Is the end nearly in sight for the boy racers who whizz up and down our streets and make our hair stand on end?
Next week, on Wednesday 12 November, Fox Lane and District Residents Association will be holding an open meeting to discuss Council proposals to create quieter neighbourhoods around the borough, including one proposed for the areas either side of Fox Lane from Bourne Hill to Alderman’s Hill and right up to Green Lanes. The proposals could include 20mph limits and restrictions on through traffic.
The meeting is open to anyone who lives in the association’s area, regardless of whether they are members of the association.
Council officers will be explaining the plans and the consultation process. David Burrowes MP will also be speaking about the Community Assets Register.
The meeting will be at the United Reformed Church – it starts at 8pm.
Truro House, pictured in 2013 by Basil Clarke and reproduced with his kind permission
One of the most frequent enquiries to the Palmers Green Jewel in the North website relates to Truro House, the building which stands on the corner of Oakthorpe Lane and Green Lanes. It seems like Truro House has always invited curiosity and like all good stories, it is shrouded in mystery.
No one seems to know exactly when Truro House was first built, but we do know that in 1673 the triangle of land between Green Lanes, the New River and what is now Oakthorpe Lane was occupied by a public house. Owned by Enfield brewers Beckett and Ostliffe, the pub was at various times known as the Three Nightingales, the Rose, and finally the Kings Arms. The last publican to be granted a licence at the Kings Arms was George Airs in 1817 and in 1828 the property was put up for auction.
Around this time it seems likely that the land came into the possession of Sir Thomas Wilde (1782-1858), the first Baron Truro, who lived at Bowes Manor to the south and was Lord Chancellor 1850 to 1852. (There is a blue plaque to Wilde at 2 Kelvin Avenue marking the location of Bowes Manor). If so, Alderman Thomas Sidney (1805-1899) – Whig politician, tea merchant and Mayor of London from 1853-4 – was the next owner. Sidney was responsible for laying out Palmerston Lane in the 1870s, which at the time was on the western edge of the Bowes Manor estate.
However, even though the building seems to have been named after Baron Truro, there is little or no evidence of either Wilde or Sidney actually living there. The reason? Apart from having perfectly acceptable accommodation at the Manor, Truro Cottage, as it was then, was probably simply too humble an abode for your Big-Whig-about-town.
Records of a Truro Cottage begin appearing in directories and post office books in 1861, when Elizabeth Ward is known to have lived there, followed by Charles Foster in 1867 and William Morris, a stockbroker, who occupied the building for much of the 1870s and early 1880s. The first mention of a Truro House comes with the occupancy of Thomas Reynold Roberts, a draper from Islington who had a shop at 222 Upper Street and is known to have lived at the Palmers Green site from at least 1886. It seems possible that he remodelled the building on a grander scale, resulting in its rebranding from cottage to house.
Sometime in the 1890s the house came into the possession of Frederick Penberthy Colliver who lived there with his wife, three sons, and four servants – a nurse, housemaid, cook and coachman. According to Colliver’s grandson who wrote to us recently, two of the sons may have been born in the house and all three of the Colliver boys went on to be mentioned in dispatches in World War One. They moved to Chaudon house in Hemel Hempstead late in the 1890s and the property was for a short time occupied by George H Frank.
1898 saw the beginning of the most definitive and certainly the most stable period in Truro House’s history, a notable one hundred year occupancy by a single family, the Davises. George Davis was a civil engineer. His wife Marie Henrietta Charlotte Davies was French and Davis’s own middle name was Emile; perhaps this gives us a clue as to why the apparently already ‘French’ appearance of the house appealed to the family and the style of the renovations they undertook in the years that followed. George was a founder of Davis and Timmins screw manufacturers, who continued to trade until the 1960s, with works in Brook and Clarendon Road in Wood Green and premises in Kings Cross and Walthamstow.
Davis died of a stroke in 1922 and when his wife also passed away in 1936, the property passed to their daughter Charlotte Davis. She lived at Truro House in the company of her French housekeeper, Mlle Florence Zanotti until she died in 1995 at the grand old age of 98. In 1973 Charlotte sold the eastern part of the land for the building of Honeysuckle House – up until that point the freehold still spanned the full triangle formed by Green Lanes, Oakthorpe Lane and the New River. In 1975 Truro House was given a Grade 2 listing by English Heritage.
