Category: Highgate

The London library that's bounced back to life

20/12/2024

It's back. Highgate Library has come back to life after a refurbishment costing £1.8 million which took almost a year. And doesn't it look grand!

This is the Highgate Library on Chester Road in Highgate New Town - so part of Camden; it has a step-sibling near Highgate tube station (in Haringey).

Good on Camden for finding the resources. And what a spectacular achievement by the Friends of Highgate Library who have been so effective in lobbying for the library, organising voluntees and seeing the renovation through to completion.

The money has been spent on reducing the carbon footprint of this Grade II listed building and making it more comfortable and accessible for users. A heat pump has been installed along with insulation, double glazing and new lighting.

A building which is well over a hundred years old now looks ready to last out the century.

And don't get the impression that because there aren't many people in these photos, there isn't much demand for this library.

When I asked the librarians for permission to take a few photos, I made clear that I would not include those who were browsing the shelves, using the terminals or enjoying the children's room.

V.K. Krishna Menon was once the chair of St Pancras's library committee. I'm sure he would be proud of all the work done to safeguard his legacy.

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Why Waterlow is London's loveliest park

10/12/2022

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Everyone thinks that their home patch is special. That's the way it should be. But excuse my parochialism, I am absolutely convinced that my local splash of green, Waterlow Park, is the loveliest in London.

It's been shown to best effect on recent sunny winter mornings. There's something bewitching about it. The park is just 26 acres, on the southern slope of Highgate Hill, looking out towards the City four miles or so away. It's gorgeous!

The park was given to the people of London as 'a garden for the gardenless' by Sir Sydney Waterlow in 1889. He was a business man and philanthropist, a Lord Mayor of London and the Liberal MP for Islington North (the seat now held by Jeremy Corbyn).

There's an imposing statue in the park of this public benefactor.

Adjoining the park is Lauderdale House, which dates back to 1580 and has a nice cafe and an outside seating area.

And the park has three ponds, all fed by natural springs. The photo below is of the middle pond where I have seen a kingfisher (just once, but how many Londoners have spotted a kingfisher in their local park!) and terrapins.

From the park you have an enticing view over high-rise Central London, which adds to the magic.

And fun fact: unlikely as it may seem, Mott the Hoople (remember those dudes?) wrote a song about the park entitled 'Waterlow'.

You're welcome!

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Highgate's other cemetery

1/4/2022

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At the heart of Highgate. there's a charming burial ground that hardly anyone knows about. It's a lot older than the much celebrated Highgate Cemetery nearby - a lot easier to get to - and while it's small, very small, it is peaceful and a place to commune with the past.

What more could you ask for!

This is the small graveyard adjoining Highgate School chapel. It's just by the more southerly of the two mini-roundabouts in Highgate village.

The photo below may help you get your bearings. It's taken from the top of Highgate High Street. On the left is the mock Tudor 'The Gatehouse', a well-regarded theatre-cum-pub - North Road runs between The Gatehouse and Highgate School; then there's the red brick flank wall and tiny spire of the school chapel; and on the right is Southwood Lane which runs towards Highgate tube and Muswell Hill.

HISTORY

So back in the day, there used to be a hermitage and small chapel close to where Highgate School now stands. These got clobbered when Henry VIII 'dissolved' the monasteries.

A little later, in 1565, Sir Roger Cholmeley - lawyer, Parliamentarian and Highgate resident - was granted the land for a school. This marked the foundation of what we now know as Highgate School.

The school chapel - from the website of St Michael's Highgate

The foundation stone of the school's chapel was laid in 1576; it opened two years later and served as Highgate's church. As the locality developed from a tiny hamlet into a thriving hill-top village, the chapel was repeatedly enlarged.

The school and chapel in 1819 - from the Highgate School website

In 1830, after a great deal of argument, an Act of Parliament was passed which required the demolition of the school chapel, and the building of a new church at the governors' expense.

Courtesy of Highgate School

This new church was the wonderful neo-Gothic St Michael's, Highgate, a five minute walk away, which opened in November 1832. It's still going strong and rejoices in standing higher than any other church in London. Whether that means it's closer to God, I'll let you decide.

The church took authority over the burial ground by the old school chapel which continued to be used as the new church's graveyard.

In 1866-7, a new school house and chapel were built and Highgate School took on the styish appearance it continues to display.

Highgate School and chapel in 1867

The chapel. by the way, is wonderful - snug and well proportioned and even nicer inside than its exterior suggests.

THE BURIAL GROUND

So, to get back to the burial ground - it was consecrated for burial in 1617 and closed in 1857, through even after that special application could be made to St Michael's. No one knows how many are buried here. Quite a few of the surviving gravestones are weathered and illegible. The burial records are held at the London Metropolitan Archive.

