Kilburn, London

Kilburn is an area in North West London, in the London Boroughs of Camden, Brent and the City of Westminster. Kilburn High Road railway station lies 3.5 miles (5.6 km) north-west of Charing Cross.

Kilburn developed from a linear hamlet that grew up on ancient Watling Street (the modern A5 Road), the hamlet took its name from Kilburn Priory, which was built on the banks of Kilburn Brook. Watling Street forms the contemporary boundary between the boroughs of Brent and Camden.

The area has London's highest Irish population, as well as a sizable Afro-Caribbean population, and was once home to the black civil rights leader Billy Strachan.

Kilburn has never been an administrative unit and has therefore never had any formally defined boundaries. The area, which took its name from a nearby watercourse and eponymous priory, developed from a linear hamlet along Watling Street (here called Kilburn High Road) which was the boundary of the Ancient parishes of Willesden – to the west of Watling Street and now part of Brent, and Hampstead to the east (now part of Camden). These parishes subsequently became a Municipal and a Metropolitan Borough respectively (based on the same boundaries), before merging with neighbouring areas in 1965 to form modern London Boroughs of which they are now part.

If Kilburn is taken to extend into the City of Westminster then the historic districts it overlaps are Paddington, to the west of Watling Street, and Marylebone to the east of it. Both of these areas became part of the City of Westminster in 1965. The electoral wards of Kilburn (Camden) and Kilburn (Brent) cover some of the area. Much of the area is in the NW6 postcode area, and by some interpretations the area extends into W9; however, these do not define Kilburn; postcode areas were never intended to delineate districts, and Kilburn (like many London districts) overlaps with others, some which have a history of formal definition (e.g. Willesden, Hampstead) and others which do not (e.g. Brondesbury in Willesden).

Kilburn High Road originated as an ancient trackway, part of a route between the Brittonic settlements now known as Canterbury and St Albans. Under Roman rule, the route was paved. In Anglo-Saxon times the road became known as Watling Street.

Kilburn Priory was built on the banks of a stream variously recorded as Cuneburna, Kelebourne and Cyebourne (in the latter source most other places with the phonetic sound /kiː/ were rendered in writing Cy such as Cynestone (Kingston)). The stream flowed from Hampstead through this parish, then through Paddington (specifically through areas that became "Westbourne", "Bayswater" and Hyde Park), South Kensington, and the narrow east part of Chelsea into the Thames. The first two names perhaps imply meanings of "King's Bourne" and "Cattle Bourne". The word Bourne is the southern variant of burn (any small "river"), as still commonly used in the technical term, winterbourne - a watercourse which tends to dry up in dry periods. The river is known today as the Westbourne. From the 1850s many of its feeder ditches were diverted into combined sewers feeding away to the east; it was otherwise piped underground and became one of London's underground rivers.

The name "Kilburn" was first recorded in 1134 as Cuneburna, referring to the priory which had been built on the site of the cell of a hermit known as Godwyn. Godwyn had built his hermitage by the Kilburn river during the reign (1100-1135) of Henry I, and both his hermitage and the priory took their name from the river.