William Kent (historian of London)
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William Kent was born in 1884, the youngest son of Richard Kent, the Wesleyan owner of Kent and Matthews, a printing firm, in Lambeth. He was raised in Tradescant Road, Lambeth, south London, and attended the Wheatsheaf Hall where he taught Sunday school and was highly involved in young Methodist activities. He also watched a great deal of cricket at the nearby Oval and later wrote a book on the sport. Later, his family moved to Norbury, where his father ran a stationery business. He lost his religious faith in his early adulthood, sometime after reading the work of Thomas Huxley on agnosticism.[1][2]
Career
Kent wrote many works on the history of London, notably his very successful Encyclopaedia of London, first published in 1937, and London Worthies, 1939.
His memoirs were published in 1938 as The Testament of a Victorian Youth. His study of John Burns, whom his father had known as a boy, is his most important other work, offering a critical but witty and not unsympathetic picture of the former labour leader and cabinet minister, whom Kent often visited in the last years of Burns's life. At this time he was living in Union Road, Clapham.
He was a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, elected by ballot on 5 February 1948.
