Edgware Road - History

History

Before the Romans, today's Edgware Road began as an ancient trackway within the Great Middlesex Forest. The Romans later incorporated the track into Watling Street.

Many centuries later, the road was improved by the Edgware-Kilburn turnpike trust in 1711, and a number of the local inns, some of which still exist, functioned as stops for coaches, although they would have been quite close to the starting point of coach routes from London.

During the 18th century, it was a destination for Huguenot migrants. By 1811, Thomas Telford produced a re-design for what was then known as a section of the London to Holyhead road, a redesign considered one of the most important feats of pre-Victorian engineering.; Telford's redesign emerged only a year after the area saw the establishment of Great Britain's first Indian restaurant.

The area began to attract Arab migrants in the late 19th century during a period of increased trade with the Ottoman Empire. The trend continued with the arrival of Egyptians in the 1950s, and greatly expanded beginning in the 1970s and continuing to the present when events including the Lebanese Civil War, the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, and unrest in Algeria brought more Arabs to the area. They established the present-day mix of bars and shisha cafes, which make the area known to Londoners by nicknames such as "Little Cairo" and "Little Beirut." These shisha cafés have been hard hit by the enforcement of the England-wide smoking ban in 2007.

One of the two Edgware Road tube stations was one of the sites of the 7 July bombings. A bomb was detonated on a train leaving the tube station serving the Circle, District and Hammersmith & City lines and heading for Paddington tube station. Six people were killed in the blast: Colin Morley, 52, Jennifer Vanda Ann Nicholson, 22, Johnathan Downey, 34, Laura Webb, 29, Michael Brewster, 52, and David Foulkes, 22. The perpetrator was the ringleader of the 7 July bombings, Mohammed Siddique Khan. On the first anniversary of the bombings, a memorial plaque to the victims was unveiled at the station.