Ardwick Road, NW2

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Temple Park

Temple Park is one of the smaller suburbs of north London.

Just a few streets in total, Temple Park lies in the former grounds of a large house built along the (then new) Finchley Road in the 1830s.

The arrival of the Finchley road lessened the area’s isolation. A house called Temple Park was built on the smaller Temples estate probably in the 1830s by Henry Weech Burgess, a prosperous Lancastrian. Temple Park had become the Anglo-French College by 1873.

A few houses had been built by 1878 and in 1880 Weech Road was constructed between Fortune Green Road and Finchley Road on the portion of Teil's estate purchased by the Burgesses in 1855. Four houses were built there in 1880 and another 12 in 1887 by A. R. Amer and Becket.

In 1890 Kidderpore Hall was acquired by Westfield College, which made considerable additions to it in 1904-5, and the rest of the estate given over to the builders.

By the turn of the twentieth century, building was proceeding on the Burgess Park (Temples) estate: the same builder, George Hart, was responsible for Briardale Road and Clorane Gardens, where the houses were built between 1900 and 1910.

In 1905 on the Burgess Park estate 18 houses were built in Finchley Road, possibly including nos. 601 and 603 designed by Voysey, and by 1913 building was complete in Burgess Hill, Ardwick Road, and Weech Road and two houses had been built in Ranulf Road. In 1901 a small piece on the western side of the Burgess Park estate was added to the cemetery.

During the Second World War bombing destroyed several houses on the Burgess Park estate, including some in Ardwick Road and two of Voysey's houses, nos. 601 and 603 Finchley Road, which were replaced by houses designed by R. Seifert.