Hot Property | 4 March 2006

Perhaps it’s the association with The Goodies and with Dennis Nilsen, serial killer, but people are reluctant to admit that they live in Cricklewood. ‘Well, it’s sort of on the Hampstead border,’ they mutter sheepishly, when quizzed on their new home. But they’ll be hollering it from the top of Brent Cross shopping centre before long if Cricklewood Redevelopment Ltd has anything to do with it.

‘It was a place a man came in order to go to other places via the A41’ is how Zadie Smith describes the area in her novel White Teeth. But though roads dominate this unglamorous suburb — the A406 North Circular, the A5, the A41 and the mighty M1 — Cricklewood was a traffic-free backwater for centuries. Early settlers were put off by its cloak of dense forest, and by the mid-1800s it was still only ‘a village one mile in length’. The arrival of the railways in the 1860s shook things up, and terraces of redbrick cottages for railway workers sprung up over the next two decades. The early 20th century saw an influx of industry (Smith’s Potato Crisps, Phoenix Telephone Co. and Handley Page aircraft manufacturers) which went into decline in the 1960s.

Housing has popped up in a haphazard way over the years wherever developers have found a gap among the roads and the industry. But now a masterplan is afoot in the shape of the ‘Cricklewood, Brent Cross and West Hendon development area’, a colossal £2.5 billion redevelopment scheme that promises to transform the area. It will bring up to 10,000 homes, a market square, a new bridge over the North Circular and a riverside walkway. Disused railway and industrial land will be reclaimed to create ‘a new gateway for London and a vibrant urban area for Barnet’.