did Brent deliver in 2024/25? The Council's response. Judge for yourself who was right.

  

From Philip Grant's original post. Read it HERE

 

Guest post by Philip Grant in a personal capacity

As I had written a guest post critical of the Brent Council claim to have delivered 530 affordable homes in 2024/25, when the number delivered by the Council itself was only 26, I felt it only fair to send a copy of the article to Brent's Chief Executive, Kim Wright, and offer her a right of reply. She has taken up that offer, and the full and unedited text of her reply is set out below. 

Readers can judge for themselves which version of the facts, and their interpretation, they choose to accept, those in my original article, or the Council's:-

Dear Mr Grant

 

I hope you are well and had a good Easter. Thank you for giving me the right of reply here.

The figures in the council tax leaflet were correct at the time of printing, based on projected housing completions for the last and current financial year. 

 

At the time of publishing the council tax booklet we were on track to oversee the delivery of 530 affordable homes in 2024-25. Construction projects are rarely straightforward and some of these homes will now be completed slightly later. Due to construction delays, 434 new affordable homes ended up being delivered and the remaining 96 are all due to be completed shortly. While the leaflet was due to be delivered at the end of the financial year, the lead-in times for printing and distribution meant that the artwork was finalised and sent to print on 20 February so the team had to rely on projections.

 

It is true that the council directly delivered 26 affordable homes (the figure you quote from the FOI response) in 2024-25. However, the infographic in the council tax leaflet was an attempt to give a very high-level summary of the breadth and depth of what the council has delivered in the past financial year on just two pages, and to describe these services and outcomes in ways that are accessible to everyone. In the process, ‘oversee the delivery of’ was simplified to ‘delivered’. I accept that this is an oversimplification where the language could have been clearer and we will bear this in mind, being more careful in the future. Making communications more accessible sometimes means using less precise, less technical language and this simplification was certainly not an attempt to mislead but was about better accessibility.

 

The article you have shared states that, since the council did not directly deliver many of these homes, they should not have been included in a summary of how residents’ council tax was spent – in fact, officers are actively involved in the delivery of these homes in all sorts of ways, from planning officers and others who negotiate with applicants to increase the percentage of affordable homes that form part of regeneration schemes across the borough, to housing colleagues who work with registered providers and residents on our housing waiting list, so council tax was used to get these homes delivered in the form of officer time.

 

All of these homes meet the definition of affordable housing under the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) and Greater London Authority (GLA) guidelines. 

 

Regarding the 1,000 new council homes scheduled for completion this year, delays mean the projection has been adjusted to 899, with the remaining homes to follow. We're delighted our development in Church End with 99 new council homes, is on track to be completed soon. In a housing crisis, councils need to use all methods at their disposal to increase the supply of homes - buying homes from developers is standard practice and local people then benefit from genuinely affordable rents. Whether built by a registered provider, directly by the council or acquired through planning agreements, these homes form part of our commitment to increasing affordable housing.

 

Brent has one of the best records in London for housebuilding, we were one of only three London boroughs to exceed our housing delivery target last year and approved a total of 3,266 new homes, making us the second highest borough for housing approvals overall.

 

In relation to the ‘Your Brent’ magazine and the Council Tax leaflets, we ensure that the content complies with the Code of Recommended Practice on Local Authority Publicity, and this is,  in fact, included within Brent’s constitution.

 

The principles contained within the Code specifically refer to the need for such publications to be lawful, cost effective, objective, even-handed, appropriate, have regard to equality and diversity and ensuring that publications are issued with care during periods of heightened sensitivity.

 

The content contained within the magazine and the Council Tax leaflet is factual. Officers obtain quotes from members acting as the official council spokesperson for the topics covered. The council does not routinely state what political party members represent (unless reporting on election results e.g. page 7 of the spring Your Brent Magazine reports on the Alperton by-election result) and care is taken to ensure that the issues covered are topics that are important to the people in the Borough.

 

Best wishes to you

Kim

Kim Wright (she/her)

Chief Executive

London Borough of Brent

VE Day 80th anniversary, and other Brent history events for May

 Guest post by local historian Philip Grant

 

Title slide for VE Day anniversary talk at Kingsbury Library on 6 May.

