|
Brondesbury which includes Brondesbury Park, is an area in the London Boroughs of Brent and Camden, in north London, England. The area is traditionally part of the ancient parish and subsequent municipal borough of Willesden, one of the areas that merged to form the modern borough of Brent.
Brondesbury railway station lies 4.1 miles north-west of Charing Cross, and its proximity to the originally Roman A5 road (the borough's eastern boundary) sometimes leads to addresses on the eastern, Camden, side of the road to also be informally described as part of Brondesbury.
It was a rural area until several decades after the coming of the railway in the Victorian era. Housing began to be built in earnest across Brondesbury in the late 1860s to 1890s and it became desirable enough to retain a suburban layout and most of the associated original wave of house building. It has long had British, Irish, Jewish, black and South Asian communities. Brondesbury was once the location of residence for Black civil rights leader Billy Strachan and his family, who wrote for local newspapers gave weekly political speeches in the area.
The manor Brondesbury, Brands or Broomsbury almost certainly derived its name from Brand (seen in documents of about 1192 and 1215), sometimes confused with Brownswood in Hornsey of Roger Brun listed as prebendary of Brondesbury. The estate was held by the prebendaries until it was vested in the Ecclesiastical Commissioners in 1840 under the Act of that year. In 1649 the parliamentary commissioners sold it to Ralph Marsh but it reverted at the Restoration (1660). The leasehold interest of Brondesbury was bought with what remained too of Bounds manor in 1856 and the Ecclesiastical Commissioners retained the freehold until the 1950s and 1960s.
|
