The Fryent Country Park Story - Part 4

The fourth in a series of guest posts by local historian Philip Grant

 

Welcome back, to our wander through the history of one of Brent’s best open spaces. If you missed the previous instalment, please “click” on Part 3 (which has “links” to Parts 1 and 2).

 

1. A view across the fields at haymaking time, with Kingsbury and Stanmore Common beyond.

The story so far has brought us up to the early 20^th century. The hay trade, which had been the main source of income for Kingsbury’s farmers, was declining by this time. In part, this was due to the import of cheaper foreign hay, but the introduction of motor vehicles was also having an increasing impact. New uses had to be found for many of the local pastures. Some, like Fryent Farm, had switched to keeping dairy cattle. 

George Withers, at Little Bush Farm, had become a breeder of, and dealer in, polo ponies. You might not imagine our area as a centre for playing polo, but in the early 1900s there were at least two local polo grounds. The Kingsbury Polo Club occupied land that is now the site of Roe Green Village, and part of Roe Green Park. There was also a polo ground, with stables and fields for the ponies, centred where Greenhill Way now stands (which is why the road across this hill is called The Paddocks!). The First World War put an end to the polo clubs, after their ponies were requisitioned by the army in 1915.

 

2. Little Bush Farm, in a postcard from c.1920.  

(Courtesy of the late Geoffrey Hewlett)

After the war, the spread of suburban housing would bring about greater changes. When Wembley Park was chosen, in 1921, as the site for the British Empire Exhibition, Blackbird Hill, Church Lane and Forty Lane were all converted from narrow country byways to wide modern roads, to make the exhibition easier to reach. This better access to the area also attracted property developers. In 1923, Wembley Golf Course was purchased by Haymills Ltd, who were soon building streets of detached homes on the southern slopes of Barn Hill.

 

3. The cover of the 1922 "Metro-Land" booklet.  

(Wembley History Society Collection at Brent Archives)

Around 27 million visitors came to the British Empire Exhibition in 1924/25. Many were attracted by the pleasant countryside, close to London. The Metropolitan Railway was already promoting the districts along its line as “Metro-Land”, a healthy place to live, from which the man of the house could commute “to town”. Wembley Council could see the danger of overdevelopment, and in 1927 purchased 50 acres at the top of the hill from Haymills, to be Barn Hill Open Space.

In 1929, the Metropolitan Railway announced that it would build a branch line from Wembley Park. Construction began on this Stanmore Line in January 1931 [“click” on the link for full details]. The route curved around Barn Hill and through Uxendon Farm, which had already been demolished to make way for it, on its way to Kingsbury.

 

4. Uxendon Farm, about to be demolished in 1929.

 (Brent Archives online image 0498)

Haymills had already purchased more land, to the north of the hill, from Preston Farm. These were the fields known as Upper and Lower Hydes, and Bugbeards – the latter may seem an odd title, but this field name was first recorded in the 15^th century, and a document from 1642 lists five men in Harrow Parish with the surname Bugbeard! In 1934, Haymills stopped building in the area, and sold their undeveloped land to George Wimpey & Co. 

On the Kingsbury side of our future country park, Masons Field in Old Kenton Lane had been sold to the London General Omnibus Company in 1927, for a sports ground. Just along the lane, another field beside the Junior Mixed and Infants’ School (now Kingsbury Green) was acquired by Kingsbury Council as a recreation ground. Little Bush Farm had closed by 1930, while Hill Farm had become a horse-riding establishment, the Premier School of Equitation.

5. Hill Farm and its pond, in Salmon Street, c.1920.  

(Brent Archives online image 0480)

Having established the Barn Hill Open Space, Wembley’s Parks Committee had to make sure it was looked after. In March 1935, a report from the Council’s Surveyor referred to an annual loss of “decayed and rotting trees”, and suggested a regular programme of tree planting. One of his proposed schemes for Barn Hill was to ‘plant approximately 4 dozen Lombardy Poplars in the form of an avenue leading from the top of the hill to the gate on the east side adjoining Town Planning Road No.17 (Kingsbury).’ Some of those poplars are still a skyline feature.

