Brindley Street was once one of the poorest streets in Paddington.
Brindley Street, Alfred Road, and their neighbours were built as densely-packed terraces around 1855.
The commercial prosperity of Westbourne Grove contrasted with a rapid social decline in these streets between the railway and the canal. Subletting to weekly lodgers had made Brindley Street the most overcrowded in Paddington, with three and a half persons to a room by 1865. By 1894-5, nearby Waverley Road was ’among the eleven worst in the parish’. A few street further south Marlborough Street (later Torquay Street), was singled out as one of six poor patches amid the general affluence of north-west London.
Subletting had gone so far that a room might have different tenants by day and by night. This was controlled only by declaring buildings to be lodging houses. This was attributed in 1899 to the canal isolating the area against through traffic and to the density of building.
The worst slums, between the railway and the canal, were transformed by the LCC. In 1957 it had bought 206 properties from the borough council and 266 from the Church Commissioners. Under a 1958 scheme, half of the land was to be used for 1,127 dwellings, of which 946 were to be in new blocks and the others in renovated houses. The Warwick estate, as it came to be called, was opened in 1962 and soon extended west of Harrow Road over the site of Brindley Street.
Most of the old street names have disappeared, including Brindley Street - a few names were reassigned to rebuilt roads or cul-de-sacs.
