THE neighbours weren’t happy, of course. Mill Hill’s leafy mansions had provided two mayors of London, plus William Wilberforce — and Sir James Murray, who founded the Oxford English Dictionary.

Now, they were to have thousands of London’s impoverished working class on their doorstep. Children used to tenements would lead gangs of thieves, they insisted. Their parents would create a Little Moscow.

It’s true that Burnt Oak was an unlikely choice. It’s the last but one stop on London’s Northern line and then so remote that its station opened only in 1924, and then just at weekends.

It was in that year that London County Council (LCC) chose Burnt Oak to build 3,968 houses. They would have gardens on an estate with churches, schools, parks and shops.

I spent my first years and went to school there. I remember houses of brick, wood and steel, not in depressing rows but in 41 acres of parks and playing fields. Town planners, sociologists and even plain tourists came to look. The Tube station had “For Watling” signs.

Yet all this was dreamed up not by a socialist but a Conservative. And not just any Conservative. Lord Salisbury was leader of his party.

Newspapers denounced his state socialism. Lord Wemyss said rehousing the poor would strangle “the spirit of independence and the self-reliance of the people, and [destroy their] moral fibre” — in other words, poverty was good for them.

Years of meetings followed. But then 120,000 people in squalid Islington and St Pancras were told their rat’s nests would be demolished. Many would be rehoused on 390 acres of Goldbeaters Farm, beside the Edgware Road.

The first 29,000 arrived in 1927, before there were schools, roads, churches, shops or community facilities to greet them. The first doctor lived in a caravan.

More than that, there was no pub. The LCC would allow one only if those who ran it, said its advertisement in the Times, had no “direct pecuniary interest in encouraging the sale of alcoholic liquor.” Not surprisingly, there was little interest.

The only option was the Bald Faced Stag, built before the estate and above its edges. The radio presenter, Robert Elms, who went to the estate’s grammar school, says: “It was the rowdiest place you can imagine, with fights as often as not. People still ask me if the stories are true.”

One in five who moved to Burnt Oak were skilled workers. But many stayed no less poor than when they arrived. A survey in 1937 said of a Mrs Miller that “she used to pawn her washing every, every Monday. Her laundry, bed sheets, bed linen. And take it out again on Friday night … she used to cart it down to Harvey and Thompsons, who were the big pawnbrokers in Watling. They were the lifeblood of many people in Watling.”

The same survey reports a complaint that “my husband thought it was a terrible … godforsaken hole, miles away from anywhere. My mother wasn’t too happy because, in Marylebone, we were just down the road from Selfridge’s, but when you got to Watling, it was just fields plus fields.”

A report on the conservation area that Burnt Oak has become says, “There was nothing but bricks and mortar and acres of mud. The main thoroughfares … were narrow lanes — little more.”

One in 10 packed their bags each year. Local communists saw the dissatisfaction as a struggle against the estate’s slow gentrification and held lectures at the community centre, only to be expelled.

The dissatisfaction may also have been the rents. The council subsidised them, but they were nevertheless higher than for slum rooms. There were neither the facilities nor the community feel that incomers had known. Travel fares into London for work could create real hardship, says the report.

It changed, of course. Things always do. Yet for all that, half the houses are now privately owned; Burnt Oak remains both working class and an attraction for incomers.

The first were Irish immigrants, some of who had dug the roads and laid the bricks in the first place. Then came others. The singer George Michael, the son of a Greek waiter, lived on the estate’s edge. There’s still a Greek restaurant on the ground floor.

Jack Cohen, himself of the East End, opened the first branch of Tesco in Watling Avenue, the main thoroughfare, at number 54 in September 1929. That the site is now occupied by a halal food shop says a lot about how the area has changed.

The latest to arrive are Romanians. Marius Pepoo Marius told My London that he chose Burnt Oak in 2007 because so many Romanians went there before him.

“It was hard to find Romanian food before 2014 in London as there weren’t many places. When I came here to Burnt Oak, I was blown away. There were so many restaurants. It was like having my mum’s cooking but without having my mum — if that makes any sense. So it was really exciting for me.”

But, like all immigrants, Romanians were not always welcomed. Andrei Liviu Chirosca owns a fast-food shop. An unsigned letter told him: “You should have gone back to Rumania, with your gypsies. You are not welcome here — And never will be. We hope the Brexit will stop any more from coming Here. We are sick of not hearing our own language in our own country. We never go to Watling Avenue shopping centre, 12 Greengrocers, the rest are cheap clothes shops and tatty gift shops (none of these shops are English)… You will only get Romanians in your shop and hopefully you will not last long and we can see the back of you.”

It has always been that way. As the snooty types of Mill Hill showed a hundred years ago.