Now a major center of Britain’s Orthodox Jewish community, the London suburb of Golders Green was first settled by Jews a century ago. The story of its first synagogue, as told by Helen Fry, is one of joining the fashionable middle class:
The Jews who moved into Golders Green at the turn of the century were primarily from the middle classes, . . . rather than [the working-class immigrants of] the Jewish East End. By the 1920s, Golders Green became a very fashionable place to live and its high street was described as having “the finest shops outside the West End of London.”
The nascent Jewish community began in 1915 with only twenty members, but in its heyday rose to a membership of around 1,500.
From 1915 until 1922, the early congregation rented St. Albans Hall from the local Anglican Church for Shabbat services and all the major festivals. . . . By 1918, the congregation was able to purchase a plot of land in Dunstan Road but . . . could not build the synagogue before 1922 because the government had reserved the land as allotments to feed the nation after the food shortages of the Great War.
Read more on Jewish News: http://www.jewishnews.co.uk/looking-back-at-the-remarkable-history-of-golders-green-shul-as-it-turns-100/