 

6. Part of the Kingsbury U.D.C. 1926 Town Planning Scheme map. 

 (With thanks to Gareth Davies)

Proposed future main roads were something that local Councils had to include in the town planning schemes the government asked them to prepare in the 1920s. Kingsbury had been a separate Council area, until it became part of Wembley Urban District in 1934. Its T.P. Road No.17 was built in 1934/35, and named Fryent Way. Another of the new roads included in the 1926 scheme would have run from Slough Lane, by Bush Farm, to Fryent Way, and the kerb stones for that junction are still in place, just south of Valley Drive! All of the land between the Stanmore Line and Salmon Street was zoned for future housing development.

 

7. Bush Farm in a postcard from c.1930. (Brent Archives online image 0479)      

By the end of 1935, Wimpeys already had a planning application approved to build two new streets, with 362 houses, between Uxendon Hill and Fryent Way. As the map extract below shows, housing development was also spreading northwards on the other side of Barn Hill. Salmon Estates Ltd had put in an outline application to build homes at 8 per acre, on all the land beyond Salmon Street zoned for housing. Then, in January 1936, they submitted detailed plans for houses on both sides of Fryent Way, north from the junction with The Paddocks.

8. Extract from the 1935 O.S. map, showing Salmon Street and the Hill Farm land due for development.

The rapid spread of suburban housing around London had given rise to the idea of a “Green Belt”. In 1934, Parliament gave Middlesex County Council powers to acquire land for this purpose, and during the following year it worked out, with local councils, how such purchases could be financed. The area which is now our country park was identified as land suitable for such a scheme.

In early 1936, the County Council put a compulsory purchase order on the Wimpey’s land north of Barn Hill. There was a court battle over how much compensation the developer should receive. When this was settled in 1938, Wembley Council contributed 25% of the cost, and the fields were added to its Barn Hill Open Space, with some used as sports grounds.

In March 1936, Wembley’s Planning Committee “disapproved” the Salmon Estates planning applications, on the grounds that the land was now reserved for open space purposes. Again, it was 1938 before the purchase of the fields in Kingsbury Parish from All Souls College was finalised, and they became Middlesex C.C.’s Fryent Way Regional Open Space. As part of the Council’s policy, the existing farm tenancies on the land were allowed to continue.

You may think that this is the end of the story, and that things have stayed the same on our open space since the late 1930s. However, there will be more to discover next weekend, if you wish to!

Philip Grant

LINKS TO OTHER ARTICLES IN THIS SERIES

History of Fryent Country Park – Part 1

History of Fryent Country Park – Part 2

History of Fryent Country Park – Part 3

History of Fryent Country Park – Part 4

History of Fryent Country Park – Part 5

History of Fryent Country Park – Part 6

History of Fryent Country Park – Bunker Special

The Fryent Country Park Story – Part 3

 The third in a series of guest posts by local historian Philip Grant

If you have already read the first two parts of this history of our local country park, welcome back. If not, you can find them by “clicking” on Part 1 and Part 2.

1. The pond on Barn Hill.

We left the story in the late 18^th century, when most of the fields on what would become the country park had been turned over to growing hay. Some of the local landowners, though, did not need to rely on this seasonal crop for their income. 

The Page family had been farmers in the Wembley area since at least 1534, when John Page rented land from Archbishop Cranmer (and later purchased some of it, after King Henry VIII had taken it from the Church in 1545). They had become wealthier over the centuries, and when Richard Page inherited another fortune from a spinster aunt in 1792, he wanted to show off his estate in the most fashionable way.

Page hired the famous landscape architect, Humphry Repton, to create beautiful grounds for his home, which he planned to rebuild into a mansion. As well as his fields to the south of Forty Lane, he also included the Barn Hill section of his Uxendon lands. Repton drew up a planting scheme that would frame the hill with a line of oak trees, which have been a feature of the landscape ever since, with many still there.