Julia Hudson, the archivist and records manager at Highgate School - and how marvellous that they have such a role! - has been hugely helpful as I prepared this post, and sent this plan of the graves dating from 1865.

Courtesy of Highgate School

The most eye-catching memorial is a twenty-feet-tall granite obelisk which towers over the other graves

The inscription on the obelisk reads in part -

'Sacred / to the memory of / Isabella / daughter of the late / Robert Langford Esq of Highgate / and wife of / Lieutenant General Robert Cannon / who departed this life / on the 12th of January 1854 / in the 27th year of her age ...'

- and also to the memory of their daughters: Helen, who died in infancy in 1850, and Amy Josette, who died in Constantinople in 1854, aged 3.

General Cannon served in the Crimean War of 1853-6, which perhaps explains why his young daughter was in Constantinople (in this conflict Britain and the Ottoman Empire were allies against Imperial Russia).

The graveyard continues to fall under the auspices of St Michael's but is looked after - and well looked after - by the gardening team of Highgate School. It is neither over-manicured nor an impenetrable wilderness.

With the help of pupils two-thousand bulbs have been planted. The plan is to rewild the area, with an annual cut-and-prune to stop the area becoming overgrown.

I asked if any descendants of those buried here ever visit. No, not in the last couple of years, according to the garening team. But Julia Hudson does recall showing round one or two people searching for their ancestors' graves during her time as archivist and records manager.

THE CRYPT

One of the pleasures and surprises of the burial ground is a crypt with natural light underneath the chapel. It's a bit of a clamber to get in there but worth the effort.

It is unusual to have a crypt with windows. I can only imagine that this was the crypt of the old chapel and when the new building was constructed in the 1860s, this was seen as the best way of preserving the graves below.

Again it's well maintained and generally dry - though when it does get wet, toads find the place particularly congenial.

This leads to the inevitable question: was anyone famous buried here? Well, yes - but they've moved.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge - author of 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' and 'Kubla Khan' - moved to Highgate in 1816, living first on South Grove and then on The Grove. St Pancras Borough Council placed a memorial plaque to him at 3 The Grove, which also sports an English Heritage plaque for J.B. Priestley who lived there a century after Colerdige. (More recently this was the home of the model Kate Moss, but there's no plaque to her - yet.)

Coleridge was a worshipper at the newly built St Michael's and on his death in 1834 was buried in this graveyard. But the vault was apparently in some disrepair and in 1961 he was reburied in the crypt of St Michael's, which now has a stylish memorial stone set in the floor.

That is imho a bit of a pity. This is a great place for a poet's grave.

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A new look at the Whittington

26/1/2021

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The Whittington hospital has a new aspect - or an old aspect revealed. The demolition of an undistinguished building on the east side of Dartmouth Park Hill (I think a nurses' home) has revealed once again the full magnificence of the building at the heart of the Whittington estate.

So here in its majesty - well, it's a pity about the fire escape - is the west facing side of the Smallpox and Vaccination hospital. It's the oldest part of what is now the Whittington and was built over 1848-1850.

Grand as this Italianate facade is, this is not the front of the building. That's the south facing side, complete with portico, clock and inscription.

It is so much more stylish than modern hospitals, don't you think?

By the end of the nineteenth century, a new smallpox hospital has been built, and the old smallpox hospital became the administration block for the adjoining Islington workhouse infirmary (which is also part of the Whittington these days).

What is now the Whittington combines three former workhouse infirmaries. On the east side of Highgate Hill there's what the was the Holborn and Finsbury infirmary. And on the left side of Dartmouth Park Hill is the St Pancras infirmary, now a mental health centre, altogether more distinguished and dating from the late 1860s. Some clearing of trees and shrubs in Waterlow Park, plus the weight of the snow on the branches, offers just at the moment a marvellous view of what was the imposing administration block of St Pancras infirmary.

And below is what this western section of the Whittington once looked like - taken from the Camden History Society's excellent Streets of Highgate.

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Full on Victorian Gothic: Holly Village - UPDATED

9/12/2020

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Holly Village is a wonderful piece of 'full-blown' Victorian gothic, hidden away in Highgate New Town just three minutes' walk from Hampstead Heath and even closer to Highgate Cemetery.

It's private so you can't venture past the entrance arch - which explains why some of the photos that follow are taken over walls and through hedges.

The village dates from 1865. It consists of eight buildings - four detached houses and four adjoining pairs of cottages - round a small green. The community of buildings was designed by Henry Darbishire for the extravagantly wealthy heiress and philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts.

openstreetmap

Coutts lived nearby on Holly Lodge - a grand house with large grounds which, several decades after her death, was demolished and is now the sought after Holly Lodge Estate.

