Christopher was the youngest of three sons born to Eileen and Henry Oswald Wade. He was sent to a preparatory school in Margate, then to Shrewsbury and he read modern languages at Trinity College, Cambridge.

During the war he was in the RAF as a Flight Lieutenant but did not fly due to poor eyesight. He was sent instead to Sierra Leone in West Africa to help run a landing strip. He was in Brussels on VE day and later did some useful work rescuing relevant documents, and debriefing German airmen.

Post-war he joined the BBC World Service in Bush House, London, where his fluent German was useful. It was here that he met Diana, who was his secretary. They married in 1956, moved to a new-build house at 28 Willoughby Road and never moved from there.

At the BBC Christopher became Head of the Script Unit whose job it was to sift through scripts and to find writers for existing productions. He was proud to have helped develop the careers of Dennis Potter and Jack Rosenthal.

He was able to retire at the age of 54 in 1975 and embarked on his second career as a Hampstead historian. He joined the Camden History Society when it was founded in 1970 and became its Publications Secretary. He led various research groups into the history of localities which lead to the publication of the Streets of Hampstead and other similar publications. He led a group surveying all the monuments in the graveyard of Hampstead Parish Church, with their locations and information, and produced as part of it Buried in Hampstead. He wrote other books including one on the Wells Charity, and also Hampstead Past.

Christopher, together with lawyers David Sullivan and Kit Ikin, arranged for Burgh House to be registered as a charity. When Burgh House reopened in 1979, Christopher and his wife Diana became joint honorary curators of the Hampstead Museum in it. He was also actively involved in setting up the Hampstead Community Centre and became its Vice Chair.

He died in 2015.