Discover Cricklewood NW2 – Where Early Aviation Met Northwest London
Cricklewood NW2 occupies a stretch of the A5 in the northwest of the capital, a postcode whose identity has been shaped by successive waves of industry, community, and reinvention over more than a century. Few Londoners know that Cricklewood was once home to one of the world's earliest commercial aerodromes — Handley Page established its aircraft factory and flying field here in 1912, and in the years following the First World War the site operated some of the first scheduled international airline services ever flown, with passengers boarding open-cockpit biplanes bound for Paris from a field that is now buried under residential streets. The aerodrome closed in 1929 when operations moved to what became London's main airports further west, but for a decade and a half this corner of northwest London was genuinely at the frontier of commercial aviation. Gladstone Park, which straddles the border of Brent and Barnet to the north of the postcode, preserves the grounds of Dollis Hill House — a Victorian retreat where Prime Minister William Gladstone worked during the summer months in the 1880s and where Mark Twain was among the visitors who came to stay. The park itself covers over 100 acres and provides NW2 with open grassland, formal gardens, and one of the better views of the northwest London skyline. Clitterhouse Playing Fields along the Brent to the north add further green space, and Cricklewood Broadway — the continuation of Watling Street that the Romans drove northwest from Londinium — gives the postcode a bustling high street whose shops, cafes, and markets reflect a community drawn from across the world over many decades. Brent Cross Shopping Centre lies within easy reach to the north, and the mix of Victorian and Edwardian terraces throughout NW2 gives the residential streets a solidity that makes this a postcode people tend to settle in and stay.
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