 

The Spring 2025 “Your Brent” magazine promised ‘exciting events across Brent libraries commemorating the 80^th anniversary of VE Day’, and frontline staff at our Council-run libraries have been under pressure to deliver on that promise! As a result, I was asked (and agreed) to prepare an illustrated VE Day talk, which I will be presenting at a Kingsbury Library coffee morning event on Tuesday 6 May, from 11am to 12noon. If you would like to come, you can find out more and reserve your place using this “link”.

 

As the request was made at fairly short notice, I had to use some of my existing Second World War material in putting the powerpoint slide show together, including an article I wrote for the 75^th anniversary, as part of the 2020 weekly “local history in lockdown” series for Wembley Matters and Brent Archives. My talk will cover not only the celebrations in May 1945, but also the six years before that in Wembley and Willesden, and the slides may also be shown in other Brent libraries on Thursday 8 May. As my introductory slide makes clear, it is a talk that celebrates the end of war, not war itself.

 

 

 

The only other special event for the VE Day anniversary in Brent libraries that I am aware of is a lunchtime concert at Willesden Green Library on Thursday 8 May, from 12noon to 1pm. This free 1940s musical hour will be given by the Bluebelle Trio. For more details, and to reserve your place, “click” here.

 

The Bluebelle Trio (Image from the Brent Libraries, Arts and Heritage Eventbrite page)

2025 is also the centenary of the second year of the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley Park. Brent Civic Centre is on the site of part of that exhibition’s Palace of Industry, so it is appropriate that Wembley Library will be the venue for my talk on “A Day Out at Wembley Park in 1924”, on Tuesday 20 May, from 6.30 to 7.30pm.

 

Title slide for my talk at Wembley Library on 20 May.

 

This is almost the same presentation that I gave at a Kingsbury Library coffee morning in July last year, but by putting it on in the early evening, and in Wembley Park, I hope it will make it more accessible for people who are working during the day. If you would like to attend this guided tour, in pictures, around the 1924 exhibition you can reserve your free place here.

 

If you are interested in the British Empire Exhibition, and particularly in the part it played in 1920s British design, then Wembley History Society’s meeting on Friday 16 May may appeal to you. Dr Kathryn Ferry will be presenting an illustrated talk on “Wembley 1924 – The First Concrete City”. The meeting takes place from 7.30 to 9pm at St Andrew’s Church Hall, Church Lane, Kingsbury, and visitors are welcome. You can see more details on the poster below. [I have been watching some of the “Villages by the Sea” programmes on iPlayer recently, and Kathryn Ferry appears as a guest expert on seaside history in several of them, so I know that she is an excellent speaker!]

 

 

There are other Brent Libraries events, for both adults and children, which you can check out on the Libraries, Culture and Heritage Eventbrite page at any time, by using this quick “link”:

http://tinyurl.com/jjhjrrzs

 

I hope that at least some of these events will be of interest to you, and look forward to welcoming you, if one of mine finds its way into your calendar!

Philip Grant.

Please sign the petition to retain Stonebridge’s heritage Victorian villa

 Guest post by Philip Grant in a personal capacity

 

“Altamira”, 1 Morland Gardens, at the corner of Hillside and Brentfield Road.

 

Willesden Local History Society has been campaigning to save the locally-listed Victorian villa, known as “Altamira”, since Brent Council “consulted” on its original plans to demolish it as part of its Morland Gardens redevelopment plans in 2019. I joined the fight in February 2020, with a guest post on “Housing or heritage? Or both?”

 

The battle has been long and hard, but the planning consent which Brent’s Planning Committee gave in 2020 expired at the end of October 2023, without construction beginning on the project. The following month, the Council started a review of its future plans for the former Brent Start site (the college having been moved to a “temporary” home in the former Stonebridge School annexe in 2022, at a cost of around £1.5m).

 

That review was due to last a few months, with proposals then being put to Brent’s Cabinet by Spring or early Summer 2024. Instead, it eventually got tagged onto the redevelopment proposals for Bridge Park, as part of what Brent then started calling its Hillside Corridor project. At the exhibition in November 2024, which began another consultation, this was the conclusion after one year of the Council’s Morland Gardens review:

 

 

By March 2025, a new consultation was launched, asking whether residents agreed that the Morland Gardens site should comprise new Council homes and youth facilities. It did not give any indication of whether Brent intended to retain the heritage Victorian villa as part of that scheme, even though I’m aware that many people had asked for that in their comments as part of the earlier consultation (including me, with detailed proposals on how this could be done!).

