Enjoy a glass of locally brewed craft beer or real ale for a final few afternoons and evenings at the Urban Alchemy bar in the Chipping Work Shop in Barnet High Street before its last day of trading on Sunday 26 March.
Developing Barnet as “a borough of fun” is the objective of Barnet Council and to help achieve this there are to be increases in the number of people who are allowed to attend events in some of the borough’s 200 parks and open spaces.
A fresh application to redevelop some of the woods and farmland at Whalebones in Wood Street, High Barnet — but this time with fewer new homes — is about to be made on behalf of the trustees of the estate.
Barnet appears to be leading the way among outer London boroughs in the speed with which cameras and equipment is being installed by Transport for London for the introduction of the Ultra-Low Emissions Zone which will impose a £12.50-a-day levy on older vehicles.
With persistent warnings of shortages of fresh vegetables there seems to be even greater enthusiasm for grow-your-own produce — and that was certainly the vibe at an event organised by Barnet’s Incredible Edible campaign aimed at encouraging home cultivation in gardens and on unused land.
For 30 years Queen Elizabeth’s School, Barnet — which is celebrating its 450th anniversary — was at the apex of a clash between opposing education policies which were being pursued by Labour and Conservative governments, and which at the time split the country.
Despite the pace of new building in Barnet, most of our existing homes fall well below the environmental standards we need to meet to avoid climate catastrophe. At last week’s Barnet Society debate on Better Homes for Barnet, Dave McCormick of Barnet Friends of the Earth gave advice on what residents can do to save energy, minimise waste and make Barnet more sustainable. Below is a summary of Dave’s presentation.
We can probably all agree that we want new housing developments to be “healthy homes”, but are our existing homes healthy?
Homes in Barnet are the source of 48% of carbon emissions and most of the existing housing stock was built in the last century when climate change and biodiversity loss were less prominent issues. Unhealthy homes are homes that can harm our health and the environment – making our homes healthier can lead to healthier people, communities, and nature. So, what are the issues and what can we do?
Barnet is within a water-stressed region of the UK as we are extracting water from our environment faster than nature is replenishing our water resources. To avoid water shortages our water companies need to reduce leaks from pipes and we need to reduce the amount of water we each use per day by about a third. Shorter showers, turning off the tap when brushing teeth, using a bucket rather than a hose when washing the car are all simple things that we can do to reduce consumption. Fixing dripping taps and leaky loos takes a bit more effort and costs some money but can make a big difference. And when legislation for water labelling is finally introduced, we will be able to make better informed decisions about what products we buy.
Over 70% of our homes have gas central heating – a major source of emissions. We need legislation to make it easier to expand local renewable community energy, and help to change how we heat our homes. While we wait for this, we can improve insulation, turn down the thermostat and turn off radiators in unused rooms. All will help reduce our energy bills and our emissions.
Cooking on gas hobs contributes to carbon emissions and indoor air pollution that can harm our health. Switching to induction electric hobs is a good solution but meanwhile boil water in a kettle then put it into a saucepan for cooking and use saucepan lids to reduce gas use. When cooking, make sure the kitchen is well ventilated to help disperse pollution.
If we manage to stop our homes leaking heat we then have to ensure that lack of ventilation doesn’t lead to mould which can damage our health. Indoor air quality is becoming a growing area of concern.
Our households create a lot of waste and in Barnet, less than 30% of it is currently reused, recycled or composted. Rather than focusing on more frequent waste collection, the starting point should be to reduce the amount of waste and compost as much as possible at home (hot composters are good for this).
We all buy a lot of stuff – buying less can help reduce waste and reduce the emissions and water used in making the things we buy.
Food production is a significant source of emissions and freshwater use. Halving our meat and dairy consumption can cut agriculture emissions by between 20-50%. A vegan diet isn’t for everyone but we could all try to eat less meat, eat seasonable local produced food and grow our what we can in our gardens or windowsills.
