Wedderburn Road was named, indirectly, after a Lord Chancellor.
A large house in southern Hampstead was leased between 1792 and 1803 to Alexander Wedderburn, Lord Loughborough, Lord Chancellor and later earl of Rosslyn. He renamed this house Rosslyn House and was a notable resident of Hampstead.
One of the major builders in Hampstead was William Willett (1837-1913). A fashionable builder in Kensington from 1876, the Willett opened an office in Belsize Court after 1873 and, having built some cramped houses in Belsize Crescent, put up large houses in Belsize Avenue. In 1880 he obtained a 99-year lease of 12 acres of the Belsize Court estate, where from 1886 he built Wedderburn Road, named after the notable earlier resident of the area.
The Willett houses were solidly constructed and set a new artistic standard for speculative architecture. They were red-brick and varied in design, many of them by Willet’s own architects Harry B. Measures and, after 1891, Amos Faulkner.
In the 1880s and early 1890s the entire Belsize estate west of Haverstock Hill was occupied by people classified as living ’in comfort’. The newspaper proprietor Harold Harmsworth, later Viscount Rothermere (1868-1940), lived in early Wedderburn Road.
In 1937 John Laing, the construction firm which bought Belsize Court, the last of the seats in spacious grounds, extended Wedderburn Road eastward to Belsize Lane, replacing the house by seven blocks of flats called Belsize Court.
