It is a varied street. AA Milne lived at one end of the High Road and WH Smith at the other. Dickens once drank in The Black Lion. Ella Fitzgerald once sang in The Gaumont State Theatre, later a bingo hall, later still, a church. Ian Dury's original band was called "Kilburn And The High Roads".
Kilburn High Road railway station opened in 1852 as Kilburn & Maida Vale station by the LNWR. The current footbridge and street-level buildings are not so much the result of modernisation but of three or four major fires which have occurred here since the early 1970s. It is now part of the London Overground.