There is lots we can do at home. We can also encourage others to act and support (and ask our councillors and politicians to support) the following initiatives that are aiming to address the issues around Healthy Homes:
The Healthy Homes Act, Local Electricity Bill, United for Warmer Homes (a Friends of the Earth initiative with a local petition).
We face a climate and biodiversity crisis and across our Borough, there are many volunteer groups trying to inspire and educate residents to take simple steps to make our homes healthier, reduce emissions, consume less and protect and enhance nature.
Community gardening, such as Incredible Edible in New Barnet, helps people learn about growing food and plants, composting and bug hotels in a social setting that improves well-being. Projects to plant pollinator bulbs and seeds help improve local biodiversity and Goodgym helps people get fit while doing good.
Community events such as “eco-show and tell” share ideas and get people thinking about what sustainability means for Barnet. This year, East Finchley Community Festival in Cherry Tree Wood aims to replace use of diesel generators with green alternatives – something other parts of Barnet could learn from.
Community action can make a big difference to making our homes, our communities and nature healthier. To succeed, whether it is designing and building new homes or maintaining and improving existing homes, sustainability needs to be at the heart of all we do.
How can we put this into action in Chipping Barnet?
Tributes from former colleagues, fans and fellow sports journalists to the legendary BBC football commentator John Motson have been reflecting on his fondness for Barnet Football Club where the young Motson cut his teeth as a cub reporter on the Barnet Press.
Action to thwart the onward advance of tower blocks around High Banet and close to the Green Belt was a shared objective of a panel of politicians and architects at a Barnet Society discussion on future housing needs.
A steep increase in crimes recorded by the police in and around High Barnet during the last 12 months — and especially since the start of the year — is a matter of real concern says the group that monitors the response of the town’s Safer Neighbourhood Team.
BBC Television were present on Hadley Green to record the final inspection and handover of a newly-restored pink granite water fountain which will once again offer the chance of a refreshing drink of water after being out of order for the last 50 years.
Barnet Vale residents are being consulted about possibilities for restoring long-abandoned changing rooms used by New Barnet Football Club and finding ways to bring the building back into community use.
After years of dereliction, Barnet Homes have published proposals for sites in Moxon Street and Whitings Road for public consultation. The designs are better than previous schemes for the same sites approved several years ago, but never built. They’re also more imaginative and sensitive than almost any the Barnet Society has seen for a long time. We support them, and hope you will too.
Barnet Homes got the latest plans off to a good start by arranging early public consultations, well before the planning applications are due to be submitted in spring, and by appointing good and experienced design consultants.
Both design teams are led by Peter Barber Architects, who have an excellent record of inserting attractive housing on awkward urban sites. In Barnet they’ve designed the modest Brent Place off Mays Lane; Edgewood Mews, Barnet’s answer to the Byker wall, alongside the North Circular; and the dramatic Pegasus Court in Colindale. The landscape designers for both projects are Staton Cohen, a practice based in Barnet Vale.
Together, the two schemes will offer 50% market and 50% affordable housing, but the mix will on each will be different, as will be the size of units and the balance of flats and houses with gardens.
The Whitings Road site (above) is relatively straightforward, the main planning requirement being to avoid overlooking of adjoining neighbours and Whitings Hill Primary School. The plan does this by clustering 35 homes, mainly 3 & 4-bed houses up to three storeys high with gardens, around a communal green.
The Moxon Street site (above) is more complicated. Half of it is within the Wood Street Conservation Area and it adjoins a Grade II Listed Georgian house. On Moxon Street, the former Checkalows building will be retained and extended, and a new building in similar style will fill the gap next to the listed house. The ground floors will provide small commercial premises with three flats above. Behind Moxon Street, 18 more 1 & 2-bed units will form an L-shaped mews, no higher than two storeys, linking to Tapster Street.
As usual with Peter Barber, the buildings are cleverly designed to maximise accommodation but minimise intrusion into their neighbourhoods. The predominant material is traditional brick, but the facades have a variety of windows and rooflines to provide individuality.
