Queen's Park Fills The Old Fields

William Austin

William Austin Founder of the Artizans, Labourers and General Dwellings Co. Ltd. He was a reformed alcoholic and there was  always a strong temperance feeling in all their work and an absolute ban on public houses on the estates. As a result the off licenses in the Harrow Road did a brisk trade. Typical Queen's Park Houses

By 1882, 1,571 houses had been built at Queen's Park and 449 were in course of erection. Today the order of building can be traced from the dates on the fronts of the houses. By building the estate right up to the edges of the fields, with Kilburn Lane to the north and west, Lashmore Road to the east and Harrow Rd to the south, the Company retained the fossilized shape of the northern part of 'Chelsea Removed'. Its old field boundaries are still clear today.

Swindlehurst had claimed earlier that the Company was more successful in providing housing for working people than the Waterlow, or the Peabody administrations, which had more capital. They had put families into rented accommodation at 2 shillings a room a week. The Artizans, on the other hand, had put them not only into occupancy of a five-roomed house, excluding the scullery, but into actual ownership, at one shilling and two pence per room per week. Payments to extend over 14 years.

House Prices

During the housing boom of the 1980s estate agents promoted Queen's Park vigorously, advertising it, according to Benny Green, as ‘West West Hampstead’.

In 1988, these cottages were being sold for £115,000 and in the year 2000, for about a quarter of a million. This is far more money than Swindlehurst saw in his lifetime.

Later prices rose even more steeply and in 2010 a compact two bedroom flat in a small house was being rented to a single mother with two children for £335 a week.

Guardian  6/10/2010

The maps below shows the changes betwen the Chelsea Tithe Award Map, 1847 used on page 97 and the 1896 Ordinance Survey Map.

Chelsea Tithe Award Map, 1847 (see page 97)	Whole Map	Full Size	Full Size Map in New Window
Ordinace Survey , 1896	Whole Map	Full Size	Full Size Map in New Window