Despite the rumours it has just been confirmed by the current landlord that The Fox hasn’t in fact been sold as reported in FLDRA’s recent bulletin.
Stories have been circulating for several months, so where are they coming from? Is it the Fox up for sale? Should we be pressing for the pub to be registered with Enfield Council as a community asset ?
We are lucky enough to have lots of green space in and around Palmers Green: Grovelands Park, Broomfield Park, the secluded open spaces tucked away behind houses. There is one park which gets less attention than the others but has perhaps the most amazing story of them all – one that is intrinsically linked with the story of Palmers Green.
Tatem Park, at the bottom of Hedge Lane was formally opened by Mrs E A Young, Chairman of the Edmonton Urban District Council to great fanfare on 8 May 1937. The new park had been designed at some considerable cost by Thomas Mawson, a well-respected landscape architect and the first president of the Landscape Institute, and included undulating grounds, a state of the art playground, a boating pond and a world class skating track, around which steep grassed banks formed a green amphitheatre.
The new park was an exciting prospect for the children of Edmonton and Palmers Green. Reported the local paper: “A host of children…made straight for the playgrounds, the cycling track and the paddling and model yachting pools without waiting for the completion of the [opening] ceremony, and the speeches which followed were punctuated by their excited shouts and happy laughter.”
The park was the fruit of a partnership between Southgate Borough Council and Edmonton Urban District Council, a fact so astounding to the local populace that it was described as a ‘romance of local history.’ Instead of competing for the park, as they looked set to do, the two local authorities had been persuaded by Alderman Ingram to jointly contact the Harman sisters who owned the land with proposals for a new park.
The approach was successful, and the elderly Harmans agreed to donate the land provided that under no circumstances should it ever be used for any purpose other than as an open space or recreation ground. And as the only surviving relatives of James Tatem, the last owner of Weir or Wyer Hall, of which the lands were once part, they asked that the park be named Tatem Park as a permanent reminder of their family.
Once a prominent local landmark, Weir Hall had stood close to the junction of today’s A10 and North Circular roads and is known to have existed as early as 1340, when it was the property of the Wyerhalle family who had large estates in the area under Edward III. In 1610, it became the home of George Huxley, a merchant haberdasher of the City of London, who appears to have got it for a knock down price. Not much is known about the hall itself, though it appears to have been a moated, stately pile, particularly following Huxley’s extensive rebuilding, refurbishments and repair. It is also thought that the house may have come under attack in the civil war – the walls are said to have borne the marks of musket fire.
The male line of Huxley’s ran out in the 1750s, and the property passed to Thomas Huxley’s daughter Sarah, and then on to relatives the Tatems in the 1800s. The hall is said to have been in a state of some dilapidation by then, and neither James Tatem nor his son appears to have lived there. The house was demolished in 1818 but still continued on in local legend. There is a story of a cook who murdered another servant, a bricked up haunted room, and sightings of a spectral white dog.
The landscaping of the new park may have been due to the talents of Mawson, but the sunken shape of the park and undulating banks were the product of other processes. At the end of the nineteenth century the land which was to become Tatem Park had housed brick kilns which made the very brick which was used to build Palmers Green. The local council had also previously leased the land to dig gravel for local roads.
But excavations brought far more to the surface than just building material – as the digging went deeper, through topsoil, clay and then gravel, new layers of geological strata were revealed, containing mysterious finds deposited from the ice age. The news of the discovery of mammoth bones hit the national press in 1913 – the full tally from excavations included the skeleton of a mastodon, remains of Indian and African elephants, a picture of a reindeer engraved on a mammoth tusks, flints and bone tools, the skeleton of a Longirostris (a kind of dolphin), and a skeleton of a Magatherium, a bear like large land mammal.
These are just the finds we know about, however. “Workers in the gravel pits would take their finds home with them and use them as garden ornaments!” says Heather Frost of Friends of Tatem Park. Its likely that the finds dispersed far and wide without ever being recorded, and indeed, there are probably a few homes in Edmonton and Palmers Green who unbeknownst to them, still have a relic of prehistoric times just a few feet away from their front door. Heather has long hoped that they will one day all be tracked down and exhibited to the public.
In 1945 Edmonton Council bought adjoining waste land on the corner of Hedge Lane and the Great Cambridge Road to create the more formal Hollywood Gardens and the two parks became united in 1983 to create one continuous urban oasis from the traffic of the Great Cambridge Road. The roller skating track has recently been refurbished and has a modern, record breaking surface which plays host to many international and British championship races. In the park, the emphasis is on wildlife conservation and meeting the needs of children and families in the area.
The hard working Friends of Tatem Park are currently in discussion with Enfield Council about the possibility of a new dinosaur themed playground to commemorate the history of the area. Like all friends groups, they aren’t short of enthusiasm but need more members who would be interested in helping them take the park into the next phase of its long life, and in particular help with fund raising and conservation. If you would be interested in getting involved why not get in touch? Email me at palmersgreenn13@btinternet.com and I will pass on your details.
You can have a tree or triangle – that seems to be the stark choice facing Palmers Greeners as they look ahead to the future of Green Lanes.
