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)
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.
This article first appeared in the October edition of Palmers Green and Southgate Life
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
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?
Current refurbishment at the site of the audio visual shop has revealed the fascia underneath of Bourlet’s the jewellers, who previously occupied the site at 349 Green Lanes.
Bourlet’s is slightly iconic in Palmers Green because of it’s old jewellers clock, which is still on the building though long ago stopped and looking a little unloved.
I have often wondered who the Bourlets were – can anyone tell us more about them? There is a Bourlet’s Close in Fitzrovia, and a Bourlet’s fine art dealer, but other than that…
Tomorrow Monday 4 August we are being asked to switch out our lights at 10pm and light a single candle to mark one hundred years since the start of the First World War. I hope that it will be successful. I don’t think war should be glorified but 16 million people lost their lives and 20 million more were wounded. Those who survived saw Britain and our wider world change forever. What exactly should we remember, if not that?
As time moves on, of course, our perceptions of the past and our relationship with it change, but for as long as I can remember in my own life, the events of the First World War have been writ large in my understanding of our history. It’s not history in the Tudors-and-Stuarts sense, but much much closer, something that people I knew experienced at first hand.
My granddad, Reg Beard, was in Palestine and Egypt during the First World War. He’d been a traction engine driver, and in 1914 was one of the few people who could drive; he probably had a good understanding of how machines worked too, so though we aren’t sure when, he was sent to work on the Palestine railway.
We never knew much about what he experienced there: partly because we never sat him down to ask, but also because a lot of people returning from war simply didn’t talk about those things, though he did used to say that in Palestine you could pick oranges from the trees and they were the best he had ever tasted.
My father often says “That’s in the past now, move on”. Perhaps that is what my granddad thought too. I do remember though, that there was a tattoo on granddad’s forearm. I asked him about it once and he said it was because he had “been a naughty boy”. For years after, I thought tattoos must be a kind of punishment. I think now that perhaps he got it in Palestine. Or Egypt. Or, perhaps more likely, Chelmsford.
To see the impact of the war on Palmers Green, you need only visit the Garden of Remembrance, tucked away at the Powys Lane/Broomfield Avenue end of Broomfield Park. It’s a lovely, peaceful area with a pergola, formal gardens and a simple memorial to those lost in two world wars. 530 names are listed in the 1914-18 conflict, including many family names that are still familiar in the area today.
Some surnames are listed again and again. In the second world war this is often due to civilian casualties of bombing, but in the First World War it more likely tells the story of families hit by loss again and again as one by one their sons went to war, often willingly with best foot forward and even lying about their age to be able to take part. In his book Akenfield, Ronald Blythe tells us that many a lad who went to war actually grew a few inches taller on war rations, such was the diet of the farm labouring poor.
The story of the coming of war to Palmers Green as depicted in local paper The Recorder makes surprising reading now, knowing what we do. In the issue at the end of July there is no sense of what lay ahead and stories are of alterations to the town hall, liberal fetes and scarlet fever scares. By October, the Recorder was publishing lists of people who had joined up and the new rifle range at Broomfield Park, which had only been established a few weeks before but had 800 members and was getting through over 1000 rounds of ammunition daily. The Recorder itself did not make it though the war. It stopped suddenly in 1917.
There is one more sign of the changes World War One brought to Palmers Green. The expansion that had begun only 10 or 15 years before came to a halt. Some roads were stopped in their tracks, and there are tales that some houses started before the war went though it without roofs. It’s one of the reasons why you will see different house styles in one street, and pre war motifs appearing in post WWI houses.
But this article is for my granddad, who survived the war with hat at a cocky angle, became the father of my uncle Reg and my dad Dennis – and chose to live his life in the present, and not tell the tale.