Edgeware Road

It would seem to me that a larger percentage of you lot will have been to or through Edgeware Road than the other destinations I'm visiting. But it is technically the terminus for the Wimbledon-Edgeware Road District Line, so despite having been there many times before, off I went.

It is, of course, a huge Middle Eastern area, full of Arabic and Lebanese cafes, where you can smoke sisha pipes, and restaurants (I had a lovely chicken shwarma at Beiruit Express). But did you know it was also the site of Great Britain's first curry house, the Hindostanee Coffee House, in 1809? I didn't either.

The station was part of the world's first underground railway system between Farringdon and Paddington, which opened in 1863. It was also one the sites of the 7/7 bombings. Had I not stayed at my girlfriend's place the night before, I would have passed through the station on my way to work.

Instead, having been kicked off the Central Line, I found myself standing at the bottom of Edgeware Road as the 30 or so emergency vehicles rushed up it.

This end of the road, near Marble Arch, is perhaps the most historically interesting. Edgeware Road is a Roman road, a fact that becomes obvious once you realise that it is straight, a feat successive road engineers in the UK have failed to match. It had been laid upon an ancient trackway in the Great Middlesex Forest (a forest? Here?). And it was at the end of this road, where it joined two other Roman roads coming out of London (now Oxford Street and Park Lane), that the medieval village of Tyburn stood.

For reasons that aren't entirely clear on Wikipedia, it was here, in this little village outside London, from 1196 until the 18th century, that executions took place. Indeed, for hundreds of years, it was the primary place for executing people around London.

And that was because of what became known as the Tyburn Tree--a three sided gallows that allowed up to 24 executions at once. Or, at least, that was the highest number ever achieved.

At the very bottom of Edgeware Road, in the median, you can see, if you can call it this, the memorial to what used to happen here. The name Tyburn is still in use in the buildings around the area (there's a Tyburn Abbey, even), perhaps most noticably, it is the name of the dodgy pub on the East side of the street.

When I set out for Edgeware Road, knowing it was a big Middle Eastern area, I thought I would try to figure out why Arabic peoples settled here. I never did.

Because now I want to know is what it would have been like to grow up and live in the village where they executed people.