The hill came out of the Second World War looking much as it had gone in. The streets around it did not. Between 1940 and 1945 bombs, a parachute mine and a flying bomb took out whole terraces of stucco villas, and what replaced them — brick blocks of flats, then towers — reshaped the social character of the district as much as its skyline.
Guns and allotments on the summit
Early in the war an anti-aircraft battery was established on top of Primrose Hill, equipped with four single-barrelled 4.5-inch guns; local accounts record that these were replaced in 1943 by heavier double-barrelled 5.25-inch weapons. Nobody pretended the results were impressive — a much-quoted wartime calculation reckoned that thousands of rounds were fired for every aircraft brought down.
By October 1940 much of the summit had been turned over to allotments under the Dig for Victory campaign, some of which survived for years after 1945; residents remembered fetching manure from London Zoo. Slit trenches were dug at the foot of the hill, Anderson shelters went into gardens, basements were propped with steel posts and lined with corrugated iron, and Chalk Farm and Swiss Cottage Underground stations were used as public shelters at the height of the Blitz. Cleared bomb sites were pressed into service as emergency water supplies, their access doors painted "EWS". When the guns were removed at the end of the war, the huts on the gun site were occupied by squatters — mostly ordinary families who had been bombed out of their homes.
Where the bombs fell
Local historians have reconstructed the damage street by street. St Mark's Church was hit twice in late September 1940. Eleven people were killed at a house on Adelaide Road that same month. On 17 April 1941 a parachute mine destroyed a row of villas on Fellows Road and killed twenty-seven people. On 25 November 1944 a V1 flying bomb fell in King Henry's Road, killing eleven; and in March 1945 the only V2 to fall in the district struck the tea rooms on Primrose Hill itself, causing no casualties. At least sixty-five people are recorded as having been killed by bombing in the area, with many more injured and a great many houses damaged.
Primrose Hill Court and the London County Council
The King Henry's Road flying bomb did more than kill. The blast damage was extensive enough that a number of houses in King Henry's Road and Oppidans Road had to be demolished, and the cleared ground was compulsorily purchased by the London County Council. In its place rose Primrose Hill Court, a large block of flats which opened in 1951.
Elsewhere the pattern was patch and replace, plot by plot. Number 10 Regent's Park Road, for instance, was redeveloped in the mid-1950s as a block of flats and studios. Where a bombed stuccoed villa came down, what generally went up was a flat-fronted brick block of a quite different scale and rhythm — which is why so many Primrose Hill terraces run smoothly for a dozen houses and then stop dead at a 1950s elevation.
Adelaide Road and the Chalcots towers
The largest change came in the 1960s, and it came on the old Eton College land. A redevelopment scheme published in 1964 covered around thirty-three acres centred on Adelaide Road, between Winchester Road to the west and Primrose Hill Road to the east. Approvals were given in 1965 and 1966 and the Chalcots Estate was built in 1967 and 1968 to designs by Dennis Lennon and Partners: four identical twenty-three-storey towers and one smaller block, with well over seven hundred flats between them. Four of the blocks — Dorney, Bray, Burnham and Taplow — are named after places near Eton, a last echo of the college's long ownership, just as Provost Road, Fellows Road and Oppidans Road are.
Camden, formed in 1965 from the boroughs of Hampstead, Holborn and St Pancras, soon turned away from towers. Sydney Cook was appointed borough architect that year and backed low-rise, high-density housing instead; the best known result is Neave Brown's Alexandra Road estate, designed in 1968 and built between 1972 and 1978 a short distance west of the hill. In 1993 it became the first post-war council housing estate in the country to be listed.
Conservation and the changing street
By the time the Primrose Hill Conservation Area was designated in 1971, the argument had swung decisively from replacement towards repair. Designation put the surviving Victorian fabric under control and effectively ended large-scale clearance in the streets immediately around the hill; the period houses that had been cheap and subdivided in the 1950s became, over the following decades, something else entirely.
The result is the streetscape you walk through now: long runs of early Victorian stucco interrupted by post-war brick, a 1951 council block a few doors from a listed terrace, and towers on the northern skyline built on land a school in Berkshire owned for four hundred years. It reads as an accident, and largely it was one.