A veteran High Barnet motorcycling enthusiast, 86-year-old Peter Biles — who bought his first motorbike just before the Coronation in 1953 — was one of the veterans taking pride of place in the pageant The Times of Our Lives on the final day of the Platinum Jubilee celebrations in Whitehall and The Mall.
With fine weather on bank holiday Friday, Platinum Jubilee street parties were the order of the day, and the party planners were delighted with the turn out.
Continue reading Platinum Jubilee street parties get celebrations off to a flying start
Objectors to a plan to install a 20-metre high 5G network phone mast on the main approach road to Barnet Hospital say it would have an overbearing impact on residents in nearby roads and perhaps become a potential health hazard.
Continue reading Plan for a 5G phone mast in High Barnet as high as the Angel of the North
With so few outlets available for small shopkeepers and with so little space for new businesses and shared working, Chipping Barnet Town Team has decided to take the initiative and open temporary accommodation for budding entrepreneurs in a prime location.
A newly opened recital hall at Queen Elizabeth’s School for Boys is to host three concerts to be held in July as part of the second annual High Barnet Chamber Music Festival.
Opening the new £4 million Signature care home in Wood Street, High Barnet, was the first official duty for the newly installed Mayor of Barnet, Councillor Alison Moore.
What is being billed as The Big Picnic on Saturday 4 June on the lawn beside Barnet Parish Church will be one of the highlights of local celebrations for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee bank holiday weekend.
Hadley FC, the oldest football club playing in Barnet, have won promotion to a higher league.
Continue reading Football fans have something to cheer about as Hadley FC celebrate fresh success
Hadley Green’s pink marble drinking fountain — out of order for the last 50 years — might possibly secure a new lease of life and once again offer walkers and even their dogs a refreshing drink of water.
Barnet High Street is to lose one of its convenience stores — the Sainsbury’s Local at 146 High Street is to close later this year.
Barnet Council is to charge £790 during the summer months to remove grass clippings from High Barnet’s two bowling greens — way above the £210 that was charged last year.
Continue reading Hefty bill for taking away grass cuttings causes consternation at Barnet Bowls Club
After investing £22 million in building a 100-apartment luxury care home in Wood Street, High Barnet, the Signature Care Homes group has now embarked on a marketing drive to attract future residents.
Continue reading Barnet’s high-end new care home seeks to attract residents for 100 apartments
Golfers with disabilities assembled at The Shire golf course in St Albans Road, Barnet, for the launch of the Cairns Cup, a new international disability golf competition between teams from Europe and the USA.
Continue reading Disabled golfers stage new international tournament at Barnet’s 18-hole course
Labour has taken overall control of Barnet Borough Council for the first time since the London boroughs were created in the 1960s — and High Barnet is one of the former Conservative strongholds that now has two Labour councillors.
Barnet High Street is busily adapting to changes in trading patterns that developed during lockdown, and which seem to be here to stay given the ability of so many employees to work from home.
Transport for London has rejected a plea for out-of-service buses to offer a skeleton 84 service when heading back and forth between Potters Bar bus garage and stops where services start and terminate in High Barnet.
Organ and piano pieces by the celebrated Barnet organist and composer William Ralph Driffill were played for the first time in probably 100 years at a recital commemorating the centenary of his death.
Continue reading Recital commemorating much-admired Barnet organist, composer and music teacher
An application to demolish a much-loved heritage landmark in New Barnet has once again been thrown out by the planning system, but the building is now at serious risk from vandals.
Continue reading Planning appeal victory for locally listed landmark undermined by vandals
Knights on horseback are to feature for the first time in military re-enactments at the fourth annual Barnet Medieval Festival to be held in mid-June at the Byng Road playing fields.
Residents were delighted to welcome back to High Barnet the celebrated chewing gum artist Ben Wilson who spent a day refreshing a trail of tiny pavement illustrations that starts outside his parents’ former home in Carnarvon Road and continues round the corner into Alston Road.
A two-century old gravestone in Monken Hadley churchyard was the final stop on a guided walk around locations associated with inspirational women from Barnet’s past.
