During the Victorian era, the concept of a cottage estate was created, taking advantage of the railway network and railway companies’ low-priced workman’s fares. It was a self-contained community of affordable houses built on open land outside of the city centre. William Austin, an ex-labourer turned philanthropist, founded the Artisan’s, Labourers’, and General Dwellings Company in 1867.
The Queen’s Park Estate, named in honour of Queen Victoria, was founded in 1874 by the Company, which purchased six fields on the north side of Harrow Road, just east of its intersection with Ladbroke Grove and Kilburn Lane, from All Souls College, Oxford. At that time, the only buildings in the area were a church, parsonage, and school at the Harrow Road crossroads, a couple of farms in Kilburn Lane, and Kensal House, as well as a tea garden and a few cottages, in the small triangle between the canal and Harrow Road.
Over the following twelve years, the Company constructed over 2000 Gothic-style cottages in a regular grid of streets centred on two broad, tree-lined avenues, Ilbert Street and Fifth Avenue. When the streets were named (at first they were called A, B, C, D etc. Street), they were named after people or places related to the Company. For example, Droop was one of the directors, and Alperton was the location of the company’s brickworks.
In 1978, the houses along most of the southern edge of the estate, between Droop Street and Harrow Road from Sixth Avenue almost to Third Avenue, were replaced by Westminster’s Avenue Gardens, which consisted of 11 blocks named after trees.
Most of Queen’s Park, which was declared a conservation area in 1978, remains unchanged from when it was built by Hubert Austin and later by Roland Plumbe for the Company. The houses are two-storeyed terraces of red and yellow brick in ’minimum Gothic’ style, with turrets at some of the street corners, and many of them bear a date or the company’s monogram.
