Childs Hill Park

10th Century

The settlement at Childs Hill is certainly medieval, possibly the 10th-century settlement Codenhleawe, later called 'Cowhouse'.

16th Century

The earliest known use of the place name Child's Hill is in 1593.The name is probably taken from a family called Child in the 14th century.

18th Century

The Castle Inn was first recorded in 1751, when Child's Hill was a centre for brick and tile-making run by the Morris family, supplying material for building Hampstead. At one time there was a brick and tile making industry, which supplied materials when the Hampstead area was being developed from the late-18th century.

19th Century

By the 1870s a number of laundries at Childs Hill cleaned clothes for people in the new suburbs of West London and Hampstead. Clothes washed in London were thought to be susceptible to waterborne disease, such as cholera and typhoid, and Child's Hill, then still in the countryside, was supplied by a series of small streams coming off Hampstead Heath.

In 1884 the Pyramid Light Works, a candle factory, was the first factory in the Hendon area. Victorian Child's Hill was a 'very low' place, with cock-fighting, drunkenness and vice.

Housing development at Child's Hill was rapid once the Child's Hill and Cricklewood Station opened in 1870. Childs Hill Park was created on land that was gifted to the Hendon Board for this purpose in 1891 by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners.

20th Century

Housing in Child's Hill in 1903 was described as a 'disgrace to civilisation', and in 1914 Hendon Urban District Council built its first council estate, numbering 50 houses. Childs 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.

Type

Park

Purpose

Recreational/sport

Principal Building

Parks, Gardens And Urban Spaces

Survival

Extant

Open to the public

Yes