NO MORE HEROES ANY MORE

NO MORE HEROES ANY MORE

UP HILL AND DOWN VALE

We are beginning to do as Westminster City Council wants, and call the area Maida Hill. They scrupulously refer to the public space at what used to be called Prince of Wales Junction (and is still so called by TFL) as the Maida Hill Piazza, and there is an excellent facility next to it which is called Maida Hill Place, so it’s beginning to catch on. The Royal Mail used to call the area Maida Hill, when nobody else did, because their delivery office in Lanhill Road (just behind St.Peter’s) was called the Maida Hill Delivery Office. Needless to say, that was closed a couple of years ago and has been sold off for housing. Apparently, before it was generally called Prince of Wales, the junction was called Sixways, which was reasonable, as six roads did converge there until the Piazza was created.

The rest of the world has heard of Maida Vale, and I like to be perverse by explaining that we are called Maida Hill because we are downhill from Maida Vale, which usually ends discussion. But the real story? Actually Maida Hill pre-dates Maida Vale. In modern urban areas slopes which were significant in the days of horsedrawn transport are often barely perceptible, and so it is with this one. If you travel north from Marble Arch on Edgware Road (the A5, Roman Watling Street) you go gradually uphill (we cyclists notice these things more clearly) until you go over a crest, and then descend a sharp slope, at the bottom of which Maida Vale tube station is signposted. There is then only the gentlest rise until you reach the Marriott Hotel, where Kilburn High Road begins, at what was Kilburn Bridge, the bridge over the Kilburn stream, and a very ancient boundary (now between Westminster and Brent). It is that first crest on the road, which would actually look quite pronounced if there were no buildings, that is properly Maida Hill. Running underneath it, crossing beneath the road at right angles is the Maida Hill Tunnel, through which the Regent’s Canal passes on its way from Paddington to Limehouse. It makes perfect sense that Maida Vale is the gentle valley into which you descend having climbed Maida Hill.

NO MORE HEROES

Maida Hill got its name from a pub which stood pretty much on the summit, the Hero of Maida. Now that was named after General Sir John Stuart, who commanded a small British force that won the first victory on land over the forces of Napoleonic France, in July1806. Maida is in the far south of Italy, and this was part of a campaign to keep the French out of Sicily and assist the Calabrian resistance. The battle was a genuine victory, over a significant (if low-grade) French force (the remains of a division) but it had no real long term value. Nevertheless, it became an important propaganda tool, as undermining the myth of French invincibility, and so at the time it was quite famous. Stuart was given the title Count of Maida by the grateful King of the Two Sicilies (whose kingdom he was defending).

The pub is said to have opened in 1809 and it stood at 435-7 Edgware Road, though the present building is clearly not that old, but mid-Victorian. The license is said to have been in the same family for the whole of its existence. It is perfectly reasonable to suppose that it was rebuilt in the grand Victorian style. It is now a dermatological clinic, and you can spot it easily, because there is still a proper pub sign on the roadside.

I’ve been re-reading Anthony Powell’s sequence of novels, “A Dance To The Music of Time”, which I first read when I was a sixth-former, and The Hero of Maida features in two of the novels, thinly disguised as The Hero of Acre. Since one of the climactic moments of the whole sequence occurs on the banks of the canal, a few minutes’ walk away, the identification is obvious. The events Powell describes are set in 1947, and he gives a fascinating picture of how seedy the area was at the time; if you want to check it out, it’s in “Books Do Furnish A Room” (though the Hero also features in a magnificent setpiece at the start of “Temporary Kings” as well).

NO MORE NEELDS

The Neeld Arms on the corner of Harrow Road and Marylands Road is, as I’ve said before, being redeveloped as flats. The other day, thanks to the generosity of kind parishioners, I went to the “Age of Giorgione” exhibition at the Royal Academy, (well worth seeing, by the way, not much Giorgione, but lots of nice pictures) and in the catalogue happened to spot a reference to the Neeld family. A picture in the last room of the show, a painting of Judith with the head of Holofernes, by a follower of Giorgione called Giovanni Cariani, was first catalogued by the great art historian Bernard Berenson a hundred years ago at Grittleton House, near Chippenham, in the collection of Sir Audley Neeld Bt. It’s a striking picture (Judith as Venetian courtesan) but it sent me back to the Neelds.

Technically they weren’t actually landowners, but they leased an estate here and developed it. The actual landowners were the Dean and Chapter of Westminster (the Abbey of St.Peter) and that’s why the area was called St.Peter’s Park. The one who actually took the lease in 1821 was Joseph Neeld, a lawyer who acquired the interest in it from his great uncle, Philip Rundell, a successful goldsmith, who had lived at Westbourne Farm. Rundell’s sister had married a Mr Goldney, and when Rundell died, Neeld bought the manor of Grittleton with his inheritance. He was one of the last MPs for the notorious rotten borough of Gatton (one elector, two MPs) and then MP for Chippenham in the reformed House of Commons for more than 20 years. It was Joseph Neeld’s brother and heir, Sir John, who started developing the estate in the 1860s. They also had a plot of land further up the Harrow Road, where you can find Grittleton Avenue and Chippenham Avenue on the Tokyngton Estate, but they can have got no great return from that as it wasn’t built on in the Neeld era. The St.Peter’s Park estate went up gradually over the 1870s and 1880s, and early photos of St.Peter’s Church reveal that the church was built before the neighbouring houses (which was remarkable). The estate stretched from Formosa Street up to Fernhead Road , which was apparently called Neeld Road at one time. St.Peter’s Park was the customary name for this area well into the twentieth century, as there is a War Memorial tablet commemorating the men of Queen’s Park and St.Peter’s Park who were killed in the Great War, which is now in the Beethoven Centre (in Queen’s Park).