Kensal Green is the site of Kensal Green Cemetery, the oldest English cemetery still in operation, which contains many elaborate Victorian mausoleums, including those of William Makepeace Thackeray and Anthony Trollope.

The origins of Kensal Green though go way back. The first part of the name Kensal Green was recorded as Kingisholt, meaning the king's wood, in 1253, and the whole name was recorded in 1550. Kensal Green was for long a very remote area, straddling the Harrow Road. It formed part of one of ten manors, most likely Chamberlayne Wood Manor, named after Canon Richard de Camera (of the Chambers).

The place was depicted in 1599 as a broad green at the junction of Harrow Road with Kilburn Lane, on the borders of the parishes of Willesden, Kensington, and until 1900, some 144 acres of it formed a detached portion of the parish of St. Luke's, Chelsea. Its location marked the boundary between Willesden and the then Chelsea & Paddington.

In the fifteenth century the then Archbishop of Canterbury Henry Chichele (1414–1443), acquired lands in Willesden and Kingsbury. In 1443 he found All Souls College, Oxford and endowed it lands in his will.

There was an inn called the 'Plough', in the 1780s a haunt of the artist George Morland.

By the 1740s farmhouses had been built facing Kilburn Lane and the Plough inn at the junction with Harrow Road. South of Harrow Road a large house stood opposite the Plough and the Red House farther west.

The isolation of this remote district had been greatly increased by the construction of the Paddington branch of the Grand Junction Canal, opened in 1801. A cottage had been built on the All Souls estate by 1800 and another next to the Plough by 1823.



The Plough, Kensal Green (click image to enlarge)


After 1814, the green was used as a shooting range by the Cumberland Sharpshooters, a local rifle club. When it was enclosed in 1823 the green was divided up into small plots which were sold as valuable sites at a junction on Harrow Road near the Paddington canal. Cottages, owned by local tradespeople and inhabited by the poor, had been built on all these plots by 1829. A terrace of houses (Kensal Place), had gone up by this year too.

At the turn of the 1830s, Kensal Green was a village with a baker, a grocer, a milliner, a carpenter, a bookmaker and two general dealers. Barges laden with cargoes ranging from iron and coal to waste paper and gravel were towed through Kensal and this traffic led to the foundation of a brick works.

There were two dairy farms in Kensal Green by the early 1800s, which expanded greatly after the 1864 Act of Parliament which made it illegal to keep cattle within the City of London. Although by the late 1800s residential development had greatly reduced the farmland, still in the 1890s many sheep and pigs were raised in the district. One of the farms later became a United Dairies creamery, supplied by milk trains from Mitre Bridge Junction.

The General Cemetery Company in 1831 bought fifty-four acres of land for use as a burial ground, and in 1845 the Western Gas Company had opened a gasworks on land (previously the property of Sir George Talbot) with frontages to both the canal and the railway. The opening of All Souls cemetery in 1832, effectively blocked further building in Kensington parish. The London and Birmingham railway was driven through the Willesden portion of Kensal Green in 1837, cutting off the farmhouses in Kilburn Lane from much of their land.

The Hampstead Junction railway was built north of Kensal Green in 1860 with a station, Kensal Green and Harlesden (operational between 1861 and 1873), at the junction of Harrow Road with Green Lane (later Wrottesley Road). The station was moved to Kensal Green (called Kensal Rise from 1890) in Chamberlayne Road in 1873. By 1876 Kensal Green was 'most thickly covered' and many of the houses were small, consisting of only two or four rooms, drained into open ditches and taking their water supply from butts. Many people kept pigs.

Rapid residential development led to local commissioners reporting in 1880 that there was inadequate drainage and sewerage facilities, with most houses having only improved access to what were the old agricultural drains. In that same year, All Souls College started to develop its lands north west of Kilburn Lane, including All Souls Avenue and College Road, with adjacent roads being named after leading Fellows of the college.

Kensal Green is now a residential area with good transport links to central London. The names Kensal Green and Kensal Rise are used somewhat interchangeably by non-residents to denote the same district, although residents differentiate between the areas based on proximity to the local tube and railway stations. Roughly speaking, the area west of Chamberlayne Road, north of Harrow Road and south of Kensal Rise railway station is considered Kensal Green while that to the east of Chamberlayne Road and north of the station is considered Kensal Rise. These boundaries are by no means fixed however and some residents are known to use both terms with little regard for geographical accuracy.

Kensal Green station opened on 1 October 1916 on the New Line on the north side of the existing London and North Western Railway tracks from Euston to Watford.