News from The Barnet Society

Polish trained chef Lukasz Szumski is planning to add one or two specialities from his grandfather's recipes to a traditional English menu at the Sebright Arms in Alston Road which has just re-opened as a gastro pub and sports bar after several weeks closure.

Searching for a celebrity connected wth all 272 tube stations on the London Underground has been a lockdown artistic venture for High Barnet cartoonist and caricaturist Simon Ellinas. He hopes his choices for tube stations in the London Borough of Barnet will become a talking point.

Plastic barriers and traps have been set up across Monken Hadley Common to safeguard great crested newts which might be threatened by the construction of a new water main.

To improve access for the disabled and children and visitors in wheelchairs, the main paths in and around the nature reserve at Barnet Environment Centre are to be re-laid with a rubber compound which will make them easier and safer to use.

Young and old joined in to help with High Barnet Green Beings' Sunday litter pick in and around the town centre.

Barnet Council is being asked to investigate whether restoration of the boarded up cricket pavilion in Tudor Park sports ground might be financed in part through a community infra-structure levy that will have to be paid on multi-storey blocks of flats proposed for the New Barnet former gas works site.

Years spent walking the dog on Hadley Green and in Hadley Woods and King George's Field was the inspiration for director and writer Paul Morrison whose new film 23 Walks, starring Alison Steadman, is to have its UK premiere at Barnet Everyman cinema.

Paintings and drawings on display in the Spires shopping centre are the work of Barnet children who have been isolating at home during the virus pandemic - and some of whom are still too anxious to return to school.

A community garden in New Barnet where passers-by can help themselves to vegetables, fruit and herbs is the first of what might become several similar ventures if the self-help group Incredible Edible Barnet can find sufficient volunteers.

Volunteers are getting prepared for a High Barnet litter pick on the last Sunday in September.

A newly formed team of volunteers has started picking and collecting surplus fruit across the Borough of Barnet so that unwanted produce can be diverted to food banks and distributed by other organisations helping the needy. Barnet Community Harvesters has been established by Daniella Levene.

Kenneth Grahame's classic children's story The Wind in the Willows is to be performed live in the open air at East Barnet - a rare chance for a family outing for theatre lovers who have missed out on so much during the many months of lockdown.

Passers-by and property owners within High Barnet's conservation areas are being urged to be on the lookout for thieves stripping lead from old and historic buildings. The Old Court House Surgery in Wood Street is the latest to be targeted.Lead flashing and gutters have been stripped from a rear roof of the surgery.

When my beer supplies dried up during lockdown, I was delighted to discover – by way of The Wilds Café – Urban Alchemy Brewing, a newly formed brewery based in York Road.

Brake Shear House, one of the last of the many small factories and workshops that were once dotted around High Barnet, is currently being demolished to make way for a new development of flats and houses on a site just off the High Street.

Residents are being asked in an online survey whether more roads should be included within the Barnet Hospital controlled parking zone and whether pay and display parking should be allowed in those streets where parking is currently restricted to residents only.

Separate cycle lanes up and down Barnet Hill - an ambition ridiculed for so long by Barnet councillors - may have become a step closer as a result of the government's decision to pump £2 billion into schemes to encourage cycling and walking as a way of fighting the coronavirus pandemic.

In a dramatic U-turn, Barnet Council has dropped its plan to temporarily close Barnet High Street to through traffic as a way of ensuring safe social distancing for pedestrians and shoppers.

Barnet High Street is to be closed temporarily to all through traffic from the last week of August to ensure there is safe social distancing on the narrow pavement beside the parish church of St John the Baptist.

Ambitious plans are being drawn up to celebrate the 550th anniversary next year of the Battle of Barnet.