Author: Suzanne Beard

Watch the birdie!

Blackbird picture Africa Gomez Creative Commons

Have you got an hour to spare on Saturday or Sunday?

This weekend people all over the uk will be taking part in the annual RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch. The programme has been running on the same weekend in January for the last 35 years, and the data has grown into a fascinating record of bird populations in the UK.

To get involved all you need to do is make a note of the largest number of each species you see at one time in the period of one hour, and report your findings to RSPB. Not birds on the wing, we hasten to add– that way madness lies – but just those you spot in your garden.

Secretly we suspect that birds rather look forward to the Birdwatch weekend each January. Maybe a little more bird food gets put out, though its something RSPB advises we should be doing all through the year.

Up in the Northern reaches of Palmers Green, our birds like the usual bread, cake, suet, dried fruit, the odd leftover potato and rice. They turn up their beaks at niger seeds, which we optimistically put out in the home of luring in some finches. And they will only eat apples on sufferance. Maybe they go off them after the autumn glut.

The real mystery is what birds will turn up during the course of a year. In our first year in PG, we didn’t see a single sparrow or starling, only a standard lineup of robins, blackbirds, crows, jays, pigeons and various types of tit. But since then we have seen greater spotted woodpeckers, green woodpeckers, and, once, a redwing. We still haven’t seen any parakeets, though once they arrive we will probably loathe them.

What is the most obscure bird sighting you have had in Palmers Green? And did you take a photo?

If you are interested in bird behaviour I recommend Africa Gomez’s BlogSpot The Rattling Crow http://therattlingcrow.blogspot.co.uk/

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.

Art and Culture Community Film History Palmers Green Uncategorized

New exhibition warns of the evil that humans do

Post author By Suzanne Beard
Post date January 14, 2014
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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.

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.

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Devonshire Road pioneers Palmers Green playstreets

Post author By Suzanne Beard
Post date January 13, 2014
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Devonshire Road is set to become Palmers Green’s first play street.

A recent residents’ postal vote in favour of a Temporary Play Street Order will allow the road to be closed once a month to through traffic, to allow children to play on the road.

Residents’ traffic will be allowed in as normal, albeit at walking pace behind a steward. It’s a model of street play that is spreading fast around the country, having started in Bristol, as the Playing Out website explains (www.playingout.net).

The date of the first play session will be announced shortly and Devonshire are inviting residents of other streets to come and take a look so that they can see a play street in action, and maybe consider if it might work for them.

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

What Palmers Green will be like in 2014, probably…

Post author By Suzanne Beard
Post date January 10, 2014
2 Comments on What Palmers Green will be like in 2014, probably…

The beginning of the year is the traditional time for looking into one’s crystal ball. Here are our predictions for 2014, courtesy of ‘Mystic Jewel’. All of them, I think you will agree, are almost certain to come true.

The Palmers Green farmers market moves to the Triangle. Enfield Council embraces this as part of the regeneration of the centre of Palmers Green and gives permission for the wider streets on Green Lanes and Aldermans Hill also to be used for stalls.
Bread – in 2014 Palmers Greeners will go mad for it Image: freefoto.com

Palmers Green residents become so excited by fresh produce and artisan products that new butchers and bakers open, having first lovingly restored their new premises to the appearance they would have had in 1914. A deli follows. Then a greengrocer. All of them open until 8 rather than closing before most people even get home.
The fate of Broomfield House is finally decided and everyone in Palmers Green agrees that the outcome, whatever it is, is the best that can be achieved. Previously opposed factions make daisy chains together on the lawn in front of whatever is left of the building.
Truro House and grounds are purchased by the Council, who restore the historic 19^th century gardens right down to the New River, opening up river access with a new pocket park. A new zebra crossing links with the new developments around the library and town hall. Palmers Greeners start getting noticeably puffed out with civic pride. Some people who don’t even live in Palmers Green start to have heard of it.
Jona Lewie, who had a hit with You’ll Always Find Me In The Kitchen at Parties, the only song ever to mention Palmers Green in the lyrics, opens the 2014 Palmers Green Festival. A competition is launched to write a new song about Palmers Green, to be judged by online votes based on performances of each song at the 2015 Festival. Everyone in Palmers Green buys the winning song on iTunes and it becomes the Christmas no 1. Palmers Green is widely praised as ‘one sick ‘hood’ (whatever that means).
The Palmers Green Conservatory runs a front gardens competition as part of Britain in Bloom. It is a precursor to the 2015 Palmers Green Garden Festival.
The council gives all shop owners opportunity to apply for a grant to improve the quality of their shop fronts and fascias, provided that they follow a design code that takes Green Lanes back to its original, more uniform look.
Railings on green lanes are replaced by tubs of hardy perennials. These are adopted by shops and kept tidy because they recognise that it contributes to the growing reputation of the area.
The Reliant Robin – the new PG car for 2014 Image Commons (Michael Warren)

Owners of black German cars in Palmers Green form a self policing group to crack down on the boy racers among their number. Said boy racers who cannot thus be reformed are required by law to change car to a pink Reliant Robin with built in speed limiter and are banned from residential streets and motorways. A small Palmers Green workshop revives UK production of pink Reliant Robins with huge sound systems, and production goes into overdrive as robins become known as, you know, ‘Badass’.
Buoyed by development, Palmers Green declares itself an independent republic, and produces its own notes and coinage with famed local artist and man about town Ralph Hutchings’ head on it in place of Her Maj. Much blues is played in celebration.

What are your Palmers Green dreams and predictions, do tell us!

Community History Palmers Green

The year was 1914

In 1914 the Palmers Green we know today was largely brand new; the streets were pristine (a little muddy perhaps), the houses occupied by the self-consciously respectable…and war was round the corner.

This weekend the Guardian published some stunning pictures of life in 1914 from across Britain, including a number from London. Unbelievably to us now, in early 1914, some were arguing the moral virtues of war, as reported by Elizabeth Day in this fascinating article. The anonymous A Rifleman felt war offered the potential for “the highest degree of physical and moral development”.

A Rifleman was in one respect perhaps half right about physical development. Ronald Blythe in his book Akenfield told of how the farm workers in a remote corner of Suffolk between the Orwell and the sea actually grew several inches taller while at war (those that returned, that is) – such was their poverty at home that, depressingly, diet was actually better as a fighting soldier.

But in early 1914 (writes Day) people had other preoccupations than war – indeed Europe seemed to be going through an unprecedented period of calm. The pressing issues were Ireland and the suffragettes, even here in Palmers Green it seems – Palmers Green had its own unionist societies (the official name of the Conservative party is the Conservative and Unionist Party), and connections with the suffragettes through the Goulden family and other local campaigners (see here for our article on the suffragettes in Palmers Green).

The Guardian’s photos give a chilling glimpse into a world about to change forever. To view them, click here