We made encouraging comments on the initial proposals in December. In the light of public comments, modifications have been made and a second round of public consultation is currently being held on both schemes. Only slight amendments have been made at Whitings Road, but at Moxon Street the plans have been developed to meet some criticisms.
We have only minor concerns at this stage. At Moxon Street, using three types of brick will look too ‘busy’; and while the widely differing window sizes and shapes are fun, they might quickly seem dated. At both sites, the flat roofs and varied rooflines are visually interesting but tricky to keep weatherproof. The units are mostly quite small with some strange room layouts. Achieving adequate privacy, daylight and private amenity space will be challenging. The net-zero ambition is admirable, but provision of photovoltaics, air-source heat pumps and a renewable energy strategy is unclear. But these can be sorted out by designers of this calibre.
The deadline for public comments on Moxon Street is Wednesday 15 February, and for Whitings Road Wednesday 22 February. Details can be found here.
If you’re excited by housing schemes like these – or if you dislike them – come and say so at the Barnet Society’s public meeting on Tuesday evening 21 February. Our debate on Better housing for Barnet will be at The Bull theatre, 68 High Street.
Come and ask questions – and suggest solutions – to our panel of speakers which includes
Doors will open for refreshments at 7:00pm and the meeting will be from 7:30 to 9:15pm. Admission: members – free; non-members – £5 donation (or why not join instead?).
Residents in the north of Barnet have recently felt besieged by new housing developments. We want more – and decent – homes for elderly as well as first-time buyers, but much of what is offered is unimaginative, out of scale and character with our neighbourhood, and mostly unaffordable. Surely we can do better? Brook Valley Gardens – nearing completion – shows one promising way forward.
The Barnet Society is hosting a public meeting on how to improve new and existing housing in Barnet. The debate on What in our back yard? WIMBYS, not NIMBYs! will be on Tuesday evening 21 February at The Bull theatre, 68 High Street.
Come and ask questions – and suggest solutions – to our panel of speakers which includes
Doors will open for refreshments at 7:00pm and the meeting will be from 7:30 to 9:15pm. Admission: members – free; non-members – £5 donation (or why not join instead?)
Brook Valley Gardens is a huge site – over 10 hectares (26 acres) of the former Dollis Valley Estate – and planning approval was granted nearly 10 years ago. But because construction won’t be complete before 2025, and because most of it is hidden from Mays Lane, it’s escaped public attention. That’s a pity: it’s an important and exceptional piece of planning and design.
The project, led by Countryside Properties, replaces a late-1960s prefabricated council estate that suffered a range of building and social problems. Wholesale redevelopment contentiously involved displacement of some 177 council tenants but secured a net gain of 192 homes. Of its 631 new homes, 60% were for private sale and 40% were affordable housing (managed by housing association L&Q). The community was to benefit from a replacement nursery and community centre including the Hope Corner café. The Society supported the planning application.
We particularly supported the design approach of the architects. The master-planners of the whole scheme, and architects of early phases, are Alison Brooks Architects, and of later phases HTA Design. Both are housing specialists with fine track records including numerous awards.
A key feature of the scheme is the restoration of traditional streets, which makes navigation easy and knits the new housing into the existing neighbourhood. Each street is lined with trees and has a different combination of flats and houses with gardens.
Most of the houses are in two or three-storey terraces, but the twelve different house-types and their arrangement, sometimes in line and sometimes staggered, avoids uniformity. The flats are blockier and up to four storeys high, and often mark the street corners. This provides an interesting variety of massing and roofline, but the development retains a sense of identity through use of the same cream textured brick and a high quality of landscaping.
Although the scale of the buildings is fairly traditional, they’re often quirky in shape and detail. Not everyone will like that, but it’s a refreshing change from either of the dominant styles in planning applications, neither trad pastiche nor blunt modernism.