Barnet Council has refused planning permission for a 50-megawatt electric battery array in the green heart of the borough. An earlier application for a gas peaking plant nearby was withdrawn last year. Mill Hill’s Green Belt has been saved for the moment – but if the UK is serious about reaching zero-carbon, an alternative may still need be found somewhere in the vicinity.
Tucked away on pastures north of Partingdale Lane and mostly screened by woodland is one of Barnet’s visual surprises – a National Grid substation that looks as if it recently landed from an alien planet. In fact it’s been there for years, largely unnoticed except by walkers or horse-riders. Equally surprisingly, it sits on Barnet’s Green Belt and a site of Metropolitan Importance for Nature Conservation (SINC).
The site first came to the attention of many Barnet residents in 2019, when TNEI applied to build a gas peaking plant, increasing the footprint of the substation by some 25%, on the east side of the existing National Grid plant. TNEI’s justification was that it “would help to ensure that National Grid is able to ‘keep the lights on’ in the UK as the electricity system strives to maintain the balance between supply and demand while rapidly decarbonising.” Following over 400 objections, and perhaps a rethink about gas, the proposal was withdrawn a year ago.
Meanwhile Harbour Energy had submitted another application, to install a battery storage facility including 20 battery containers (each nearly 14m long and 3m high) and 10 inverter and transformer stations, plus security fencing and other associated works, on the west side of the plant. Harbour argued that the proposed development “would store power from the Grid at times of excess supply and would feed this power back into the grid at times of high demand/reduced generation capacity.” They claimed that no other suitable sites were available in or around Barnet.
This time there were 912 objections. They included one from Theresa Villiers MP on the grounds that, although outside her present constituency boundary, the battery array would adversely affect her constituents. She and others were very concerned about nitrogen oxide emissions, air and noise pollution, and their impact on natural habitat, wildlife and ecosystems. Most were also opposed to any encroachment onto the Green Belt or SINC.
That was also the Barnet Society’s chief concern. The site is part of a wonderful tract of fields and woods that survive between Totteridge and Mill Hill, much loved by the residents who live around it and walk or ride across it.
We didn’t dispute the growing demand for energy, but battery storage and power generation aren’t listed among the ‘very exceptional circumstances’ permitted by the National Planning Policy Framework. In our view, the development would only be justifiable as part of a coherent regional energy strategy that included detailed evaluation of alternative sites, endorsed by full public consultation and political support. None of these were evident. Approval would set a damaging precedent, opening the door to ad hoc proposals on other Green Belt sites.
We therefore welcomed the unanimous refusal of the application by Barnet’s Planning Committee B on 30 March, contrary to the Planning Officer’s advice to approve it.
The conflict between our environment and our demand for energy will go on. The government’s recently-published British Energy Security Strategy is too high-level to help in situations like this. It acknowledges planning issues, but doesn’t mention Green Belts once.
The threat to the Green Belt in Mill Hill has been beaten off, at least temporarily – but it’s under attack elsewhere. As I write, a proposal has been submitted for up to nine houses on farmland by Mays Lane, and a second application is in for Arkley Riding Stables off Barnet Road (this time for three, not four, houses). And a field by Hendon Wood Lane has yet to be cleared of builder’s mess after years of illicit use as a yard. The Society can’t drop its guard.
An online election hustings is being organised by local pressure groups in the run-up to the May council elections to promote what they believe should become a shopping list of environmental targets for a newly elected Barnet Council.
Continue reading Election campaigning to urge Barnet Council to try to become greenest borough in London
Street parties, ceremonial tree plantings and the lighting of the beacon on top of Monken Hadley church tower are just some of the local events being arranged to celebrate the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee in June.
Continue reading Preparations underway for celebrations marking the Queen’s 70 years on the throne
Bus passengers mourning the loss of the 84 service from New Barnet to Potters Bar have taken to social media to express their anger.
