Before 1800 this was farmland. Westbourne Green and Westbourne Farm sat among fields, with cows grazing on them, close enough to London to supply it and far enough out to be countryside.

An Act of Parliament in 1795 authorised the Grand Junction Canal – later the Grand Union – to run from Birmingham to London and bring goods down from the industrial north. The Paddington arm opened in 1801, and it is the stretch still here today. It arrived through open fields and did not leave them that way for long.

The Great Western Railway followed in 1836, Brunel’s line linking London to Bristol and the West Country. It cut the Westbourne area in two, on much the same alignment as today. Between them, the canal and the railway brought work – directly, and through everything that grew around them. The dairies near Paddington took milk off the Great Western from as far as Wales.

By the 1840s the streets around the church site were densely built. North of the canal, houses went up for comfortable families. South of it, they did not. These streets were built quickly and cheaply for the incoming working population, and became multi-occupied almost immediately – whole families in single rooms, cooking and washing shared on the landings. They were being called slums well before the church was finished.

The founders knew all of this. It was the reason for the building. Father Richard Temple West and George Edmund Street set out to put a masterpiece in the middle of it, and the decision to install no pews came from the same thinking: no rented seats, no bought places at the front.

The first service was held on 22 July 1873, St Mary Magdalene’s Day, and the church was consecrated on 21 October 1878 once the interior decoration was complete. It drew a reported 400-strong congregation on a Sunday. In streets this crowded, with almost no open ground, the height and light inside would have been a relief in itself. An order of nuns attached to the parish ran education for local children and a refuge for women with nowhere to go.

Both world wars largely missed the area – the nearest bomb fell in Westbourne Square. But by 1945 the terraces were in serious disrepair, and post-war housing policy took an interest. The London County Council bought the whole area around the church, and demolition began in the late 1950s. Families were promised new homes in the estates to come; many took an offer of more space outside London instead, and a great number moved to Slough. The Warwick Estate went up from the early 1960s.

North of it, around Westbourne Square and west into Notting Hill, the old housing stayed – and became the territory of landlords operating without rent controls, the most notorious being Peter Rachman, who bought up houses, forced sitting tenants out, and subdivided the rooms. Few landlords would let to people arriving from the Caribbean. Rachman would, at his own price.

Then the Westway. Building an elevated dual carriageway through the area in the 1960s took more housing with it, and split a neighbourhood that transport had already divided twice.

Some of what the pins hold: fifty children aged eight to fourteen marching on County Hall in April 1968 to demand a playground, with a petition of 500 parents’ signatures handed over by 13-year-old Marian Hastings – and a promise of play facilities within three months. Dr John Alcindor, a Trinidadian doctor who qualified at Edinburgh in 1899, practised at 209 Harrow Road from 1913 until his death in 1924, won a Red Cross medal for treating wounded soldiers, and led the African Progress Union. Kelso Cochrane, an Antiguan carpenter murdered on Golborne Road in 1959 walking home from Paddington Hospital, and the crowds that lined the streets for his funeral. Walterton and Elgin Community Homes, who used a clause in the 1988 Housing Act meant to sell council housing to private landlords, and transferred their estates into community ownership instead.

Today

More than thirty people who have lived and worked in North Paddington have been recorded talking about their own lives. Much of what is described above, they describe first-hand – the streets before the demolitions, moving onto the Warwick Estate, arriving in London for the first time.