 

Now we have found out that the long-awaited new proposals will be put to Brent’s Cabinet at its meeting on 16 June 2025, not as a separate item, but tucked away as part of a report about the future of Bridge Park. In response to this, Willesden Local History Society have launched a petition on the Council’s website:

 

We the undersigned petition the council and its Cabinet, when considering the regeneration of 1 Morland Gardens, as part of the Hillside Corridor proposals, to retain the beautiful and historic locally listed Victorian villa, Altamira, as part of the redevelopment of that site for affordable housing and youth facilities. The 150-year-old landmark building is part of the original estate which gave Stonebridge Park its name, and its sense of place can be an inspiration to local young people who would use it, while there is plenty of space behind the Victorian villa to build a good number of genuinely affordable homes.

SIGN THE PETITION HERE

As I write this, more than 150 people have already signed this online petition, more than enough to ensure that the Society can present its views in support of retaining this important local heritage building at the Cabinet meeting. We can hope that this view adds weight to a recommendation already made by Council Officers, but we won’t know that until the report is published about 10 days before the meeting!

 

From Brent’s Historic Environment Place-making Strategy (Part of the Council’s adopted Local Plan!)

 

At this stage, it is important that as many people as possible from the Brent community sign the petition, to show the strength of feeling that this beautiful and historic building is too valuable to be demolished. The Council’s own planning policies tell them that, but there are some people at the Civic Centre who don’t seem to care about that! If you agree with the petition’s aims, then please sign it, if you haven’t already done so. You can do that here. Thank you.

Philip Grant.

 

 

Bee kind! – grow some winter flowering plants if you can

 Guest post by Philip Grant

A buff-tailed bumblebee in a Kingsbury garden, 24 January 2025.

 

If you were watching the BBC Winterwatch programme on Thursday evening, you will have seen a film about a buff-tailed bumblebee, and its need to find flowers to feed from after emerging from its hibernation burrow. A sudden rise in temperature and some sunshine, like we had on Friday after several very cold weeks, can make them think that Spring has arrived.

 

Plants that are in flower can be hard to find at this time of year. It is several weeks too early to find snowdrops or crocuses in bloom. The bumblebee in Bristol was lucky enough to find some Mahonia bushes in flower, a winter flowering evergreen shrub that can have yellow flowers between November and March.

 

Mahonia flowers. (Courtesy of the RHS website)

 

But if you have a garden, or even a small patio or balcony, and can grow some suitable plants, you may be rewarded with sights like the buff-tailed bumblebee above, which I saw feeding on a patch of winter-flowering heather in the sunshine on Friday morning. Bee kind, if you can – nature needs our help, and can also give us so much pleasure.

 

Don't forget it is the RSPB Garden Watch this weekend! See my post from last January HERE.

 

Philip Grant.

1 Morland Gardens – hoping the Victorian villa has a Happy New Year! Here's how it could be so.

 Guest post by Philip Grant in a personal capacity

 

“Altamira”, the landmark villa at the entrance to Stonebridge Park, in 1907 and 2023.

 

For 150 years the Italianate-style Victorian villa called “Altamira” has stood at the entrance to an estate which gave the name Stonebridge Park to the surrounding area. Five years ago, Brent’s Cabinet approved plans which should have seen it demolished by now, even though it is a locally listed heritage asset in good condition. But it is still standing, and has the chance for a secure future as a community facility, as part of new redevelopment plans for the site.

 

The Council’s future options for its Morland Gardens property have been under review since November 2023, but with little progress on display when the public were asked for their input at the Bridge Park / Hillside Corridor exhibition on 28 and 30 November 2024. The consultation exercise launched then is still ongoing, but ends on Monday 6 January, so you still have time to express your views.

 

The consultation questionnaire for Morland Gardens was mainly a tick-box list of possible community facilities you would like to see provided, along with new Council homes on the site. That was not enough for my comments and suggestions, and I have submitted the detailed document which I hope that Martin can include at the end of this article.

 

 

The plan above is at the heart of my proposals, showing what I believe is a sensible outline redevelopment suggestion for the site, including the retained Victorian villa as the community facility and a housing layout which would provide around 27 Council homes, 25 of them as two, three or four bedroom properties to rent for local families with children. (It wasn’t until after I had finished preparing this plan that the lyric, ‘Little boxes on a Hillside’, flashed into my mind!) You can find further details of this suggested layout in section 3 of the document.

