Cricklewood, North London

The Gateway: How Cricklewood Became the First Stop

Cricklewood's role in Irish London's story is distinct from Kilburn's, though the two neighbourhoods are often conflated. Where Kilburn was where Irish immigrants settled and stayed — where they built their institutions, raised families, and grew old — Cricklewood was where they arrived first. The distinction matters. The Broadway was a transitional space: a place of lodging houses and labour exchanges, of men sleeping four to a room and moving on within weeks or months, of a continuous circulation of newly landed Irish in transit between the boat train at Euston and whatever work could be found north of the river.

The geography was decisive. Cricklewood sits on the old Edgware Road, the Roman road that runs straight north from Marble Arch, and the Broadway had long been a staging post — coaching inns in the eighteenth century, then boarding houses in the Victorian era. By the 1950s, the cheap lodging houses along the Broadway had become the primary landing point for Irish men arriving in London with little money and no contacts. A bed in Cricklewood cost less than a bed in Kilburn; the work — on the sites of Wembley, in the factories of Brent, on the roads and drains of the expanding suburbs — was immediately accessible from the Broadway.

The Irish who came to Cricklewood in those decades were predominantly from the west of Ireland: Donegal men who had worked the potato harvest in Scotland before the war; Mayo families driven off marginal land that could no longer support them; Galway men who had heard from cousins already in London that Murphy's and McAlpine's were always looking for labour. They arrived at the Broadway with an address written on a piece of paper — the address of a lodging house kept by a woman from the same county — and within days were working. Cricklewood was where you got your bearings; Kilburn, a mile to the south, was where you put down roots.

The Lodging Houses and the Navvy Culture

The lodging houses of Cricklewood Broadway were a world unto themselves, and their role in the Irish immigration story is only now beginning to be properly understood. They were typically run by Irish women — widows or the wives of men who had done well enough in construction to buy a property — and they operated as networks of mutual support as much as commercial enterprises. A woman from Roscommon running a house on the Broadway would know which contractor was looking for navvies, which foreman could be trusted, and which to avoid. She would extend credit to a man from the same county who had not yet found steady work, and she would keep his mail for him when he moved on to a site in the Midlands.

The navvy culture that centred on Cricklewood was hard and physically demanding in ways that are difficult to fully convey from a distance. These were men working with pneumatic drills and shovels, pouring concrete and laying tarmac, often in conditions of considerable danger and always in conditions of considerable discomfort. The great contracting firms — Murphy's, McAlpine's, Wimpey's, Laing's — had established labour sub-contracting systems in which Irish middlemen, known as "gangers," recruited and managed gangs of workers, taking a cut of the wages in exchange for finding the work. The ganger was often the most powerful figure in a navvy's London life: the man who found you work, docked your pay, and could leave you without an income if you crossed him.

The culture of the lodging house and the building site was masculine, often rough, and sustained by its own internal codes. Men who had come from the same parish worked and lived together; county loyalty was a more pressing identity than national one. A Donegal man would identify himself as a Donegal man before he identified as Irish, and the networks that sustained him in London were organised around that county loyalty. The county associations — including those for Donegal, Mayo, Galway, and Roscommon — had offices and meeting halls in the area, and they provided the primary social infrastructure for men who had little else.

The Galtymore: Dancing in the Diaspora

If Cricklewood was defined by work and hardship during the week, it was defined by music and dancing at the weekend. The Galtymore dance hall on Cricklewood Broadway was, from its opening in the 1950s through to its closure in 2008, one of the great institutions of Irish London — a venue as important to the social life of the Irish diaspora as any ballroom in Dublin or Galway. Its name came from the Galtee Mountains on the Tipperary-Limerick border, and the mountain imagery was deliberate: an evocation of the Irish landscape for people who had left it and who, in the warm and noisy interior of a North London ballroom, could briefly feel that they had not gone so far after all.

The Galtymore operated on a circuit with the National Ballroom in Kilburn — the two venues sharing bands and audiences, creating a geography of Irish London entertainment that was understood by every Irish person in the city. On any given weekend in the 1960s, the Showbands — The Royal, The Capitol, The Miami, Joe Dolan and the Drifters — would play one venue on Friday and the other on Saturday, or alternate between them across successive weekends. The audiences came from across London, but especially from the Irish communities of North and West London: from Cricklewood and Kilburn, from Camden and Harlesden, from the bedsits of Willesden and the boarding houses of Brent.

The importance of the Galtymore as a social institution went beyond entertainment. It was where Irish men and women met potential partners — where matches were made that led to marriages, families, and the Irish-descent communities that still exist across North London today. It was where people from the same county found each other in a city of eight million, where a man from Donegal could hear someone speaking his own dialect across a crowded dancefloor. The Galtymore's closure in 2008 was mourned as the end of an era by tens of thousands of people across the Irish diaspora, and the building's subsequent fate — a protracted and contentious redevelopment — became a focus for debates about the erasure of Irish London's heritage.

Cricklewood and Kilburn: First Stop and Settlement

The relationship between Cricklewood and Kilburn is one of the most revealing patterns in the sociology of Irish London. In simplified terms, Cricklewood was where you went when you arrived, and Kilburn was where you went when you stayed. This was not a rigid distinction — plenty of men spent years in Cricklewood, and some arrived directly in Kilburn — but it captured a real dynamic in the way Irish settlement worked in North London during the peak immigration decades of the 1950s and 1960s.

The pattern reflected the economics of the two areas. Cricklewood was cheaper: the lodging houses offered basic accommodation at low cost, suitable for a single man who had not yet found stable employment. Kilburn, with its established community and its more developed rental market, offered better-quality housing but at higher cost — something affordable once you had been on the sites for a year or two and had saved some money. Moving from Cricklewood to Kilburn was often experienced as a step up, a sign that you had moved from the transitional phase of immigration to something more settled. Marrying, renting a proper flat rather than a room in a lodging house, and shifting from Cricklewood to Kilburn were frequently stages in the same life trajectory.

This pattern gives Cricklewood a particular character in the memory of the Irish diaspora. For many families, it is the place named in the stories their parents or grandparents told about arriving in London — the first Irish address, the first English street, the first morning waking up in a city that was not Ireland. It was a place of transition and disorientation, but also of solidarity and support, and the community that formed there, however transient, left lasting traces in the lives of people who moved on from it.

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