As if you need reminding, the Palmers Green Festival is tomorrow. Last year’s was brilliant and this year’s looks set to be even better – food, music, community stalls and all your neighbours in festive mood.
For the full festival programme, visit the festivals immensely impressive looking website http://www.palmersgreenfestival.org.uk/palmersgreenfestival.org.uk/home.html.
See you there!
Our house was one of the last of our terrace to be built before the First World War. With the coming of conflict, the rapid development that had created Palmers Green as we know it had come to a sudden halt. A few plots remained empty for some years, like runs of missing teeth between the new pristine rows.
The view northward to the end of our road in 1914 would have been to Bourne Hill, and then on into arable or grazing land, perhaps with a tantalising glimpse of Winchmore Hill in the middle distance. Perhaps, with the coming of the war, some pockets of farmland nearer at hand got a stay of execution. I hope that they were a great play space for Palmers Green’s newly arrived children – some small consolation while their families worried over the news in Europe and what it would mean for them…
I have always been fascinated by the history of our house and those around it. We are lucky that our house still has a few original features – we still uncover a little surprise here and there lurking beneath Edwardian raised pattern wallpaper and the efforts of decades of home improvers – the outline of our old wooden fire surround, the route of gas lighting, the outline of where the ‘copper’ once stood in the scullery, maybe once tended by a maid-of-all-work.
The first occupant of our house, according to Kelly’s directory, was Henry George Wort. Henry appears to have been born in Clerkenwell around about 1861, and a rummage through the 1911 census indicates that Henry’s previous residence was probably 126 St George’s Avenue in Tufnell Park, showing that the trend for Palmers Greeners to be refugees from inner north London is nothing new.
Henry had married his wife Elizabeth in 1887, and so they had been together more than 25 years by the time they moved into their brand new house in Palmers Green. Though they were 52 and 49 respectively, they had had no children.
The Worts were here for over 20 years. Elizabeth died in March 1936 and Henry outlived her by four years – he was nearly 80 when he died in November 1940, having lived in our house in two world wars. What must it have been like for him then I wonder, to arrive in Palmers Green on the brink of one world war, and then lived in it into the second. Some of our glass dates from the wartime (if your glass has an uneven ripple, perhaps some of yours does too) – and I can’t help wondering if the originals were blown out by an explosion and replaced while he lived here.
But I am getting ahead of myself. The building of our house had caused some ruffling of feathers in the local area – for the houses being planned by Mr Byford on our corner of Clappers Green Farm were to be terraces, and not even the aesthetically pleasing ‘linked’ terraces you find occasionally in this area. What’s more, they were to have only 3-4 bedrooms. Cheap properties were thought to be likely to attract lower class people such as bank workers and civil servants, not at all what those in the Lakes Estate had in mind as neighbours.
Henry Wort in this respect appears to be an enigma, for the census for 1911, two years before he came to Palmers Green, indicates that he was an assistant teacher, a less senior occupation than perhaps might have been expected even for our humble house, though Henry left more than three thousand pound on his death. Perhaps he moved here to take up a new post in one of the fast expanding local schools?
We don’t know if he was an owner occupier or a renter, but if it was the former, he and Elizabeth were likely to have been responsible for choosing our fixtures and fittings – the colour of the floor tiles, the coloured glass, the fireplace and the hearth tiles. Purchasers of newbuilds were given the opportunity to choose smaller details from a catalogue, which is why you will see some similar flourishes in your neighbours’ houses, but not necessarily in the same order.
The colours that Henry and Elizabeth chose have presented a bit of a challenge to subsequent generations. Dark green, dusky pink, burgundy and yellow, with smatterings of blue… By the time we first set foot inside in 2007, we had a house with pistachio walls and pink carpet in the back room, Lincoln green carpet and canary yellow walls in the bedroom and, in the hall, blue green carpet and walls with a contrasting paper border, the carpet fixed by drilling holes into the original tiled floor. Ho hum.
Somehow, even when facing these aesthetic challenges, the house has always felt happy, warm and welcoming. There have been many occupants since Henry Wort. Periods of rental mean that parts of the original house are still here that could easily have been lost to unsympathetic builders and home improvers.
We often thank Henry Wort for his house – and Henry and Elizabeth, we promise to always look after it.
This article also appears in the September issue of Palmers Green Life
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 ?
I have been hearing rumours about this for some time, but this week confirmation comes via the Fox Lane and District Residents Association’s weekly bulletin that The Fox has been sold to developers – apparently the same company that recently bought Winchmore Hill police station.
Though the current building dates from 1904, there has been a Fox on the site for several centuries. Palmers Green’s horse drawn buses once ran into central London from the Fox Hotel, as it once was. Geno Washington once played there. There have been theatre productions, celebrity drinkers, a ghost, a comedy club, and community cinema. And of course, it gave its name to Fox Lane.
The attraction for developers is fairly obvious – a huge plot of land, centrally located. But the loss to us of a major Palmers Green landmark and amenity is beyond calculation.
Is this really the end for The Fox, and what does it mean for Palmers Green?
From the Twitter stream of N21 online comes an intriguing call for extras for a film to be set in Palmers Green, apparently featuring big names.
The action is to be based in a betting shop, and so I cant think why it should be based here, with a mere 10 to chose from.
Extras are needed until 6 September. If you are interested, please email stephaniegrace9@hotmail.com. And dont forget to spill the beans to the rest of us about who’s in it and what its all about.
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.