2. Humphry Repton's sketch of what the view of Wembley Park from Barn Hill would look like.

Repton believed that having grazing cattle would ‘enliven the scene’ when viewed from the Wembley Park mansion, as hay meadows lacked interest. He also built a ‘prospect tower’ on top of Barn Hill, from which Mr Page’s visitors could enjoy the view across his estate, ‘as well as forming a dwelling house for those who should have the care of the prospect rooms, and the dairy’. It is likely that he also had the pond created on top of the hill, close to the tower and dairy, so that the cattle had plenty of water to drink.

The 1793 plans for Wembley Park were never fully completed, after Richard Page fell out with Repton over his designs for the mansion. The history of the Page family does not end well, but that’s another story!

The Pages were exceptions to the rule, and with small farms let on short leases and a single basic crop, the hay farmers of Kingsbury did not become rich men in the 19^th century. They hired casual labour to help with the haymaking, and in years when the weather was bad at harvest time, they often went into debt. It didn’t help that, at times of agricultural depression, the local parish rates were higher, to provide relief for the poor.

 

3. A modern view of the Kingsbury meadows at haymaking time.

One unfortunate farmer was William Nicholls of Bush Farm. He had been declared bankrupt, and his belongings were sold to help pay his debts. An advertisement in March 1842 lists his farm equipment. This included ‘two capital road waggons, nearly new’, twelve hay, dung and other carts, hay making machines, a heavy pasture roller, a large number of rick cloths, two stack scaffolds, plus ladders, hay racks and forks.

By the late 1840s, many haymaking labourers were itinerant Irishmen, who had left their homes because of the potato famine. Bishop (later Cardinal) Wiseman was head of the recently restored Catholic church in London, and in 1849 he asked the Passionist religious order to send over priests from Dublin, to minister to these agricultural workers. They rented a barn at Hyde House Farm in Kingsbury (where the writer, Oliver Goldsmith, had lodged from 1771-74), before moving to a house in Wood Lane three years later.

When the Ordnance Survey published a booklet in 1865, giving details of all the land shown on their 1:2500 map of Kingsbury, all but two of the 200 fields in the parish were meadows. Almost every farm had a plot of land, generally of between a half and one acre, specifically described as “stackyard and sheds”.

Some of the meadows were put to other uses as well. John Elmore, who farmed at Uxendon in the mid-19^th century, held popular steeplechase races across his land. The Wealdstone Brook ran through his fields, and provided a ‘sensational water jump’. Even after Elmore’s death, this course was used occasionally as part of long-distance horse races from the Old Welsh Harp tavern, until an Act of Parliament in 1879 banned unlicensed race courses within ten miles of the centre of London.

While Kingsbury was still a rural backwater, it was beginning to be recognized as a place for recreation. From 1870, people in the crowded Metropolis could take a train to Hendon, and an 1880s book, “Our Lanes and Meadowpaths”, encouraged them to enjoy Saturday afternoon walks in nearby countryside, after their 5½ days of labour. It’s author, H J Foley included several routes through Kingsbury.

 

4. Haymaking near Kenton c.1880. (An illustration from H J Foley’s “Our Lanes and Meadowpaths”)

For one walk he tells his readers to ‘… make for Piper’s Barn just beyond the Green Man.’ From there, he describes a footpath to Harrow, which for nearly four miles ‘simply threads its way through one meadow after another, round the base of a big green hill.’ That was Barn Hill, and the path can still be followed today, from alongside St Robert Southwell School in Slough Lane. This “meadowpath” is all across fields, until the bridge over the Jubilee Line leading to Shakespeare Drive, apart from where you cross Fryent Way, near the end of Valley Drive.

When Wembley Park Station was opened on the Metropolitan Railway in 1894, it did more than just bring visitors to the new Pleasure Grounds there. By the following year, the Wembley Golf Club’s course had been laid out on the Barn Hill section of Repton’s century-old landscape. The second of the 18 holes on the 4,500-yard golf course had the tee on one side of the hilltop pond, and the green on the other!

