Dollis Brook - Wellhouse

Dollis Brook
Dollis Brook flows north and east

Post to the north Barnet
Post to the south Totteridge Common
Post to the east Underhill

Bells Hill
St Stephen. Built as a mission church 1896
St Stephen’s Social Club

Chesterfield Road
The area around the junction with Mays Lane was Ducks Island. And is marked as such on the Ordnance Survey map of 1887. It is near the Dollis Brook and the name should be self-explanatory – or is the stream too small a trickle for ducks - or did people shoot the ducks – or was there a local farmer called Duck.

Connaught Road
Council estate from the 1850s

Darlands Drive
St Stephen's Hospital. This opened as The Barnet Infectious Diseases Hospital in 1907, for patients with diphtheria and scarlet fever. It was managed by a Hospital Committee with representatives from Barnet Urban District Council, East Barnet Valley Urban District Council and Barnet Rural District Council. In 1917 its name changed to Barnet Rural District and Urban District and East Barnet Valley Urban District Isolation Hospital. In 1939 a new one-storey buildings, had new wards, offices, a laundry and an extension to the Nurses' Home. In 1939, the hospital had 60 beds but penicillin and sulphonamide drugs made isolation hospitals obsolete and it closed on the introduction of the NHS in 1948. Barnet Group Hospital Management Committee took it over in 1948 as an annexe to Wellhouse Hospital naming it St Stephen's after the local church. Initially it dealt with ear, nose and throat patients opened, post-operative female patients and long-stay elderly male patients and by the mid 1966s most patients were elderly long stay. The Hospital closed in 1989 and was demolished in 1999. 

Ridgeview Close
Grange Playing Fields. Let to AC Finchley.

Well Approach
Physic Well, Timber framed building covering a well. This was built about 1937 with herringbone brick and plaster panels. This put up by Barnet Surveyor's Department in 1937, when the area was surrounded by council housing. The well itself was discovered circa 1650. In 1656 the parish, who owned it, had a well house built, and appointed a keeper. Under the well house and there is the original 17th barrel vaulted brick well chamber reached by a flight of stone steps, with brick floor and two shallow pools. It was arched over and given a pump in 1808.  This was a fashionable place for Londoners to try the medicinal qualities of the mineral waters, and this included Samuel Pepys. The water was bottled and sold in London.

Whitings Road

Semi detached houses laid out in the 1930s on the site of Whitings Hill Farm
Whitings Hill Primary School. Dates from the 1960s and recently rebuilt.

Sources
British Listed Buildings web site
Field. London Place Names
London Borough of Barnet web site
Lost Hospitals web site
Pevsner and Cherry. London North
Smyth. Citywildspace
Whitings Hill School web site

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