New Southgate

 

Bellevue Road

Holly Park School.  Pretty Edwardian. Elementary school.  Chequerwork centre between two big gables.

Betstyle Circus

a good interwar parade in the Arts and Crafts tradition on one side but is otherwise amorphous

Bestyle Lodge built about 1850.

Bowes Road

A couple of farm buildings were all that was here before the railway came.

Friern Barnet

Campe Almshouses, 1612, nineteenth century old stone panels

Bestyle, New River Co., well and two pumping engines, 24 hp

Holy Trinity Church

Railway line to New Southgate Hospital, track went into the hospital.

Friern barnet hospoital; Summerhouse and water tower In the grounds, octagonal arcade.

The Asylum was on the area of Hollick Wood. 

Princess Park Manor. -Friern Hospital. Listed Grade II but once considered to be at risk. Built in 1849 as the Middlesex County Lunatic Asylum, of major importance in the history of humane reforms in the treatment of the insane. It was the largest mental hospital in Europe and the name became synonymous with these institutions. Built as Colney Hatch Asylum, the second Middlesex pauper lunatic asylum and planned for 1,000 patients.  Designed by S. W. Daukes in the style of an Italian monastry.  Foundation stone laid by the Prince Consort in 1849.  It eventually opened July 1851 with 1,250 patients.  By 1851 there were 2,000 patients – but no straight jackets. The hospital was self-supporting with own sewage works, gas works, etc.  It was transferred from Metropolitan Asylums Board to London County Council in 1880.   By 1896 the population was over 2,500, and they were partly housed in temporary timber buildings, which burnt down in 1903.  During the First World War there were 3,500 beds. Almost all traces of service building - gasworks, water supply, sewage farm brewery etc. - have disappeared.  The hospital was closed in 1994 and converted to private housing from 1998.

The front range set well back in spacious grounds, approached down a main avenue past an Italianate lodge dated 1893.  The formal central block is in mixed Italianate style; its centrepiece is an awkwardly tall octagonal domed tower, an echo of Sydney Smirke's dome at Bethlem Hospital, Lambeth, of a few years earlier.  The E-shaped plot adopts the principles of Alderson's Hanwell Asylum of 1829-31; central block with chapel, assembly hall, and kitchens, and on each side seven wards with bedrooms opening onto long day room with canted central bays.  They are connected by a bleakly disorientating corridor - reputedly the longest in Europe running the whole extent of the front.  Extended 1857-9 with one- and three-storey blocks.

Seven brick villas for special categories of patient were built around the perimeter in 1908-13.

 

Grove Road

Baptist chapel of 1901 has become flats, quite a tactful conversion which maintains the character of the broad red brick Gothic front, with tower on one side ending in an octagonal turret. The green space nearby ought to be a focal point in this largely rebuilt area, but it all fails to cohere.

Flats - Ranks of post-war four-storey flats

High Road

a sad backwater among new housing, was once more important, as is shown by its cluster of churches.

St Paul Anglican shrouded in evergreens,

Sikh temple in a former Wesleyan chapel, its brick and stone spire rising incongruously above later pebbledash

Highview Gardens

First stage of a post-war plan to completely rebuild New Southgate.

Tower blocks completed in 1970.

New Southgate

Auburban streets of 1902-12 began after the railway came in 1850, but the prosperity of the area was blighted by the asylum just across the  railway line in Friem Bamet – since the middle classes would not move nearby - hence the change of name from Colney Hatch to New Southgate. The Victorian centre can just be recognized but the area became working class in character and Jewish after the 1930s.

Springfield Road

Garfield Primary School.  Part of rebuilding of New Southgate in 1970s.  Low concrete pavilions. School is on the site of the childhood home of Jerome K.Jerome.

Station Road

Nothing here before the station was built.

New Southgate Station. 1850. Between Oakleigh Park and Alexandra Palace on the Great Northern Railway Southgate's first station. At the time of its construction, the station, called  'Southgate & Colney Hatch', had two staggered platforms. A single line branch left here going tothe Cemetery station. It was also called ‘Colney Hatch & Southgate Station’ and ‘New Southgate and Friern Barnet Station’.  The station had extensive awnings and platform buildings, and these remained for many years in their GNR condition. Name signs were etched into waiting room windows, which survived until modernisation. There were blue running-in boards with the name 'New Southgate & Friern Barnet', until 1973. By 2000 The station was much reduced in size, although the brick base of the footbridge and some canopy supports remain.  

Arch.  On the down side stood the old Colney Hatch asylum, separated by a stout retaining wall, and deliveries of coal were made through an opening. The bricked-up arch through which line serving hospital ran remains.

Signal box named 'Cemetery', which served as a reminder of the GN equivalent to the better known Brookwood Necropolis on the LSWR, albeit much closer to London.

From Wood Green the northbound Hertford Loop swings sharply up and over the East Coast Main Line, and the four tracks we stay with shoot northwards through Wood Green tunnel. We skirt the edge of Muswell Hill Golf Course, over the widened North Circular Road, and on to New Southgate station, which is 6m 35ch from King's Cross.

signal box at the London end of the up platform, abolished about 1972.

Southgate Gas Works site, Gasholder Heavily stylised box-lattice guide frame with cast iron finials.

Tewkesbury Terrace

V2 rocket fell at at about breakfast-time on Saturday, 16 September 1944 and observed over a wide area. A Muswell Hill witness reported seeing a vapour trail in the early sunrise ascending to a great height. A little later he perceived a projectile in flight which appeared to burst, shooting out three smaller projectiles. Shortly afterwards an explosion occurred.

The Bourne

Wesleyan Chapel.  A.  Brocklehurst of Manchester.

Woodland Road

St.Paul. Hidden in evergreens.  1873, by G. G. Scott, ragstone, routine. Repaired 1950 by R. S. Morris after war damage.

Parish Hall 1908 likewise repaired