News from The Barnet Society

These are critical times for London’s Green Belt. But Barnet still has many open spaces where the illusion of countryside is remarkably unspoiled. Eight of them – all in Totteridge or Mill Hill – are on new videos that you can view on the website of the London Green Belt Council (LGBC).

Local councils in London and the Home Counties are currently planning to allow building on more than 48,000 acres of the Green Belt, according to a major new report by the London Green Belt Council (LGBC).

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 An earlier application for a gas peaking plant nearby was withdrawn last year.

Above is the Green Belt between Barnet and St Albans. It’s the site of Bowmans Cross, a new settlement planned by Hertsmere Council. It will eventually have 6,000 homes for around 15,000 people – nearly as many as live in High Barnet ward.

Chipping Barnet is a great base for some glorious countryside walks, and the best are described in Rambles Round Barnet – two volumes published by the Barnet Society. The good news is that Volume I has just been reprinted in a limited edition.

The Barnet Society’s AGM on 1st July gave me the opportunity to highlight the range of work we have done in the past, and continue to do, to enhance Barnet’s green environment.

Dollis Valley Greenwalk, one of Barnet's precious green open spaces, is about to get some extra care and attention from volunteers anxious to enhance its biodiversity and ensure its future wellbeing.

A planning application (19/3949/FUL) has been submitted to build 152 new homes and a replacement artists’ and bee-keepers’ studio on the Whalebones site. This is probably the most significant proposal for Chipping Barnet for many years (unless the High Barnet Station development goes ahead).

The Council’s proposed master plan for Barnet and King George V Playing Fields, and especially its building on Barnet Playing Fields, would be a gross intrusion into the Green Belt. It would be contrary to Council, Mayor of London and Government policies. It would set a very bad precedent for future developments in the Green Belt.

Chipping Barnet is surrounded on three sides by Green Belt – virtually unspoiled open countryside from Hadley Wood in the east to Whitings Hill in the west and south along the valley of the Dollis Brook.

For our spring public forum, the Barnet Society has arranged for an expert panel to answer questions of local interest on key issues such as the future of education and training, prospects for local employment, plans for new housing and future safeguards for the Green Belt.

Hertsmere Council is consulting on the possibility of building up to 2,620 new homes plus new places of work between Wrotham Park and Potters Bar, westwards as far as South Mimms and eastwards beyond M25 junction 24. This would have a huge impact on our Green Belt.

The Barnet Society welcomes the Council’s intention to restore Barnet & King George V Playing Fields, and to widen public access by providing a café with toilet facilities and play areas for children and their parents or carers.

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.

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.

Building houses on the fields around Whalebones, between Wood Street and Barnet Hospital, has possibly moved a step closer following an agreement between the landowners and a leading housebuilder, Hill, of Waltham Abbey, Essex.

There has been another indication of the growing commercial interest in, and rising value of Barnet’s Green Belt land – just as Arkley residents step up their campaign against local farmland being developed as a natural burial site.

Local residents, bird watchers and nature lovers are joining forces to step up their campaign against plans to develop a natural burial ground on farmland at Arkley bounded by Barnet Road, Barnet Gate Lane and Mays Lane.

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.