Dollis Hill is a proper hill lying between Neasden and Cricklewood. Gladstone Park covers much of its southern slopes, but the hilltop is historically important in its own right for three unexpected reasons.
1. Dollis Hill House
Dollis Hill House started out as a farmhouse in 1825 when everything hereabouts was fields, but its prime hilltop location soon attracted the well-to-do. In 1861 MP Sir Dudley Coutts Marjoribanks moved in, followed in 1881 by his son-in-law Lord Aberdeen. He and his wife enjoyed entertaining the great and good, and house guests at Dollis Hill included Prime Minister William Gladstone, Joseph Chamberlain and Lord Randolph Churchill. The house's next owner was newspaper proprietor Hugh Gilzean-Reid, who in 1900 invited a famous American novelist to stay for the summer.
Mark Twain was seriously impressed. "I have never seen any place that was so satisfactorily situated, with its noble trees and stretch of country, and everything that went to make life delightful, and all within a biscuit's throw of the metropolis of the world." Later he added "Dollis Hill comes nearer to being a paradise than any other home I ever occupied." For the environs of Neasden, that's high praise.
The following year Willesden Borough Council bought up 96 acres of surrounding hillside and opened it to the public as Gladstone Park, named after the recently-deceased PM. The house became a wartime hospital, and later a catering college, but after this closed down in 1989 the property was left to decay. Two bouts of arson in the mid 1990s reduced Dollis Hill House to a shell propped up by increasingly-important scaffolding, and a third fire in 2011 proved the last straw.
Several rescuepackages were proposed, the largest a £1.2m Lottery grant, but this was never match-funded and the government duly approved demolition. I went along in January 2012 just before the diggers didtheirworst, and mourned the needless loss of a listed building. Today all that's left is a single window surround, with the remainder of the house's ground floor footprint picked out in unremarkable brick. Anyone can wander through the site, a bit like when you explore the ruins of an abbey, but most parkgoers appear to give the hallway, parlour and dining room a miss. It's a sad end for this favoured spot of Gladstone and Twain, irrevocably lost to vandalism and austerity.
2. Post Office Research Station
Back in the days when the GPO ran all of Britain's telecommunications, an experimental facility was required to keep on top of the latest developments. By 1921 this Research Department had grown large enough to require separate facilities so took over an eight acre site on the hilltop at Dollis Hill, housed in old army huts. A campus of permanent buildings was opened in 1933 by PM Ramsay MacDonald, its laboratories used to investigate new technologies for telephone, telegraph and teleprinter. Dollis Hill is where the Speaking Clock originated and where the science behind trans-Atlantic telephone cables was developed.
In wartime the Research Station's focus changed to projects with immediate military application, which is where Tommy Flowers comes in. Here at Dollis Hill he designed the world's first programmable electronic digital computer, called Colossus, to support the work of codebreakers at Bletchley Park. Colossus was programmed by plugs and switches, and used 1500 electronic valves and gas-filled thyratrons to perform logical operations. A prototype was ready by December 1943, and by the end of the war ten Colossi were in use cracking German communications.
After WW2 Dollis Hill's engineers returned to civilian operations, conjuring up ERNIE the Premium Bond generator, pulse-code modulation and Prestel, the Post Office's Viewdata service. A separate facility on Dollis Hill Lane manufactured the nation's supply of coin-operated telephones. Then in 1975 the Research Station was relocated to fresh futuristic premises at Martlesham Heath in Suffolk, and most of the Dollis Hill site was turned over to social housing. The main building became 62 luxury flats, now known as Chartwell Court, a gated community accessed via Flowers Close. Its residents now own computers vastly more powerful than Colossus, appropriately enough inside their telephones.
3. 'Paddock'
A hilltop on GPO premises seven miles from Westminster proved the ideal spot for construction of a top secret WW2 government bunker. Preparations began in 1938 to build a deep level Emergency War Headquarters, initially codenamed CWR2 and later 'Paddock' (after the former Willesden Paddocks stud at Upper Oxgate Farm). If Whitehall were ever compromised then ministers would use this bombproof bunker, shielded deep underground beneath a thick slab of concrete, to coordinate the fightback. In fact ministers only ever visited Paddock twice, once for a Cabinet meeting and "a vivacious luncheon" on 3rd October 1940, then again on 10th March 1941 for further familiarisation.
Accommodation at Paddock would have been cramped, with the flats at neighbouring Neville's Court intended to be used to house members of the War Cabinet when bombing was not anticipated. Churchill recognised the site's considerable limitations, so was relieved when the Germans switched their attention to the eastern front and the threat of invasion faded. In 1943 the best of Paddock's furniture was relocated to the basement of the North Rotunda in Westminster, thought better able to cope with a V1 attack, and the following year Paddock was locked up and abandoned. This is the full back history you need, courtesy of Subterranea Britannica.
The existence of Paddock took decades to leak out, by which time the surface building had been demolished and ownership turned over to the local housing trust. They used to run two open days a year, one in spring and one for Open House, and I was fortunate enough to don a helmet and explore in 2004. These tours no longer operate, alas, so anyone who missed out can now only stare at an anonymous door in Brook Road or make do with theexperienceofothers. Here's what I wrote at the time.
Our tour guide clearly relished his role as entertainer-in-chief. He led our group down to the first level where it was cool and most definitely damp, ushering us into a couple of dingy rooms filled with rusting machinery. We headed on down a corroded spiral staircase to the lowest level, 40 feet beneath the surface. Here another long corridor stretched off into the distance, tens of small rooms lying dark and forlorn to either side. We stood in the Map Room where Wrens would have pushed little model battleships around on a big chart, and we also stood in the War Cabinet Room where Churchill held that one cabinet meeting back in in 1940. Thin stalactites hung from the roof, dry rot covered the ceiling and the mulchy remains of rotten lino squelched underfoot. Back upstairs we saw the remains of a telephone exchange and the tiny kitchen where food was prepared, although apparently there was a planning oversight and the architects forgot to include toilets anywhere in the complex. We tried very hard not to imagine Winston straining over a small tin bucket.
Never underestimate the importance of Dollis Hill.
