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Art and Culture Community Enfield History Palmers Green Planning and open spaces Southgate Uncategorized

An open letter to Enfield Councillors: a little kindness

scan0006Dear Councillors

Last summer I wrote to the Mayor about Southgate Town Hall about Betty Wright (nee Walton) a lady who had written to me via the Palmers Green Jewel in the North website with a unique connection with the Town Hall. She was born there in 1927 and lived there until she married in 1951 – her father was fireman and Mace bearer and she had many happy memories from that time. I believe George Walton may appear in one of the pictures in your Enfield history display upstairs at the Dugdale Centre.

Cllr Cranfield kindly sent my letter on to a number of other colleagues on Enfield Council, saying at the time that she felt that it was a reasonable request. But despite having sent various reminders to the Mayor’s office and others, I have never had any kind of response or acknowledgment.

I fully understand that Enfield has some very serious issues to deal with and this was never going to be a number one priority. However, while press this year and last indicated that Town Hall had been sold, I understand now from the local papers that in fact the sale was only completed very recently indeed.

I had originally requested that you give Palmers Greeners one last opportunity to view their town hall before it goes into private hands. I am no longer asking this, though of course, given Palmers Green Jewel in the North’s emphasis on history and people and valuing the local area, I would love it to happen.

But it seems to me that you or Council staff might still be in a position to use your good offices to grant Betty Wright and her surviving siblings the opportunity to view her old home once more before the work begins in earnest.

It is something she would dearly love to happen. Amidst all the business and complexities and difficulties of Council life, it would be an act of kindness on your part, which I hope you will be in a position to agree to or facilitate.

With kind regards

Sue Beard

Palmers Green Jewel in the North

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Art and Culture Community Film History Palmers Green Shops Uncategorized

A tale or two of Palmers Green

Palmers_green_tales2There’s a rare chance to see some old Palmers Green footage this evening at the quarterly meeting of the Fox Lane and District Residents Association.

Jenny Bourke from the Palmers Green Tales oral history project team  will be showing some films of old Palmers Green and explaining more about the project, which aims to capture the memories of local people.

The evening will begin with normal FLDRA business at 7.45pm in Burford Church Hall (entrance in Burford Gardens). If you are not a member of FLDRA and care about your local area, why not pop in and join?

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Woke up this morning, PG feelin’ fine

1960s vido by jacquesWhen JacquesWajnrych first picked up his movie camera and wandered along to Broomfield Park one day in the late 60s, the scene in front of him must have seemed very unremarkable. People walking, kids playing, ducks swimming…

More than 40 years later, his 15 minute video on the new Palmers Green Tales You Tube channel gives a wonderful view of the Palmers Green that now exists only in memory. Broomfield House, pre fire, with people sitting in front in the sun, the original avenue of trees which framed the vista of the house from the west, birds still in the aviary and people in deck chairs by the band stand. There are wonderful elaborate boats on the boating lake, one of which appears to be steam powered, and bell bottom jeans a-plenty. There is also, strangely, an elephant though I suspect that bit isn’t Broomfield Park…..

Palmers Green Tales is a collaboration between local groups to collect together the memories of Palmers Greeners. Why not visit the site or get involved? We’d love to hear from you.

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Shop for Broomfield House

IMG_2863The Broomfield House Trust is one of the three charities selected by Waitrose Palmers Green this month for the Community Matters scheme.

Here is how it works: Simply ask for a green token when you shop, and place it in the Broomfield House section of the Community Matters box and at the end of the month Waitrose will allocate monies on the basis of the number of tokens deposited.

Since it’s launch in 2008, £14 million has been donated to local charities through the scheme, so its worth a moment of your time.

 

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Art and Culture Community Green Palmers Green History Palmers Green Planning and open spaces Shops Uncategorized

It’s about time

Clock tower design - the identity of the man is unknown
Clock tower design – the pic illustrates the height relative to  Costas Georgiou

Local residents are being asked to give their opinion on designs for the new clock tower at the Triangle in two consultations this month, one being run by the Green Lanes Business Association (GLBA), the other by the Palmers Green Community website.

The plans to erect the clock tower follow on from an application to the Enfield Residents Priority Fund by the GLBA. The longer term future of the Triangle area remains uncertain – a more fundamental make over could still be a long way away.

The design itself has been developed by GLBA Chairman Costas Georgiou, Mark Leaver of Enfield Business and Retailers Association working with Kareen Cox, a local graphic designer. Triangular in shape, it draws on the architectural motifs of neighbouring buildings. Once finalised the plan is for the new monument to be made by Palmer’s Green’s Triangle Metal Works.

Comments on the design are requested by 31 January, and can be sent to Makr Leaver mark.leaver@ebra.org.uk or Costas Georgiou costas.georgiou@ebra.org.uk .

Meanwhile Palmers Green Community’s survey takes a wider view, asking for residents’ views on whether there should be a clock tower at all, whether they like the clock design, what they like and dislike, whether they want the Triangle traffic island to remain, and ideas about how it could be improved.  Palmers Green Community website has published some of the first responses, which make interesting reading. There is still time to take part by clicking here.

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Art and Culture Community Film History Palmers Green Uncategorized

New exhibition warns of the evil that humans do

Some things are hard to express in words. Some things must be understood and remembered, because the price of not understanding, not remembering, is too high.

The Gun by Moshe Galili
The Gun by Moshe Galili

Artist Moshe Galili and his wife Ruby live locally now. But in 1944 fourteen- year-old Moshe (then Andor Guttmann) lived in German occupied Budapest. His family had been forcibly relocated to one of the ‘yellow star’ houses designated for the Jews of the city. Moshe, his mother Serena, and his sisters managed to survive until Hungary was liberated by the allies, often hiding in cellars but his father was shot while fighting in the Jewish armed resistance. In all, 555,000 of the 825,000 Jews who had lived in pre-war Hungary were killed in the Holocaust, the majority in Auschwitz.

Moshe’s exhibition at the Dugdale Centre in Enfield, 20 Jan to 17 Feb, entitled Watch Out! is a warning echo based on his experiences during the Nazi period.  These are not things which can allowed to be simply consigned to the past, is the message. We must be vigilant, and determined to fight discrimination, anti-Semitism and racism, because the risks have not gone away. Indeed, anti-Semitism is on the rise again in Hungary and across Europe, in particular in those countries which were once part of the old Soviet bloc

The injustice to the victims of the Holocaust and the strong return of the age-old anti-Semitism propelled me to paint my pictures through which I hope to warn the viewers to watch out because the evil in humans is never far below the surface.

Moshe’s work is stunning and powerful and must to be seen. The paintings are accompanied by a description of his experiences in the war, words which are immediate and equally powerful.

To coincide with the exhibition, Talkies Community Cinema will be showing the film Fateless. It tells the story of  14-year-old Hungarian Jew György Köves, whose arrest on a bus in Budapest leads to near death in German labour camps, and his struggle to reconcile himself to these events in the years after the war. Tickets are £5. For more information and to book, visit http://talkies.org.uk/future-events.

The exhibition is free.