I have heard people say that Miss Davis liked to keep herself to herself. Perhaps there will be people reading this article who remember her? Graham Dalling used to tell the story of how, when the Enfield Local Studies Team were based in Palmers Green Library, he and David Pam went knocking on the door, only to be sent away with a flea in their ear.
In April 1999 the freehold of the house and land was sold to Rainbow Properties. It could have been the end of Truro House, but instead this is where things get particularly interesting.
When in 2000 Rainbow applied to build a number of 3 story villas to replace the stable block, English Heritage investigated the history of the house and gardens. What they found and recorded in their report is remarkable: A sitting hall. A panelled drawing room with hidden drawers and cupboards. Stained glass with chivalric motifs and mottos. A rare early use of concrete mouldings.
The alterations of the 1900s, said English Heritage, “can be compared favourably with other interiors of the Arts and Crafts movement.” There was also a ‘near-unaltered scheme of interior decoration of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century’ including a Toile de Jouy wall in the north west bedroom (toile is a decorating pattern in which a complex scene, usually with a pastoral theme, is printed on a white or off white linen background)
The original gardens had changed little since the ordnance survey map of 1867. “Traces of curved terrace to the south of the building can still be clearly seen, as can most of the formal paths shown [in 1867].
The most exciting discovery was that “elements of timber framing and brick noggin, more commonly associated with eighteenth century form of construction, have been exposed in the upper floor landing and in the cellar” which may have been part of the old Kings Arms structure from its last rebuilding in 1775. So parts of Truro House are nearly 250 years old. The overall conclusion: Truro House is a building from the 1830s, built in an uncluttered ‘old French’ style, enlarged and remodelled in the 1890s, and modernised in the early part of the twentieth century, since when it has been largely untouched. The interior, say English Heritage, is “a rare and important survival, worthy of further study.”
And so we come to Truro House in 2014. Overgrown, looking a bit sorry for itself. But this week we hear that conditional planning permission has been granted for the restoration of the house as a single dwelling, the development of the old coach house, also as a single dwelling, and the erection of 25 flats in two blocks.
Currently the site is a rare haven of greenery in PG, leading down to the New River, Palmers Green’s other forgotten wonder. I hope that some of the character of that rare amenity can also be preserved in whatever comes next.
Do also read yesterday’s post, featuring Lindsay Barnfield’s account of visiting the house and meeting Miss David
A version of this article appeared in Palmers Green and Southgate Life in January 2014
Poor old soul – Truro House in a state of dilapidation May 2012
News comes this week via the ever hardworking Palmers Green Community website that planning permission has finally been granted for Truro House and grounds. This comes after a long hiatus in which no one seemed to know what was happening, and Palmers Green residents watched in dismay as the building became more and more neglected and surrounded in mystery.
Apparently Truro House is to be saved and restored as a single dwelling and the old coach house will also become a single dwelling. Two blocks of flats will be built, one of two stories and the other of 3 and 4 at various points. There will be lower ground floor and roof level accommodation in the new buildings.
I have not been able to establish whether the formal grounds on the Green Lanes side of the building will be retained – there is a frightening number of documents on Enfield Council’s website – but one of the drawings from 2009 indicates that the intention may be that they could be retained.
Coincidentally, my favourite message in my inbox this week was from the creator of the Finchley website Greenacre Times‘ creator Lindsay Barnfield, who told us about the time she visited Truro House and met the legendary Miss Davie, whose family occupied the building for one hundred years. Incidentally, I wrote a complete article on the history of Truro back in January, but forgot to post it, so stand by for that shortly.
Lindsay says
Like many others, I found Truro House fascinating when I passed y on the bus. I have always liked doors in walls. So you can imagine how pleased I was to being going through that door when I had reason to visit Miss Davies.
This was in 1990 when she was 92. I was greeted by her housekeeper and led in through a kitchen that dated from the early part of the (last) century complete with range, then through another kitchen with more modern appliances then in to the main hall. This was a room in itself, with a grand fireplace. At the top of the stairs there hung a beautiful full length portrait of a gowned Miss Davies, dating I should imagine, around 1920.