Enfield’s Highway Services team have announced that while there was every intention to install a tree to replace the chestnut that stood at the Triangle for many years, investigations conducted at the time of the installation of the Triangle Clock have shown that there is no viable place for a tree on the site – in their own words “we have concluded that a tree cannot and will not be introduced into the current Triangle layout..”
Colin Younger, who has been following the story of the tree closely on the Palmers Green Community website, is asking if we should consider the words ‘current Triangle layout’ ominous. And I wonder what will happen to the money donated to the Council by the Broomfield House Museum Trust for the specific purpose of planting a tree?
Meanwhile, the recent meeting about shared space in Enfield was packed out – see the article, again by Colin Younger. And Basil Clarke writes on the possibility that mini Holland may offer a much needed solution to our streets being used as a rat run.
To join in the debate, visit Palmers Green Community.
Current refurbishment at the site of the audio visual shop has revealed the fascia underneath of Bourlet’s the jewellers, who previously occupied the site at 349 Green Lanes.
Bourlet’s is slightly iconic in Palmers Green because of it’s old jewellers clock, which is still on the building though long ago stopped and looking a little unloved.
I have often wondered who the Bourlets were – can anyone tell us more about them? There is a Bourlet’s Close in Fitzrovia, and a Bourlet’s fine art dealer, but other than that…
Tomorrow Monday 4 August we are being asked to switch out our lights at 10pm and light a single candle to mark one hundred years since the start of the First World War. I hope that it will be successful. I don’t think war should be glorified but 16 million people lost their lives and 20 million more were wounded. Those who survived saw Britain and our wider world change forever. What exactly should we remember, if not that?
As time moves on, of course, our perceptions of the past and our relationship with it change, but for as long as I can remember in my own life, the events of the First World War have been writ large in my understanding of our history. It’s not history in the Tudors-and-Stuarts sense, but much much closer, something that people I knew experienced at first hand.
My granddad, Reg Beard, was in Palestine and Egypt during the First World War. He’d been a traction engine driver, and in 1914 was one of the few people who could drive; he probably had a good understanding of how machines worked too, so though we aren’t sure when, he was sent to work on the Palestine railway.
We never knew much about what he experienced there: partly because we never sat him down to ask, but also because a lot of people returning from war simply didn’t talk about those things, though he did used to say that in Palestine you could pick oranges from the trees and they were the best he had ever tasted.
My father often says “That’s in the past now, move on”. Perhaps that is what my granddad thought too. I do remember though, that there was a tattoo on granddad’s forearm. I asked him about it once and he said it was because he had “been a naughty boy”. For years after, I thought tattoos must be a kind of punishment. I think now that perhaps he got it in Palestine. Or Egypt. Or, perhaps more likely, Chelmsford.
To see the impact of the war on Palmers Green, you need only visit the Garden of Remembrance, tucked away at the Powys Lane/Broomfield Avenue end of Broomfield Park. It’s a lovely, peaceful area with a pergola, formal gardens and a simple memorial to those lost in two world wars. 530 names are listed in the 1914-18 conflict, including many family names that are still familiar in the area today.
Some surnames are listed again and again. In the second world war this is often due to civilian casualties of bombing, but in the First World War it more likely tells the story of families hit by loss again and again as one by one their sons went to war, often willingly with best foot forward and even lying about their age to be able to take part. In his book Akenfield, Ronald Blythe tells us that many a lad who went to war actually grew a few inches taller on war rations, such was the diet of the farm labouring poor.
The story of the coming of war to Palmers Green as depicted in local paper The Recorder makes surprising reading now, knowing what we do. In the issue at the end of July there is no sense of what lay ahead and stories are of alterations to the town hall, liberal fetes and scarlet fever scares. By October, the Recorder was publishing lists of people who had joined up and the new rifle range at Broomfield Park, which had only been established a few weeks before but had 800 members and was getting through over 1000 rounds of ammunition daily. The Recorder itself did not make it though the war. It stopped suddenly in 1917.
There is one more sign of the changes World War One brought to Palmers Green. The expansion that had begun only 10 or 15 years before came to a halt. Some roads were stopped in their tracks, and there are tales that some houses started before the war went though it without roofs. It’s one of the reasons why you will see different house styles in one street, and pre war motifs appearing in post WWI houses.
But this article is for my granddad, who survived the war with hat at a cocky angle, became the father of my uncle Reg and my dad Dennis – and chose to live his life in the present, and not tell the tale.
Is it my imagination, or does the setting for O2’s “Be more dog” advert look strangely familiar…?
In the ad, O2’s aloof and jaded moggy decides to make life more exciting by embracing his ‘inner dog’, jumping into Broomfield Park’s boating lake after sticks and running with a pack of dogs around the park.
PG’s houses and the view of Canary Wharf from the top of Alderman’s Hill are clearly visible…In another scene, he chases a car through PG’s streets.
Watch the whole ad here: http://youtu.be/iMzgl0nFj3s
[youtube]http://youtu.be/iMzgl0nFj3s[/youtube]