Mortimer Crescent is a notable street in Kilburn, full of literary connections.
Mortimer Crescent was built in 1854 and originally called Mortimer Road after Thomas Hill Mortimer, who was the solicitor for Fulk Greville Howard and then Colonel Arthur Upton, who owned the Greville Estate area. These were built as houses for wealthy and professional people.
Henley House school, nos. 6 & 7 Mortimer Road (later Crescent), Kilburn, had been unsuccessful before 1878 when John Vine Milne, father of the writer A. A. Milne, bought the goodwill. Numbers rose from c. 6 to 50 boys, aged 8 to 18, including 15 boarders. Milne’s family lived in one semi-detached house, the other being adapted for classrooms. H. G. Wells taught English, science, and drawing 1889-90 and admired Milne.
Although equipment was sparse and the school fell short of its intentions; the honour system for discipline was in advance of its time, and a new approach to mathematics proved successful for university entrance. Alfred Harmsworth was encouraged to start the school magazine in 1878, printed from 1881. Milne moved his school c. 1892 to Westgate-on-Sea in Kent.
On the Kilburn priory estate Hillsborough Court, a neo-Tudor block decorated with heraldic motifs in stone, was built for Greville Estates in Mortimer Crescent in 1933.
George Orwell lived in the street from 1941-44 at Kington House, an original Victorian terrace which was destroyed by a V1 flying bomb during the Second World War in 1944, while Orwell was living there.
A.A. Milne was also born and lived on the street and was taught by H.G. Wells.
In 1948 the L.C.C. began clearing the area between Greville Road and Mortimer Place and Crescent, which it replaced with the Mortimer Crescent estate, eight smallscale, brick blocks of flats, which were opened c. 1955.
