Borough in London, England
Brent
Brent is where Churchill's backup war rooms sat beneath a Post Office lab, where Colossus was built, and where England plays at a stadium topped by a 133-metre arch.
Key information
- County
- Greater London
- Nation
- England
- Population
- about 340,000 (2021 Census)
- Area
- about 43 square kilometres
- Known for
- Wembley Stadium, the Neasden Temple, Kilburn's Irish heritage, Zadie Smith's White Teeth
- Famous people
- Zadie Smith, Tommy Flowers, Winston Churchill (wartime link)
- Football clubs
- Home of the England national team and the FA Cup final at Wembley
About Brent
The bunker under the Post Office
In 1939 a secret underground complex called the Paddock was built in Dollis Hill, beneath the Post Office Research Station. It was meant as a fallback for Winston Churchill's War Cabinet if the real war rooms in Whitehall became unusable. The War Cabinet held two meetings there, on 3 October 1940 and 10 March 1941, and Churchill attended the first. The lab above it did even more for the war. In 1943 engineer Tommy Flowers and his team built Colossus there, the pioneering electronic codebreaking computer used against German Lorenz messages. Much of the early digital age was wired together in a quiet corner of north-west London. It is a startling pair of facts for a suburban borough best known for football.
Where the Twin Towers weren't, but an arch is
Wembley's stadium story starts with a failure. In the 1890s Sir Edward Watkin began a rival to the Eiffel Tower on Wembley Park, but Watkin's Tower stalled at its first stage and was demolished in 1907. The site later hosted the British Empire Exhibition of 1924 and the original Empire Stadium, which opened in 1923. That year's FA Cup final became the White Horse Final, when a policeman on a white horse, Billie, helped ease a huge overflowing crowd off the pitch. England won the 1966 World Cup final here, and the stadium also hosted the 1948 Olympics and Live Aid in 1985. The twin towers went when the old stadium was demolished, and the new Wembley opened in 2007. It is crowned by an arch 133 metres high and seats around 90,000. The tower Watkin never finished has, in a sense, been replaced.
A temple carved in India, built in Neasden
Neasden's name has long been a London shorthand for suburban dullness. The BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir stands on Brentfield Road and demolishes that idea. Opened in 1995, it was the first traditional Hindu stone temple built in Europe. Its limestone and marble were carved by craftsmen in India and shipped to London in pieces, then assembled on site. The result is a cluster of pale, intricately carved domes and pinnacles among the semi-detached streets and trading estates. It is one of the most striking buildings in London and draws visitors from well beyond Brent.
Kilburn, Willesden and the novel that put them on the map
Kilburn High Road was for decades the heart of London's Irish community, and its dance halls and pubs were where many new arrivals found work and company. The Kiln Theatre, which opened as the Tricycle in 1980, is still a local fixture and was a key part of Brent's year as London Borough of Culture in 2020. Willesden has an older claim to attention. In the Middle Ages, pilgrims travelled to see the Black Madonna of Willesden, a statue so revered that it was burned on Thomas Cromwell's orders in 1538. In 2000 Zadie Smith, who grew up in the area, published White Teeth, a debut novel set across Willesden and Kilburn that turned the borough's mix of cultures into modern literature.
Eat your way along Ealing Road
Brent is one of London's most diverse boroughs, and the food shows it. Ealing Road in Wembley is a centre for Gujarati and wider South Asian cooking, with sweet shops stacked with jalebi and barfi, snack counters, grocers and sari stores. Around Harlesden you will find Caribbean bakeries and jerk, and Kilburn still has its Irish pubs. Green space comes as a surprise. The Brent Reservoir, known as the Welsh Harp, was created in 1835 to feed the Grand Junction Canal and is now a nature reserve and a haven for birds.
How a river lent its name to a borough
The borough was created in 1965 by merging the old boroughs of Wembley and Willesden. Neither name could be chosen without upsetting the other, so it took the name of the River Brent, which flows through both. The railways did the rest. The Metropolitan Railway pushed out to Wembley Park, Willesden Junction became a major interchange, and farmland turned into suburbs. Each wave of newcomers, from Irish workers to Caribbean, South Asian and Eastern European communities, has added another layer to the borough.