Oakington (Manor) Farm was an old Wembley manor and farm, first mentioned in 1171.
Gordon S Maxwell’s The Fringe of London (published 1925) talks of the small Middlesex hamlet of Monks Park, alongside the river Brent to the south of Oakington Farm.
In 1845, Richard Welford, a cowkeeper from Holloway, took over Warwick Farm, Paddington and founded what was to become J Welford & Sons Ltd. His dairy business became the largest retail milk business in the capital. The farm’s cowsheds were situated between the Harrow Road and what is now Warwick Crescent. The fields of Warwick Farm were built over and became Warwick Avenue, Warwick Place and Warwick Crescent.
In the mid 1850s, the Warwick Farm cowsheds were moved to Oakington Manor Farm in Wembley.
The farm was situated almost next to Watkin’s Folly in Wembley Park. What was later South Way was the farm’s access track but in 1906, the Great Central Railway built a new railway line separating Oakington from Wembley Park and its farm track.
By the turn of the twentieth century, the lord of the manor and thus owner of the farm was Sir Audley Neeld who later became known as a builder throughout London. Neeld began a Wembley ‘garden city’ estate in 1914. Work was immediately interrupted by the First World War and resumed afterwards.
Neeld further extended the estate in 1932 until the remaining 21 acres of his manor house was surrounded by his own building. He gave the house to Wembley Council but at the turn of the Second World War, it was blown up in an air raid exercise.
The site of Oakington Farm is now Sherrans Farm Open Space.