Continue reading Dismay and anger over withdrawal of 84 bus between New Barnet and Potters Bar
Last night Barnet Council’s Strategic Planning Committee unanimously approved conversion of the existing building into a 90-place school for pupils with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD), despite concerns on the part of the Barnet Society. We wish it well, however – and hope it will trigger use of King George’s Fields for outdoor education, and perhaps a Forest School.
The Windmill School is sponsored by Barnet Special Education Trust (which already runs Oak Lodge School in East Finchley) and will be the first publicly funded school for Autism in the Barnet area. Public consultation on the proposal opened last October, with an exhibition in Tudor Hall. The scheme was described by Nick Jones here.
The origins of the proposal go back to 2017, when the Trust began searching for a suitable site for a second school. The offer of Department for Education funding to acquire a site, design and build a new school was never going to be turned down by the Council. Barnet is short of places for children on the Autistic spectrum and many sites were considered – though not, apparently, the Whalebones estate, which some would regard as an ideal site for a school, especially one wishing to develop an outdoor curriculum.
By 2021 the search was getting desperate. The Council rejected our suggestion of converting Grasvenor Avenue Infant School, which is due for closure. Its plan is to utilise the premises as an annex to Northway Special School. Due to the demand in Barnet for specialist places for ASD, both sites are apparently required to meet the demand.
No.50 Moxon Street was deemed the only remaining option. Over the last decade, numerous new schools and academies have been accommodated in redundant commercial and industrial buildings, often on confined urban sites. Where cleverly adapted, they can work well. But since most lack much in the way of outdoor space, they generally depend on timetabled access and imaginatively landscaped play terraces to compensate.
And while they can work for able-bodied and orderly pupils, this is often not the case for those with ASD. Their behaviours are often solitary and challenging, and so require more personal space than other children. Compounding the problem, Windmill School would have a very wide age range, from 5 (but sometimes cognitively younger) to 19. Each age and ability group would need its own appropriately designed and sized play facilities, which could not readily be shared. It’s also increasingly being realised that natural outdoor environments are particularly beneficial for those with ASD.
At Windmill, most outdoor needs will have to met in a rooftop playground that is only about 20% of the DfE’s minimum area recommendation for a school of this size and type. This causes us deep concern. The Trust’s Development Director, Ian Kingham, admitted to the Planning Committee that the playground was “woefully under area” but said that it was “the best option we have”.
Mr Kingham also asserted that the costs of transporting pupils to nearby outdoor green space “would not be a material factor”. But enabling children with ASD to access them safely requires commitments of time and staffing that most schools find hard to fund at the best of times. Sadly, because of the 2.5-metre solid wall around the rooftop playground, the nearby greenery will be almost invisible during normal play-time.
Those were the main reasons our Society Committee was concerned, but before deciding, we canvassed our members. For every member in favour, 14 opposed it. So we felt we had to object to the planning application, much though we like the principle of an ASD school.
It would be great if the Council’s decision galvanised the planners, Town Team and Chipping Barnet Community Plan to do something to improve connections from the town centre to King George’s Fields. Our existing woodland is potentially a marvellous Forest School only 50 metres from Moxon Street – but there’s currently no direct access between the two. Before long, proposals are expected for 49 Moxon Street, the property that blocks the way. It could be made a condition of planning approval that a public right of way is granted across the site to enable Windmill pupils – and the public – to benefit from the beauty and educational value of one of Barnet’s wonderful natural resources.
After missing out on so much during the Covid.19 pandemic, Barnet Choral Society are in final rehearsals for a belated 80th anniversary concert — a performance of one of the great challenges of choral singing, Edward Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius.
The bridegroom at this fashionable Monken Hadley wedding early in the last century was William Ralph Driffill, who became an admired organist and composer.
Continue reading Barnet wedding photo: a reminder of a family history with a musical twist
Chemotherapy patients receiving treatment at Chase Farm Hospital will benefit from two new cooling cap systems to be purchased with funds raised by Barnet and District CancerLink.
Saving rainwater is becoming ever more important in the face of global warming and our unusually dry summers…so Barnet Environment Centre in Byng Road has installed a giant water butt to capture and store all it can.
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