Southgate Town Hall from the New River December 2012 Image Sue Beard
Surely Southgate Town Hall was sold ages ago?
Apparently not, it seems, but it is now. Contracts have been exchanged with Hollybrook Homes, and work begins this month on the development of the Town Hall and current car park area to create 37 new flats, some of which will be affordable homes (to use the modern parlance).
The deal has netted Enfield Council £2million in a deal which also provides for the refurbishment of Palmers Green Library and the creation of public space on the corner between the two buildings (surmounted by another clock tower in versions of plans issued earlier this year).
Hollybrook’s signs are already up outside the building.
A couple of weeks ago, Londonist reported on a new community fund which has been set up by the Greater London Authority’s regeneration team to improve the capital’s high streets. There is £9 million in all up for grabs, to be spent on making local high streets a more attractive place to live and visit.
Community groups can apply for grants of up to £20,000 by way of the project website, though projects need to find 25 per cent of the money. There is also the facility to apply for larger grants through a more detailed application process. Says Londonist, “Projects can be almost anything, from cosmetic improvements to an area or launching a street food market to attract more people to visit; tackling licensing issues which prevent cafes and restaurants from putting chairs in the streets, to setting up a traders’ association. Arts activities, pop-up venues, and new community spaces are also examples which have been mooted.”
What could Palmers Green do with £20,000 or more? How about a project to paint and harmonise shop frontages, and finally get some proper greening. It would require our shopkeepers and businesses to step forward and work together. And unlike – apparently – Mini Holland, it could be relatively uncontroversial.
The first in an occasional round up of Palmers Green news
Film crew are currently out in Palmers Green shooting a new feature film reputedly starring local lad Dexter Fletcher. The story is based around a Palmers Green betting shop and locations include the Tipico bookmakers and the Inn on the Green. Did anyone volunteer to be an extra? We’d love to know more.
The Fox – at the heart of PG
Thank you to Palmers Green ward Councillors Mary Maguire, Ahmet Oykenor and Bambos Charalambous who have agreed to look into whether anything can be done to protect the Fox. Obviously no promises and there may be little they can do, but we appreciate them taking an interest in our local heritage.
Wondering what has happened to all the promises of a new Sainsbury’s in Green Lanes. We hear that contractors have apparently been called in to rid the building of asbestos.
As if you need reminding, the Palmers Green Festival is tomorrow. Last year’s was brilliant and this year’s looks set to be even better – food, music, community stalls and all your neighbours in festive mood.
For the full festival programme, visit the festivals immensely impressive looking website http://www.palmersgreenfestival.org.uk/palmersgreenfestival.org.uk/home.html.
Our house was one of the last of our terrace to be built before the First World War. With the coming of conflict, the rapid development that had created Palmers Green as we know it had come to a sudden halt. A few plots remained empty for some years, like runs of missing teeth between the new pristine rows.
The view northward to the end of our road in 1914 would have been to Bourne Hill, and then on into arable or grazing land, perhaps with a tantalising glimpse of Winchmore Hill in the middle distance. Perhaps, with the coming of the war, some pockets of farmland nearer at hand got a stay of execution. I hope that they were a great play space for Palmers Green’s newly arrived children – some small consolation while their families worried over the news in Europe and what it would mean for them…
I have always been fascinated by the history of our house and those around it. We are lucky that our house still has a few original features – we still uncover a little surprise here and there lurking beneath Edwardian raised pattern wallpaper and the efforts of decades of home improvers – the outline of our old wooden fire surround, the route of gas lighting, the outline of where the ‘copper’ once stood in the scullery, maybe once tended by a maid-of-all-work.
The first occupant of our house, according to Kelly’s directory, was Henry George Wort. Henry appears to have been born in Clerkenwell around about 1861, and a rummage through the 1911 census indicates that Henry’s previous residence was probably 126 St George’s Avenue in Tufnell Park, showing that the trend for Palmers Greeners to be refugees from inner north London is nothing new.
Henry had married his wife Elizabeth in 1887, and so they had been together more than 25 years by the time they moved into their brand new house in Palmers Green. Though they were 52 and 49 respectively, they had had no children.
The Worts were here for over 20 years. Elizabeth died in March 1936 and Henry outlived her by four years – he was nearly 80 when he died in November 1940, having lived in our house in two world wars. What must it have been like for him then I wonder, to arrive in Palmers Green on the brink of one world war, and then lived in it into the second. Some of our glass dates from the wartime (if your glass has an uneven ripple, perhaps some of yours does too) – and I can’t help wondering if the originals were blown out by an explosion and replaced while he lived here.
But I am getting ahead of myself. The building of our house had caused some ruffling of feathers in the local area – for the houses being planned by Mr Byford on our corner of Clappers Green Farm were to be terraces, and not even the aesthetically pleasing ‘linked’ terraces you find occasionally in this area. What’s more, they were to have only 3-4 bedrooms. Cheap properties were thought to be likely to attract lower class people such as bank workers and civil servants, not at all what those in the Lakes Estate had in mind as neighbours.
Henry Wort in this respect appears to be an enigma, for the census for 1911, two years before he came to Palmers Green, indicates that he was an assistant teacher, a less senior occupation than perhaps might have been expected even for our humble house, though Henry left more than three thousand pound on his death. Perhaps he moved here to take up a new post in one of the fast expanding local schools?
Hall Tiling
We don’t know if he was an owner occupier or a renter, but if it was the former, he and Elizabeth were likely to have been responsible for choosing our fixtures and fittings – the colour of the floor tiles, the coloured glass, the fireplace and the hearth tiles. Purchasers of newbuilds were given the opportunity to choose smaller details from a catalogue, which is why you will see some similar flourishes in your neighbours’ houses, but not necessarily in the same order.
The colours that Henry and Elizabeth chose have presented a bit of a challenge to subsequent generations. Dark green, dusky pink, burgundy and yellow, with smatterings of blue… By the time we first set foot inside in 2007, we had a house with pistachio walls and pink carpet in the back room, Lincoln green carpet and canary yellow walls in the bedroom and, in the hall, blue green carpet and walls with a contrasting paper border, the carpet fixed by drilling holes into the original tiled floor. Ho hum.
Somehow, even when facing these aesthetic challenges, the house has always felt happy, warm and welcoming. There have been many occupants since Henry Wort. Periods of rental mean that parts of the original house are still here that could easily have been lost to unsympathetic builders and home improvers.
We often thank Henry Wort for his house – and Henry and Elizabeth, we promise to always look after it.
Just a few miles away from Westminster, Enfield’s local politicians are making a series of gambles that parliament’s big beasts wouldn’t dare try. They come with serious political and economic risk. But if even some of the things being tried by Enfield work out, they might … point to some radical solutions to Britain’s housing crisis.
I hear lots of people complaining about Enfield Council. But the latest article in Aditya Chakrabortty’s Enfield Experiment series for The Guardian shows the difficult circumstances in which Enfield’s Housing team are forced to work, and the Council adopting forward looking solutions. Well worth reading: http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/sep/01/enfield-experiment-housing-problem-radical-solution.