At the start of the 20^th century, Kingsbury had become an Urban District, but hardly deserved that description. Its total population at the 1901 census was just 757 people, and many of these were still involved in agriculture. At Little Bush Farm, for example, the two adult males living there were listed as a “carter” and a “hay loader”.

The last entry on the census return gives the address as ‘Encampment at Salmon Street’, and lists three “households”. One was headed by Miss L. Sanders, a licensed hawker and pedlar, aged 41. She had two sons, aged 5 and 3, born at Uxbridge and Hampstead, and a male “boarder”, aged 22, whose occupation was ‘clothes peg maker’. Both of the other family groups included pedlar/hawkers, and all had been born at various locations around London.

 

5. A gipsy camp at Alperton, early 1900s. (Photo by Bertram Wickison, from “Kingsbury & Kenton News”, 1952)

I can remember, as a child in the 1950s, when gipsy women would sometimes visit our estate, and go door-to-door selling clothes pegs, and sprigs of “lucky” white heather. That was probably what this group were doing, camping for a time on a piece of common land beside Salmon Street, and getting the wood for their peg-making from the local hedgerows. By chance, a local newspaper’s reminiscences feature in 1952 included a photograph, taken at Alperton in the early 1900s, which may well show Miss Sanders!

By around 1900, Most of Uxendon Farm’s fields had been taken over by Preston Farm, and the remaining part was used as a shooting school. When the Olympic Games came to London for the first time in 1908, the farm became the venue for the clay pigeon shooting competition. Because Uxendon was hard to get to along untarmacked lanes, the Metropolitan Railway was persuaded to open a new “halt” for its trains at Preston Road.

6. Uxendon Farm, in a 1908 Olympics photo (“Evening Standard”), and on the 1920 edition O.S. map.

The map above, surveyed just before the First World War, shows fields, farms and the edge of Repton’s belt of trees around Barn Hill (also visible in the photograph). It also shows a small new development of houses on Preston Road, the start of a period of major change which will continue in the next part of the Fryent Country Park Story. Look out for it next weekend.

Philip Grant.

LINKS TO OTHER ARTICLES IN THIS SERIES

 

History of Fryent Country Park – Part 1

History of Fryent Country Park – Part 2

History of Fryent Country Park – Part 3

History of Fryent Country Park – Part 4

History of Fryent Country Park – Part 5

History of Fryent Country Park – Part 6

History of Fryent Country Park – Bunker Special

Ark Academy plan 6th Form building on Repton remnant

Bird's eye view of the area 

Rectangle marks the new building and red the trees to be removed (black dash is a tree protection boundary)

Ark Academy, Wembley, is applying for planning permission to build a Sixth Building on a site at the corner of Bridge Road and Forty Lane, that was retained when the original planning permission was given for the new school.

The site is thought to retain a rare portion of some of Repton's original landscape planting for the Page family at Wembley Park in the 1790s.  LINK

As well as the heritage argument campaigners also argued that this was a potential habitat for bats, hedgehogs and other animals as well as a patch of green in an area rapidly being concretised.

The Planning Application argues that most of the trees to be removed are due to their condition, rather than to make way for the building and that removal has been kept to the minimum. Some moving and replanting  of trees is proposed as well as new planting.

The application contains all sorts of ideas about the educational use of the protected area of trees and shrubs that will be left. However,  as someone who lives nearby and walks past almost daily, I have never seen it being used by pupils since the school opened in 2008 and the woodland looks quite neglected, with tin cans that have been tossed over the fence tangled in the undergrowth.

Habitat preservation and enhancement would be welcome but that should have been done anyway,

Preston Manor School is also seeking new build in order to expand its Sixth Form. The two schools are in competition with Preston Manor following the Ark by building a primary school on site and thus becoming an all-through school. It also converted to academy status. Ark plans to open its Sixth Form in September 2015 and is currently recruiting students.

The full plans can be seen HERE  The application will be decided no earlier than February 10th. Planning Officer  victoria.mcdonagh@brent.gov.uk