The elegant iron gates in the entrance arch of the gate house have prompted the description of Holly Village as London's first gated development.

Pevsner describes Holly Village as a 'picturesque eyecatcher' and comments on one of the really stand-out features of the development: 'All immaculately kept, down to the rustic lattice fencing and thick holly hodges.'

It's just a pity it's so difficult for the rest of the world to see and appreciate it.

UPDATED: June 2021

Strolling by Holly Village with a friend, we crept in through the unlocked gate the other day and admired the view from the interior side of the gatehouse arch.

The most striking aspect is the symmetrical church-like buildings, in what has to be called ultra-fancy - 'fussy' is Pevsner's apt description - mock gothic. I don't think they are at all clerical in use, or ever were, but the detail is very ecclesiastical, as you can see.

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The villa on Archway Road

26/7/2020

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Archway Road - aka the A1 - is a busy arterial road not noted for its architecture. Although there are clusters of shops, it doesn't really have a centre ... I was going to say a heart. The closure of that remarkable gin palace the Winchester Tavern hasn't helped - on the other hand, the Murugan temple, the Tamil Hindu mandir, has brought a bit of life to this rather barren road.

But some renovation work has revealed just how imposing one of the buildings fronting Archway Road once was. This is at the junction with Cholmeley Park. Now that the rather overgrown garden - including several mature trees obscuring the frontage - has been cleared, you can see how grand this mansion was.

This wonderful late Victorian pile, 225 Archway Road, has a colonnaded porch, it's double fronted and has a matching wing alongside the main frontage.

It's a Grade II listed 'villa' from the 1880s. But it's all set to change. The building will be renovated and extended to allow - as I understand it from the planning application, (though this dates from 2011 and may have been superseded) - four flats, and there will be some building work in the grounds. Here's the developer's version of the plans.

So enjoy this touch of North London style before it gets restyled!

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The other India House

23/7/2020

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No, this isn't India House on Aldwych - completed in 1930 and from 1947 the Indian government's High Commission in London. This is a smaller, older, more anonymous building on Cromwell Avenue in north London, in that limbo land between Archway and Highgate.

The building bears a rather generously worded GLC blue plaque for Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. He was a founding ideologue of Hindutva or Hindu nationalism and is something of an intellectual hero to the more cerebral supporters of Narendra Modi's BJP.

Savarkar was and remains a deeply controversial figure. He was tried as a co-conspirator in the Gandhi murder trial and was acquitted. In the photo below of the accused, he's the older man with glasses on the front row. To his right as we are looking at the photo is Nathuram Godse who fired the shots that killed Gandhi and who was executed for his murder in November 1949.

Savarkar had another brush with the law - again alleged complicity in a political assassination - during his sojourn on Cromwell Avenue forty years earlier. We'll get to that in a moment. But this building was much more than Savarkar's temporary home.

65 Cromwell Avenue became, in 1905, a hostel for Indian students in London, taking the name India House. It was more than simply a place to live. There was a political purpose to India House. It was intended to be a nurturing place for a new and more assertive generation of Indian nationalists. It certainly was where Indian revolutionaries of different hues got to meet and organise. Ironically, perhaps, Gandhi visited here while in London in 1906.

India House was opened on 1 July 1905 by H.M. Hyndman, a veteran socialist (and founder in the 1880s of the SDF) with a longstanding interest in India. Also present at the opening ceremony were Dadabhai Naoroji, who a decade earlier had been the first Indian elected to the House of Commons, a radical Liberal and constitutional nationalist, and two much more revolutionary-minded women activists, Charlotte Despard, suffragist and Irish republican, and Madame Cama, a Paris-based Parsee who was at the centre of the web of militant Indian nationalists and socialists in Europe.

The founder of India House was Shyamji Krishna Varma, a scholar and barrister who founded the India Home Rule Society. He published the curiously named Indian Sociologist - and fled London for Paris in 1907 after some of his more intemperate remarks and articles attracted official attention. The journal continued to appear - the maverick anarchist Guy Aldred took over as publisher and was sentenced at the Old Bailey to twelve months hard labour for his troubles.

India House provided a base for an array of political activists of different hues. The communist and anarchist M.P.T. Acharya was among those associated with the building on Cromwell Avenue. So too was Madan Lal Dhingra, who came to London from Punjab to study mechanical engineering at University College.

On 1 July 1909, Dhingra fired seven shots at Sir William Curzon Wyllie, the political aide-de-camp of the British government's Secretary of State for India (at that time John Morley), on the steps of the Imperial Institute in London. Wyllie was killed, as was a Parsee doctor, Cawas Lalcaca, who sought to come to his aid. It was one of the most renowned political assassinations in London of agents of British rule in India - the most notorious being Udham Singh's killing of Sir Michael O'Dwyer more than thirty years later.