 

As well as sending my document to the agency handling the consultation, and the Council Officer in charge of the Morland Gardens review, I sent a copy to the Stonebridge Ward councillors. I invited their support for my suggestions, if they believed they were a sensible way forward for the site. I also reminded them of what Cllr. Aden had said, on their behalf, at the August 2020 Planning Committee meeting (which was ignored by the five councillors who voted to approve the Council’s flawed, and now failed, original Morland Gardens plans).

 

Extract from the minutes of the August 2020 Planning Committee meeting for application 20/0345.

 

My December 2024 proposals are for a redevelopment that would be very much in line with the wishes of the then Stonebridge Ward councillors (two of whom are still the same). I was pleased to receive an early reply from one of the councillors, although a little surprised that he did not appear to be aware that Brent Council have been reviewing its future plans for Morland Gardens since November 2023, or that it was part of the “Bridge Park” consultation!

 

While not expressing a view either way on my suggestions, he has indicated that the Council do need to hear from local people about what they want to see provided at Morland Gardens as part of the consultation. Copying in a fellow Ward councillor, he finished with the words: ‘As representatives of the community, we are here to represent the wishes of the wider community, so I believe all options will be considered.’

 

If you want the Council to consider your wishes for the Morland Gardens site, please send them, by next Monday 6 January, by email to: bridgepark@four.agency , with a copy to: neil.martin@brent.gov.uk . If you have read the document below (or at least section 3 of it), please feel free to mention it, and say whether you agree with my suggestions.

 

Philip Grant. 

 

The 2024 Wembley History Society Christmas Picture Quiz - the answers!

 Introduction to Christmas Quiz answers by local historian Philip Grant

Thank you to everyone who had a go at last weekend’s 2024 Wembley Christmas Picture Quiz. (If you haven’t done it yet, click on that “link” and have a go before you look at the answers!) 

 

I hope you’ve enjoyed the quiz, as part of the excellent and varied “Wembley Matters” content, which I’m sure that, like me, you are very grateful to Martin for providing. The answers document is below, at the foot of this guest post.

 

I wrote in a comment under the quiz, in relation to the photograph for question 4, that I’d been asked whether Wembley had its own band when the park, with its bandstand, was opened in 1914. The answer is “yes”, and only last week this photograph of the Wembley Town Band from c.1912 was shared with me by Richard, who wrote the letter about his Wembley airman / WW2 Prisoner of War father which Martin published last month.

 

Richard’s grandfather, Henry Hawkins (second from the left in the back row) was one of the organisers of the Wembley Town Band, when it was formed in 1910. A number of the band’s members were policemen or railway workers, and Richard’s great-grandfather, James Blackmore (seated just in front of Richard’s grandfather), the first Metropolitan Police officer to be stationed in Victorian Wembley, had played bass drum in the Met. Police band in the 1890s. The short gentleman standing next to the then bass drummer, and wearing a straw boater, is Titus Barham. He was the President of Wembley Town Band, and paid for the band’s uniforms, which were green with silver trimmings (another of his generous gifts to the people of his adopted town).

 

Hopefully, most of you knew, or guessed, that the intercity railway line through Wembley, in question 7, which opened in 1838, ran from London to Birmingham. It is interesting to compare it with the current High Speed 2 line. Robert Stephenson’s early Victorian trains had a top speed of 30 m.p.h., and at first the journey from Euston to Birmingham Curzon Street took 5½ hours. HS2 is predicted to cut that journey time to just 50 minutes. 

 

But construction of the original line took less than five years (November 1833 to September 1838), whereas HS2 began construction in 2017, and the phase from Euston to Birmingham Curzon Street is expected to be finished by 2033. So the first railway was quicker in one way!

There were probably a few of the questions 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 some aspects of Wembley’s past. I’ve included “links” with some 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, and wrote down your answers, you can now see how many you got right. There are no prizes, but if you want to share your score out of twenty (just to let others know how well, or badly, you did), you are welcome to add a comment below!

 

With best wishes for the Christmas season, and a happy and healthy New Year,

 

Philip Grant,
for Wembley History Society.

UPDATE: Internet Success! Photgraph of R.D. Douglas Found: Lest We Forget – looking for relatives of a WW2 Wembley airman

 Guest post by local historian Philip Grant in a personal capacity

Extract from a document produced by the Dutch Airwar Study Group 1939-1945.

