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There are many houses of considerable Edwardian style in Palmers Green, but perhaps the one which is the biggest surprise on an afternoon mooch around our local streets is at the bottom end of Osborne Road where it meets New River Crescent. Splendidly perched on the corner lot, the Gables is a beautiful creation in stucco, exposed wooden beams and stained glass, domestic Edwardiana at its best.

It feels like a gift to Palmers Green, and a gift is what it once was. The Gables was built in 1906 by Albert Frederick Simmonds, architect and builder of the Hazelwood Park Estate, as a wedding gift to his bride Maud. Better still, it is still owned by his descendent, grandson John Peace, over one hundred years later.

The Simmonds were a family of East End painters and decorators who lived in the Columbia Road area. Born in 1873, Albert had trained as a surveyor before beginning building in Palmers Green. His first Palmers Green house was completed in 1900 and then in the early 1900s he bought part of Hazelwood Farm, the main buildings of which were located roughly where the junction of Hazelwood Lane and New River Crescent is today.

He went on to build 215 houses between 1905 and 1910 – including his own, then on a much bigger plot with room for a detached garage and tennis courts. The story goes that Maud was not allowed to see either the building or the plans until the day they moved in. Sadly Albert did not have long life to enjoy what he had created at The Gables. Having achieved so much before he was far into his 30s, he died aged 46.

Today, we know the area as the Hazelwood Estate, the harmonious streets of houses which lie to the west of Green Lanes between Hedge and Hazelwood Lanes, including Osborne Road, Park Avenue, Kingsley Road and New River Crescent. But few are looked after with the same evident pride as The Gables.

For more about Albert Simmonds, see John Peace’s interview with Palmers Green Tales and Keith Cunningham’s article about the Hazelwood Estate in Palmers Green and Southgate Life

• This article has been prepared as part of the process to nominate buildings and landmarks to Enfield’s updated local list. For more information see http://www.palmersgreenn13.com/2015/09/11/every-street-in-palmers-green/. And if you have any suggestions for buildings which aren’t listed but should be included in the local list, please get in touch. But do get in touch soon, as submissions need to be in by the third weekend week in November.

We have had several great comments with more information following my post about Deadman’s bridge – thank you Sylvia Gambin and Steve Foster.

And Richard McKeever from the excellent Bowes and Bounds Connected has given us the  following information about Richard Nicholson who is mentioned on the Palmers Green sign. He became Clerk of the Peace in 1869 and retired and died in 1913.  The bridge itself dates from the 1880s. Here is what Richard says (you can read the full article at http://www.bowesandbounds.org/profiles/blogs/solving-the-puzzle-of-deadman-s-bridge):

“The office of clerk of the peace – like that of his boss, the Justice of the Peace – dates from the Fourteenth Century when they had a criminal law function to investigate “all manner of poisonings, enchantments, forestallings, disturbances and abuses”, by the Sixteenth Century their work extended to include more mundane administrative functions for the county. As the bureaucratic workload of Middlesex County Council grew, particularly during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, more officers were appointed for specific tasks, but the offices still retained their medieval names.

Nicholson was born in Hertfordshire in 1828 and educated in Exeter – but he spent some of his early life even further south as a surveyor in New Zealand he was part of the New Zealand Company team that In 1844, sailed on the Deborah, to survey and purchase land from local Maori leaders. Nicholson is credited with laying out the city of Dunedin. On one occasion during his trip to New Zealand’s south Island he found himself in danger as the ship chartered to take him and his colleagues ran into difficulties – Nicholson’s story is recorded in the book “Early contributions to the History of New Zealand” by Thomas Morland Hocken:

Colonel Wakefield prior to his own departure from Wellington had despatched the Carbon, a 20-ton schooner to Otago on the 26th of June, having on board Messrs. Richard Nicholson and Albert Allom, who were surveying cadets, and seven men selected for their knowledge of bush work. The voyage was perilous enough, …. Driven into various bays, their food exhausted, sails split to ribbons, and all but wrecked, the voyagers did not reach their destination for a month after leaving Wellington.

Nicholson survived the journey completed his surveying work and returned to London where he became a solicitor in 1852 and took up the role of Clerk of the Peace in 1869.

In his later life he was embroiled in a minor controversy when the Southgate Recorder questioned his income and expenses – much like our modern day MPs expenses scandal. A stipend to the Clerk of the Peace was used by him to employ his own staff. The local paper celebrated the change to more transparent arrangement where staff became individual employees of Middlesex County Council.

Richard Nicholson was Knighted in 1886, in recognition of his public service he retired and died in 1913 and his obituary was published in the Times as well as newspapers in New Zealand and Australia.”

Palmers Green Jewel in the North was never intended just to be a blog, but a growing encyclopedia of all that is PG. This summer, I am blogging some of the pages that you might not have noticed, with tales of the old, quirky and the unusual. Here’s the first, about the Dog and Duck….

Technically just within the boundary of Winchmore Hill, the Dog and Duck gave its name to Bourne Hill’s previous incarnation, Dog and Duck Lane. Like the Woodman, it was originally two cottages, which in the eighteenth century gained a licence to sell ale.

In 1869, according to Gary Boudier in his great A-Z of Enfield Pubs, the Dog was the scene of an accidental shooting when the landlord John Downes caused the death of his lodger John Flaxman by shooting him in the head. The two, according to the landlord’s mother, had been about to go out shooting, but as Downes left the tap room with Flaxman walking ahead of him, the door closed, catching the hammer of the gun and causing it to go off.  Part of Flaxman’s head was shot away, though he lived for an hour after the accident. A verdict of accidental death was returned, through Downes was admonished by the magistrate for being careless where guns were concerned.