The result is a surprisingly high density of housing – over 60 homes per hectare, which is twice the density of postwar suburban housing but never feels claustrophobic or overbearing. Building at this density on brownfield land would not be enough to solve London’s housing shortage, but Brook Valley Gardens does demonstrate that high density does not necessitate tall buildings or inhumane environments.
Another strong feature of the scheme’s design is that all the dwellings are being built to Code for Sustainable Homes Level 4, a standard that was unusually high ten years ago. It includes a wide range of measures such as solar photovoltaic panels, rainwater harvesting, biodiversity and electric car charging points, all accommodated unobtrusively.
In short, Brook Valley Gardens displays a quite unusual quality of both design and construction. It sets a standard that other developers in Barnet would do well to follow – and thereby avoid the acrimonious planning battles that have raged from High Barnet Station to Barnet House in Whetstone, and from the Victoria Quarter to Cockfosters, and that now threaten The Spires.
Patience is the watchword among staff and volunteers at the Rainbow Centre on the Dollis Valley estate as they wait for Barnet Council to refurbish a dis-used sports pavilion to provide a new base for community activities.
Angry Potters Bar residents joined forces to form a mass protest to promote their campaign for the restoration of the 84 bus service between Potters Bar and New Barnet which was withdrawn by Transport for London last year.
After standing proud and erect for almost a century and a half, Hadley Green’s magnificent drinking fountain is in pieces, awaiting restoration and getting re-connected to the water supply.
Another milestone has been passed on the long and challenging road towards re-furbishing and re-opening the historic cricket pavilion in Tudor Park, New Barnet
A High Barnet community dance group which had to close during the covid emergency is building back attendances at its weekly sessions and hopes more residents will come along and give it a go.
Continue reading A welcome return of High Barnet classes in creative movement and contemporary dance
After almost a decade being the proprietor of her own beauty salon, Paige Candler is saying farewell to Barnet High Street and has plans to establish an online business.
Continue reading Farewell to a High Street business for High Barnet beauty treatment specialist
Poundland is about to open its new store in The Spires shopping centre — at 9am on Saturday 28 January — an event for some Barnet shoppers that will be up there with the opening of a branch of the fashion chain H&M in 2017.
A much-troubled plan to build flats on the former gas works site in New Barnet has joined The Spires shopping centre as one of those projects where developers might have no alternative but to respond to the views of local community groups if they are to have any chance of gaining planning approval.
A High Barnet centenarian who is often seen out and about on his four-wheel mobility scooter shopping in the High Street is still receiving congratulations weeks after celebrating his birthday.
Property company BYM, owners of The Spires, have supplied Barnet Council with more details of their plans to redevelop the shopping centre to include blocks of flats of up to six storeys in height.
Motorists who took a short cut across Monken Hadley Common to avoid road closure notices have turned much of the grass into a muddy morass and left deep tyre marks — even damaging the much loved cricket pitch.
Millie the Waitrose cat — this time in bronze — has resumed her role as High Barnet’s most popular feline character, checking out customers at The Spires shopping centre.
Barnet Choral Society has started rehearsals under its new musical director Rory McCleery — and his choice for their first concert of 2023 plays to the choir’s great tradition of performing baroque music.
Despite an ongoing planning dispute about building over 500 homes on the former gas works site in New Barnet, developers Citystyle Fairview are seeking the go ahead for the construction of two blocks of flats on land fronting onto Victoria Road.
Continue reading Redevelopment finally seems likely alongside vacant New Barnet gas works site
Recent monitoring of water quality has renewed concern about the risk of sewage pollution in Pymmes Brook — seen here on its way through Oak Hill Park, East Barnet.
BYM Capital, owners of The Spires shopping centre, are drawing up plans for a major redevelopment to rebuild much of the existing precinct to provide blocks of flats above shops and cafes and also to construct new homes on adjoining land.
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Barnet FC are pleased to announce our player sponsorship packages for the 2025/26 season are now available.
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Food and music at The Black Horse
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