 

The Second World War seems a long time ago, and we probably don’t think about it very often, unless we were personally affected by the loss of a family member. But there are some people who still give their time and effort to ensure that those who lost their lives in that awful conflict are remembered with respect. I was contacted recently by one of those, asking for help to try and find relatives, and hopefully a photograph of, an RAF airman from Wembley who died in 1943, and I’m writing this guest post to ask for any help that you can give, please.

 

Ronald Douglas Francis (no relation to the editor) was born in May 1921. By the age of 21, he was a Sargeant in the R.A.F., and the wireless operator / air gunner on a Lancaster bomber flying missions to bomb industrial sites in Germany. On the night of 3 April 1943, his aircraft was shot down by a German night fighter, and at around midnight it crashed in flames in a forest near Stevensbeek, in the south of The Netherlands. All seven members of the Lancaster’s crew were killed, and their graves are now in a war cemetery at Eindhoven.

 

Some of the war graves at Eindhoven, and the gravestone of Sgt. R.D. Francis.
(Source: Commonwealth War Graves Commission website)

 

The Dutch Airwar Study Group 1939-1945 have been collecting information about this aircraft and its crew, and have sent me an excellent information sheet, prepared by one of their members, Rene, which I will ask Martin to attach at the end of this article. As you will see, they have yet to find a photograph of Ronald Francis, or of the plane’s pilot, 20-year old Pilot Officer W.H. Swire, and rear gunner Sgt. R.R. Feeley. They would very much like to have photographs of all the crew members, to include on a memorial it is hoped to erect near the crash site. A similar memorial was recently installed to remember the crew of a Wellington bomber, who also died in April 1943 when it crashed, just inside the Dutch border, after being damaged by “flak” (anti-aircraft gunfire) on a mission over Duisburg.

 

Memorial board to a Wellington bomber crew. (Courtesy of Leo Janssen)

 

As well as photographs, the Study Group would also like to contact any living relatives of Ronald Douglas Francis, and his fellow crew members, so that they can be invited to, or at least aware of, the steps being taken and events to commemorate the lost Lancaster bomber. Ronald’s parents, John Charles Francis and Winifred Edith Francis, lived at 19 Douglas Avenue, Wembley (a turning off of Ealing Road). Does anyone in the area still remember the family, including the names of any of Ronald’s brothers or sisters who might still be alive, and where they might be found now? If you have any information which might help, please send it to Leo Janssen at: leojanssen1954@ziggo.nl  (with a copy to Wembley Matters, if possible).

 

Wars are horrible things. They bring about terrible loss of life and injury, destruction and disruption of people’s lives. Bombing, especially the indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas, is one of its worst aspects. But it is not the men and women who volunteer, or are called-up, to serve in the armed forces of their countries, who cause the wars, or decide what acts of war are inflicted on “the enemy”. If they lose their lives (or suffer life changing injuries or trauma) in the course of their service, they deserve to be remembered with respect.

 

It is moving, and humbling, that there are groups of people in The Netherlands who are working to ensure that British and Commonwealth war dead are not forgotten. Another organisation, in the same North Brabant province as Stevensbeek, is the Overloon War Chronicles Foundation. They are collecting the photographs and stories of the Allied soldiers who fought and died in the Battle of Overloon, a crucial victory in the advance towards Germany in October 1944, and are among the 281 who are buried in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery in the village.

 

A remembrance service at Overloon war graves cemetery. (Courtesy of Leo Janssen)

 

For the past few years, people the municipality of Land van Cuijk, which includes Overloon, have been holding a special remembrance event at their local war graves cemeteries each Christmas time. Any relatives of the dead, or others interested, are invited to join the local community for this. On Tuesday 24 December 2024 the tour of four cemeteries will end at Overloon, with a programme of music, speeches, poems and readings, starting at 4pm. And on Christmas Day and Boxing Day, candles will be lit on each of the graves, as part of the annual Lights on War Graves commemoration.

 

The annual commemoration and Lights on War Graves at Overloon cemetery.
(Courtesy of Leo Janssen)

 

Lest we forget!

UPDATE February 23rd 2025 from Philip Grant

Douglas Avenue cropped up again in a February 2025 WW2 guest post:
https://wembleymatters.blogspot.com/2025/02/the-curious-incident-of-dornier-in-night.html

I sent a "link" to that article to the Dutch team and their English family history researcher. I'm pleased to say that I have heard back from them that they have managed to contact a relative of Ronald Francis, and obtained a photograph of him in his RAF uniform. Here it is:

 

 
 

Philip Grant.