News from The Barnet Society

Efforts are underway to identify and map the many alleyways and footpaths that add so much to the local landscape and help make High Barnet such an attractive place to live.

Gail Laser, founder of Love Barnet, has won national recognition for the decade she has spent working tirelessly to improve trading conditions in Barnet High Street.

Barnet’s pioneering role in the development of care for young people suffering from multiple sclerosis has one lasting memento – a plaque commemorating the opening of the Marie Foster Centre by the Duchess of Gloucester in November 1973.

High Barnet’s most prominent “ghost advertisement” – high up on a side wall in the High Street – is creating quite a flurry of interest and might well be up for listing as being of historical interest.

Plans to replace a semi-derelict vacant shop that has blighted Union Street for many years will go a long way towards finishing off a make-over for one of High Barnet’s historic thoroughfares.

Three Barnet war memorials – at Arkley, East Barnet and Monken Hadley Common – have been given the added protection of listed building status after a review conducted by Historic England. They were each considered of sufficient special architectural or historic interest to secure Grade II listing from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.

In a first for schools in the London Borough of Barnet, the Pavilion study centre in Meadway, High Barnet, is offering vulnerable and excluded school children the opportunity to get an entry level qualification in horticulture.

After facing a barrage of complaints and criticism over proposal to build a new school for almost 2,000 pupils on what was formerly the Barnet Football Club stadium, the Ark Academy network admitted its plans were “not yet a done deal”.

Catering and tourism students from Barnet and Southgate College are gaining work experience at High Barnet’s newest pop-up shop, a family-friendly tea shop that has opened in the Spires shopping centre.