West Hendon, Barnet
One of the borough’s poorer quarters, West Hendon is separated from Hendon proper by the M1 motorway
West Hendon Baptist church
The land hereabouts was once part of Tunworth (now Kingsbury) but, by passing into the ownership of Westminster Abbey, came within the parish and manor of Hendon in the late tenth century.
Although the locality attracted visitors following the creation of the Welsh Harp reservoir in the 1830s, no settlement existed here until the opening of Hendon main-line station in 1868. Over the latter part of the 19th century West Hendon evolved as a new suburb, consisting almost entirely of terraced housing. A Baptist mission hall was built in 1885 and Nonconformists joined Anglicans in contributing to St John’s School, built in 1889, after seeing shoeless children walking to Church End in Willesden. The Church of St John the Evangelist held services in temporary buildings until its permanent home was consecrated in 1896. In the same year the opening of Schweppes bottling plant brought further growth to the locality.
West Hendon Broadway was fully built up by the outbreak of the First World War, although open fields still stretched south to Cricklewood railway sidings at this time. The North Circular Road cut across these fields in the 1920s. In February 1941 a V2 rocket killed 80 West Hendon residents and made 1,500 homeless. Much of the surviving housing stock was demolished and rebuilt between the 1940s and the late 1960s. The closure of the Schweppes plant in 1980 contributed to the area’s economic decline and West Hendon has recently been the focus of various regeneration projects.
Slightly more than half of West Hendon’s residents are white, while a fifth are of Indian origin.
