Local History and Heritage
The London Borough of Barnet is one of the 32 London boroughs created in 1965.
- Road, railway and tube
- Chipping Barnet
- Mill Hill, Hadley and Totteridge
- Edgware, East Finchley and Finchley
- The Welsh Harp Reservoir
- Hampstead Garden Suburb
- Hendon
- East Barnet
Barnet borough contains the former urban districts of Chipping Barnet and East Barnet, both previously in Hertfordshire and the urban district of Friern Barnet and boroughs of Finchley and Hendon, previously in Middlesex.
So large and diverse a borough has a fascinating range of history. Although it only became a suburb during the 20th century, it has always been influenced by its proximity to London.
Most of the borough is on heavy clay soil, which means that it was covered by thick forest and was not particularly attractive to early settlers. Archaeological finds of various periods have, nevertheless, been made in many areas. Most of the Roman finds have been along Watling Street and elsewhere in Hendon.
Road, railway and tube
It is crossed by three main roads from London to the north. On the western boundary, the Edgware Road, Watling Street, or A5, is part of a major Roman route. The main medieval route was put through further east and runs through Finchley, Whetstone, Chipping Barnet and Hadley.
It was the Great North Road, or A1, but after a bypass was built in the 1920s it became the A1000. The M1, the next generation of main roads, also opened through the borough in 1966.
The first railway through the borough was the Great Northern mainline, running up through Friern and (New) Barnet, which opened in 1850. New Barnet began to develop as a new suburb near the station.
The second Middlesex County Pauper Lunatic Asylum was deliberately sited next to the line, at Colney Hatch in Friern Barnet, and opened in 1851. For a while Colney entered the language as a synonym for Bedlam.
The next railways arrived in the 1860s: the Midland mainline through Hendon and Mill Hill and GNR suburban lines through Finchley to Barnet and to Edgware via Mill Hill. London had always expanded in rings, and since areas further in were not yet developed, these lines stimulated very little change.
By the end of the century the inner rings were full and it was this area's turn. A new underground line to Golders Green opened in 1907 and a brand new suburb developed simultaneously.
Development stopped during the First World War, but in the 1920s the line was extended through Hendon to Edgware and again housing spread concurrently.
Chipping Barnet
Chipping Barnet was founded around 1100 to take advantage of the new main road. It was granted a market in 1199 (chipping means market) and a fair in 1588. The fair became so famous that 'Barnet' became cockney rhyming slang for hair (Barnet Fair = Hair).
In 1471 Hadley Green was the centre of the Battle of Barnet, an important turning point in the Wars of the Roses. The Yorkists under Edward IV defeated the Lancastrians and killed the Earl of Warwick. A commemorative obelisk was built at Hadley Highstone in 1740 at the spot where "Warwick the Kingmaker" was supposed to have fallen.
In the 17th century there was a briefly famous spa near Chipping Barnet, which was visited by Pepys.
Mill Hill, Hadley and Totteridge
From middle ages onwards, successful City people wanted to live in pleasant countryside within range of London. Finchley Manor House had a long succession of such owners.
Most such grand houses have now vanished: Hendon School now occupies the site where the famous 16th-century mapmaker John Norden lived, and only a pond survives from the park of Greenhill. Some fine houses, though, remain and there are clusters at Hadley, Totteridge and along The Ridgeway, Mill Hill.
Mill Hill School opened in 1807 in a house on The Ridgeway, and acquired fine purpose- built buildings in the 1820s. It was founded as a Protestant Dissenters' Grammar School at a time when only the secondary schools were public schools, which were not open to non-Anglicans. James Murray, the founder of the Oxford English Dictionary, worked on the dictionary while teaching here from 1870-85.
The borough remained agricultural until the late 19th century, with production mainly geared to London's needs. Cattle were brought in by long-distance drovers to Barnet's markets and fairs and sold on there to London dealers.
Edgware, East Finchley and Finchley
Edgware, too, had a fair in the 18th and 19th centuries, while East Finchley had a major pig market. Most of the fields became devoted to hay for London's ever-expanding horse population, and the hay harvest witnessed huge influxes of itinerant harvesters.
As suburbs came nearer, some farms turned to milk production. College Farm in Finchley, which still survives, was the main farm for George Barham's Express Dairy Company.
In the 1820s a new trunk road, the Finchley Road, was built to link London's West End with the Great North Road at Finchley. It opened about a decade before the coming of railways ended the coaching era, but created two locally important junctions at Golders Green Crossroads and Tally Ho Corner, Finchley.
The Welsh Harp Reservoir
The Welsh Harp Reservoir was begun in 1830s by damming the Silk Stream and Brent River. From the 1860s until the end of the century, the proprietor of a local inn made it a hugely popular pleasure resort, and the subject of a music hall song, 'The Jolliest Place That's Out'.
Hampstead Garden Suburb
Hampstead Garden Suburb, all of it in fact within Hendon and Finchley, was started in 1907 and extended in the interwar years. Under the inspired leadership of Dame Henrietta Barnett and with Raymond Unwin and Sir Edward Lutyens as its chief architects, it was a very important part of the influential Garden City movement.
Hendon
Hendon was also one of the most important pioneering centres of aviation. Claude Grahame-White founded his airport there in 1910 and staged spectacular, crowd-pulling air displays. the airfield was requisitioned during the was and finally bought for the RAF, which held annual pageants there until 1937.
Other nearby airfields and factories, at Cricklewood and just across the Edgware Road, also lasted from the earliest pioneering days until the spread of housing.
Apart from early aircraft, the borough has never been heavily industrialised, but at the end of the 19th century significant concentrations of factories developed along the Edgware Road and at Barnet. Birt Acres was working for Elliot's photographic printing works in Barnet when he shot Britain's first moving picture there in 1895.
East Barnet
The Piccadilly line extension in 1933, although it lies just east of the borough, speeded the suburbanisation of East Barnet. The outbreak of the war in 1939 halted development and the imposition of the Green Belt immediately after the war meant that the remaining countryside in Totteridge and northern Barnet survived. Like the built environment, they bear witness to the borough's rich and varied history.
Email this pageLast modified by: Webmaster on 19/11/2007