Childs Hill, is the most south-eastern point of the ancient parish of Hendon, and is now a part of the London Borough of Barnet. The settlement at Child’s Hill is certainly medieval, possibly the 10th century settlement Codenhleawe (which has come down to us as “Cowhouse”), and was owned by Westminster Abbey. Although a John Knot de Childes Hill is associated with the Peasants Revolt, the earliest known use of the place name Child’s Hill is 1593. The name is probably taken from a family of the same name who held land in Hendon in the 14th century. It has been suggested that the Castle Inn was a small Civil War (1642 – 49) gun emplacement guarding the Edgware Road. The first record of the Castle Inn however is 1751. Child’s Hill was a centre for brick and tile making during the second half of the 18th Century, supplying material for building Hampstead (which is to the east nearby), and run by a Samuel Morris. 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 an optical telegraph station, one in a line from the Admiralty to Great Yarmouth. Only the name, Telegraph Hill, remains.
An act of Parliament, 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 (later renamed Granville Road). By the 1870s there a number of laundries, servicing much of Victorian West London, were established in The Mead. Clothes washed in London were thought to be susceptible to water borne disease, such cholera and typhoid, and Child’s Hill, then still in the countryside was supplied by a series of small streams coming off Hampstead Heath. The population in the area was growing quickly. In 1856 a new church, All Saints, was built (the third church in the parish of Hendon). Further extensions were added between 1878 and 84, and in 1940 the church was so badly damaged by fire that it had to be substantially rebuilt in 1952. In 1884 the Pyramid Light Works, a candle manufactory, was established, the first factory in the Hendon area.
The opening of Child’s Hill Railway Station, now Cricklewood Station, in 1868 led to an increase in population, and the subsequent overcrowding reduced Child’s Hill into a “very low” place, with cock-fighting, drunkenness, and vice. 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 Child’s Hill and Golders Green to the north was still farmland, but with the motorbuses (1906), the tube at Golders Green (1907), the trams (1909), and finally The Hendon Way (1927) farmland succumbed to suburbia, and the distinction between Golders Green and Child’s Hill was blurred. For entertainment Child’s 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.
See also
