News from The Barnet Society

A government U-turn on plans for the closure of railway ticket offices across England will come as a relief to passengers, especially the elderly and the disabled, who use stations around High Barnet on the Great Northern Railway and Thameslink lines.

Concern is growing that – nearly a month after a major planning application for 114 homes on the Whalebones fields was submitted – neighbours have yet to be formally notified by the Council. Barnet residents have until only until Tuesday 14 November to look at the plans and make their own comments, for or against.

If a fund-raising campaign is successful, there will be more of a carnival like atmosphere at this year's Barnet Christmas Fayre to be held on Sunday 3 December with professional entertainers hopefully welcoming visitors as they walk up and down the High Street.

High Barnet's Byng Road allotments celebrate their 85th anniversary next year -- and for 66 of those years Peter Morris has been tending his plot with the same determination and enthusiasm as when he started out as a teenager.

The Victoria Quarter illustrates – barely believably – the extraordinary lengths to which some developers go these days to cram housing onto their sites.

A new planning application is in for the Whalebones site. The plans have been scaled back from 152 to 114 homes, but in most other respects are similar to the one we objected to in 2019.

In a break with a tradition that dates back for a century or more, Barnet Parish Church of St John the Baptist is to set up a mixed-voice choir alongside its long-standing choir of men and boys.

Ewen Hall in Wood Street was transformed for an action-packed evening when the newly established Barnet Amateur Boxing Club held its first show event attracting amateur boxers from nearby clubs in the London area. There were 13 bouts in all -- and the evening opened with some fiery engagements from ten-year-olds.

An Islamic educational charity has paid over £4 million to purchase the vacant 1,000 seat Brethren's meeting room at the Arkley end of Mays Lane, Barnet. The sale of the property, which is within the Green Belt, and which has 160 parking spaces, was completed on Friday 6 October.

Charging points for electric vehicles are to be installed in the pavements of several side roads close to Barnet town centre -- and applications are being made for even larger self-standing charge points in front of the Everyman cinema and in East Barnet village which would be partly financed through video display advertising.  Notices warn residents

A fascinating insight into the life of wealthy middle-class households who set up home in the flourishing township of New Barnet in the late 1880s has emerged after research by family historians.

My web post on 25 September about the crucial importance of minimising carbon emissions from Barnet’s existing housing stock looked at the challenge of upgrading the environmental performance of two houses on the Council’s Local Heritage List. This post shows what can be done to a more typical home in our borough.

Bringing to life the gaiety and rough and tumble of Barnet Fair -- said to be have been one of the the noisiest and naughtiest in Victorian London -- is the challenge facing High Barnet's amateur dramatic group, The Blue Door Theatre Company.

Within two weeks of hearing about a planning application for residential caravans on Green Belt farmland in the Dollis Valley, well over 500 objectors registered their opposition, backing a campaign mounted by residents of Mays Lane and surrounding roads.

In Barnet, the biggest cause of climate change is housing. Homes emit around 50% of the carbon released in our borough. Radically reducing those emissions by upgrading the environmental performance of our homes is the most urgent and useful thing that many of us can do.

Many of the motorists hurrying past beside the edge of Monken Hadley Common have probably never stopped to take a walk or had a chance to enjoy an historic and incomparable green space on the boundary of Greater London.

Volunteers collected over 65 kilogrammes of surplus apples from trees in the back gardens of houses in Sebright Road -- all destined for foodbanks and self-help groups across the London Borough of Barnet.

Families with young children have been moving to the London Borough of Barnet because of the strong performance of its secondary schools -- a strength recognised at the annual "Celebration of Excellence" at Queen Elizabeth's Girls' School.

In his first campaign since becoming the Labour Party's prospective parliamentary candidate for Chipping Barnet, Dan Tomlinson has collected over 300 signatures in a petition opposing plans to close railway station ticket offices at New Barnet and Oakleigh Park.

Enforcement cameras at road junctions in and around High Barnet which were vandalised when the Ultra Low Emission Zone was extended to the outer London boroughs appear to be back in working order. Measures have now been taken to protect cables connected to the cameras.