She held court in a vast room, that acted as a sitting room and bedroom on the first floor overlooking the garden. There was a fascinating little staircase that led up out of the room – how I wanted to explore! Opposite Miss Davies’ room was another grand panelled room, barely used, looking as if little had changed during Miss Davies’ lifetime (apart from electricity!). How I would have loved a guided tour! She told me she has lived in the house her entire life.
I always felt that this should have been left as a museum – as Miss Davies had no children to inherit her amazing home.
For more information on the plans for the house which have now received conditional approval from Enfield Council, click here.
My first ever fireworks display was in Oakhill Park on V.E day. Fireworks were on the hill whilst we stood on the flat the other side of Pymmes Brook. It finished with George VIs head in lights. It was total magic.
Barbara B from Southgate remembers her first ever firework display. (Image by kind permission of Christine Matthews, Creative Commons Licence)
Talent abounds in Palmers Green but perhaps the strangest claim to fame goes to Tony Norton, who in 1965 journeyed to Manchester to successfully defend his title of World Needle Threading Champion.
The idea of the contest was to see how many strands of cotton could be threaded through the eye of a number thirteen rug needle. Tony, clad in natty suit and looking not unlike Hank Marvin, used unorthodox methods, including greasing the threads, to win with a record of 1,171 threads through the eye of the needle – 171 more than his record the previous year.
We have a four hundred year old man made waterway, a five hundred year old house that keeps burning down under strange circumstances, a spooky overgrown house by the main road and a railway that until the 50s knew the atmosphere and smuts of steam…And yet, after more than 100 years of modern-day Palmers Green, dripping with requisite potentially spooky Edwardiana, ghost stories about the area are very rare.
But there are a few.
The first concerns the Fox. In the 1980s and 1990s the back rooms of the Fox (as The Fox Theatre) became home of several theatre companies in succession, including in 1996 the Fact and Fable Theatre Company, whose performance of Pin Money by Malcolm Needs was directed by June Brown, Dot Cotton of Eastenders.
It was during another production in November 1996, according to Gary Boudier in his 2002 book, A-Z of Enfield Pubs (part 2), that a Mr Sullivan from Archway felt himself being tapped on the shoulder but turned to find no one there. Bar staff and customers also reported unexplained noises, only some of which were attributable to the effects of alcohol.
The Intimate Theatre also reputedly has its ghost, according to the BBC’s Doomsday Reloaded project of a few years ago, though it’s not much of a story, only a ghostly presence in the auditorium.
But my favourite story concerns the appropriately named Dead Man’s Bridge.
If you don’t know Deadman’s bridge, it’s the second bridge you cross as you head down Green Lanes towards the north circular. The story of the bridge dates from when Palmers Green was a rural area and comes from E Ploton’s long out of print Tales of Old Middlesex.
In those days, London imported food for people and livestock from miles around the surrounding area, Essex, Middlesex, Hertfordshire. Carts loaded high with straw made their way along Green Lanes, winding their way into a then more distant London.
One such carter was Gabriel Haynes, who had done the journey so many times that his old horse knew the way off by heart. Days were long and the gentle rocking of the cart meant that Gibby had got into the habit of catching a few moments sleep on the return journey as night began to fall and he drew his coat around him.
It was in this state that Gibby atop his cart, and drawn on home by his trusty horse approached the bridge over Pymmes Brook one night in early November, when a large black dog came running out from the side of the road.
Startled, the horse swerved to the side of the road. Thrown from the cart, Gibby was pitched onto the bank of Pymmes Brook and rolled into the water. He might have emerged from the shallow waters with just some bruises had cart and startled, flailing horse not come tottering after. Hauled from the water, a badly injured Gibby was carried to the Cock Inn, where he died a few hours later. Strangely it is not Gibby who E Ploton tells us was often seen in the shadows by the bridge – but the black dog who caused the death of Old Gibby.
I am not aware of any recent sightings – unless of course you know different.
There is one more local tale which is set around Christmas. You are going to have to wait until December for that one.
