If you find any that dont work, please let me know!
Category: Uncategorized
Categories
Delicious Enfield
If you are one of the growing band of people who like good food and like it to be local, you might want to check out the new Facebook page, Foodies Enfield.
The page has been set up to help local people find out about and share tips on the best independent food businesses in Enfield, as well as helping foster the development of a ‘good food’ culture in the area.
Visit the site at https://www.facebook.com/FoodiesEnfield
Categories
Enfield opens its doors
London Open House runs again on the weekend of 22 and 23rd September, and is a brilliant opportunity to see London’s best kept secrets and nose around some of its most famous buildings.
Enfield will have 13 properties opening over the weekend
- Enfield Town Library. Built in 1912 and reopened after restoration in 2010 with a new glass extension, the Library won a London Planning Award for best built project.
- The Chickenshed Theatre. Purpose built theatre facilities
- The Friends Meeting House and Burial Grounds – dating from 1790
- George V Pumping Station – designed to pump water from the River Lee into the George V reservoir
- Lee Valley Athletics Centre – state of the art and sustainable sports facilities
- Myddleton House – home of the great plantsman E A Bowles
- North London Hospice Building in Barrowell Green – just recently opened state of the art facilities
- The parish church of St Andrew Enfield – dating from the 13th century, one of the very oldest buildings in the borough
- North London Priory Hospital – fantastic grade 1 listed building overlooking Grovelands Park
- The Royal Small Arms Factory
- St Mary Magdelaine Church in Windmill Hill – an example of the Victorian gothic
- 11 Second Avenue, Bush Hill Park – timber clad garden studio and refurbishment of a victorian house, with gardens
If you would like to stay local but venture a little further, there is the wonderful Studio A and theatre at Alexandra Palace and the Muswell Hill Odeon – both worth a look.
Some events require pre booking and not all venues are open both days, so check before setting out. Venues can be busy and the London Open House website has also been experiencing a few glitches, so don’t delay planning your day.
Are there any buildings in Palmers Green you would like to see opened for Open House day?
There seems to be no new news on the fate of The Woodman.
Over 350 people have now signed the petition (have you? – see sidebar). According to discussions on the Woodman’s Facebook account and recent emails from the brewery to local residents, it seems that discussions are still on-going.
Meanwhile the issue of the closure or otherwise of The Woodman , and the general policy of the breweries towards their tenants is becoming a hot topic in the local press. In this week’s Enfield Gazette and Advertiser, Mark Leaver from Winchmore Hill writes of the experiences of his family when they ran the Salisbury Arms. At that time new rent was negotiated every three years and an acceptable figure was agreed by both parties. The breweries were fair in in what the charged for their products, so in turn an affordable price was charged to customers – result, the pubs were able to survive as viable businesses.
Now, he explains,
“tenants are tied to buying draught beer, cider, all bottle of wine, spirits and minerals from their respective landlords at grossly inflated prices…. As a free trader you can buy 11 gallons of lager for £95, as a tenant you will have to pay £200 for the same barrel.
“As a tenant you have to pay rent. As a rule of thumb your rent is approximately 10-12% of turnover. But as pubs struggle and takings reduce, your rent [to the brewery] doesn’t.
If you contact your business development manager trying to negotiate more reasonable prices, you are told that it is bad management on your part. How far from the truth that is.”
Solving it isn’t rocket science says Lever. It simply takes political will: Supermarket prices of alcohol should be regulated and the prices breweries are allowed to charge tenant should be capped.
“The price of drinks would be reduced, bringing a tenanted house in line with the pub companies’ own managed houses and encouraging the return of customers, which in turn would directly kick start the survival of the great British pub.”
We aren’t sure about the stance of local MPs on this issue.
Emails sent to David Burrowes (david@davidburrowes.com) more than three weeks ago have yet to receive an acknowledgement. Mr Burrowes may very reasonably feel that he can’t get involved in the specific issues surrounding The Woodman, or indeed the other two local pubs which have closed this year (The Willow, Winchmore Hill Road and the White Hart, Chase Road).
But we hope he might have some interest in the way in which policies of breweries impact on his constituency and others up and down the country.
The highly proper, curtain twitching Palmers Green of the 1920s seems an unlikely birthplace for a writer who…er…shall we say…. reached the parts that others could not reach…but Palmers Green it was that gave the world Dr Alex Comfort, writer of one of the most famous and game changing books of the ‘make love not war’ generation.
Alex Comfort was born in Palmers Green on February 10 1920. It was a happy childhood, surrounded by books. Aged 15 he blew off four fingers of his left hand while making fireworks with a school friend His antics meant that his parents were unable to keep him in school and so he was home educated, before going on to Highgate School and eventually studying natural sciences at Cambridge.
Comfort was a prolific writer right from the start, and first went into print aged 17 with a novel called The Silver River, based on his experiences travelling with his father in Africa and South America. While training as a doctor during the war he became interested in pacifism, registering as a conscientious objector even though his damaged hand would in any case have exempted him from active service, conducting a public debate with George Orwell and eventually becoming an anarchist and publisher of political tracts. In 1961 he was imprisoned for his role in demonstrations against the bomb, and passed the time teaching Irish Republican songs to fellow inmate Bertrand Russell.
Although he wrote 51 books in his lifetime, including poetry, novels and plays, as well as conducting groundbreaking work in the study of ageing, it was 1972’s The Joy of Sex for which Comfort, to his chagrin, will always be remembered. Dashed off in just two weeks, the result of concern about the ignorance of medical students about the fundamentals of the birds and the bees, “the unselfconscious text” (quoth the Guardian) – combined with illustrations featuring a very ordinary looking man and woman – “showed a lively interest in all sorts of highways and byways of sexuality”, organised under cook book style chapter headings. The text condemned the prudery of ‘squares’ and suggested that the American involvement in Vietnam might have come about because of ‘uninteresting sex’. His serious point was that lack of human connection can have tragic results.
In later life Comfort taught psychology at Stanford University and then the University of California. In the last years of his life he returned to the UK, and was nursed by his son Nicholas in Kent. He died in 2000 at a nursing home in Banbury aged 80.
I have not been able to establish how close his ties remained with Palmers Green after his childhood, or exactly where Dr Comfort lived. Perhaps you know more….?
References / sources
Guardian and New York Times obituaries
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2000/mar/28/guardianobituaries
Work has begun on new housing to the rear of Green Lanes alongside the footpath which once ran across Clappers Green Farm.
There has been a footpath extending west in this location for over 500 years – the Clappers Green footpath once extended as far as the entrance to The Mall.
A section of the footpath between Green Lanes and the railway line will be narrowed by 70 cm to make way for an access road to the new properties.