Dhingra was tried at the Old Bailey and, within seven weeks of the killing, was hanged in the grounds of Pentonville jail. A memorial tablet for Wyllie stands in the crypt of St Paul's cathedral.

There were suggestions that Savarkar had supplied Dhingra with the gun used in the killing and he certainly declined to criticise the assassination. Savarkar was eventually arrested and it was decided that he should stand trial in India.

While on board ship moored near Marseilles, Savarkar escaped - which doesn't say much for the competence of the Imperial authorities. When he eventually turned up in Bombay he was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment. He spent ten years in the cellular jail on the Andaman islands and many subsequent years in prison and internment.

By the time Savarkar was released in 1937, he had written his commanding work, Hindutva: what is a Hindu? He became the head of the right-wing Hindu Mahasabha and died in Bombay in 1966.

And what of India House? Well, after Wyllie's assassination the hostel was closed and the property sold. 65 Cromwell Avenue reverted to being an ordinary suburban home - but what a back story it has!

The plaque to Savarkar was unveiled by the Labour left-winger Fenner Brockway in 1985 - a staunch opponent of Empire and advocate of colonial freedom.

Ten years ago came a remarkable footnote to the India House story. A full-size replica of 65 Cromwell Avenue was built in the town of Mandvi in Gujarat, the birthplace of Shyamji Krishna Varma, as a memorial to the man who established the students' hostel. A little bit of Highgate in western India!

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The rebirth of Brookfield Lodge

13/4/2017

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The lamentable clearing away of a row of buildings on the north side of Swain's Lane in Highgate - including the site of the near legendary Cavour's hardware store, a fixture for forty years until it closed a decade back - has delivered an unexpected dividend. Peeping over the hoardings, looking out on Swain's Lane for the first time in close on a century, is a stylish early Victorian villa which had been concealed behind the later, less distinguished, commercial buildings.

This is Brookfield House and Brookfield Lodge (it's now divided into two properties), with its frontage facing out on Swain's Lane as the architect intended, and the spire of St Anne's, Highgate, looming behind. The rear of the property - the only part publicly visible until now - is about as ordinary as can be. The villa was built to face south, and I imagine the premises just demolished were constructed in what was once its front garden.

This was originally the site of the Cow and Hare inn - yet another cattle-linked pub name along the route livestock would have taken towards Smithfield market. A brewery director. Richard Barnett, bought the land and built this imposing house shortly before his death in 1851. His sister Anne inherited the property, and in memory of her brother, built St Anne's next door (nice to name a church after yourself!).

The church was completed in 1853. It's the one whose peal is memorialised in the title of John Betjeman's verse memoir, Summoned by Bells. When Anne died a few years later, she bequeathed Brookfield Lodge as the vicarage.

I fear that when the new flats come up on this site, Brookfield Lodge and House will again be hidden from view, and by far the finest aspect of this impressive villa will once more be lost to us.

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No more Ripping Yarns

15/9/2015

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So depressing - Ripping Yarns, the wonderful second-hand bookshop near Highgate tube, is closing . Sunday will be the last trading day. The rent has doubled, and just to make them feel that little bit more special, the increase has been back-dated a couple of years.

So one of the last of those 'fun to delve' bookshops, which treasure pamphlets and poetry and radical squibs and old music papers, bites the dust. There's Walden Books in Chalk Farm still going, and Black Gull in East Finchley just about qualifies, but not much else in this part of north London.

Ripping Yarns has specialised in children's and illustrated books - but I've always relished it as a haven for radical tracts and old socialist titles. I've bought dozens of gloriously tatty old political pamphlets there. Today's purchase, no doubt my last, is entitled Mail Interception & Telephone Tapping in Britain, put out half-a-century ago by the Hampstead Group of the Committee of 100 - it cost me less than the price of a pint.

The shop was set up decades ago by Celia Hewitt - she's still very much around, indeed she was on the stage at the Jeremy Corbyn Night at The Forum on Monday reading poems by her late husband, Adrian Mitchell. There's a lovely account of the history of the shop here written by one of its staff. It's a shop with personality - which is not something you can say of most of the Oxfam bookshops, however much they are appreciated.

The Ripping Yarns website says the business will continue online. That's great - but it's not quite the same!

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A Passage to India

24/11/2014

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This charming yet deeply tragic memorial tablet is on the walls of St Anne's, Highgate - the church where John Betjeman was baptised. You can only imagine the excitement amid which Doris Tanner, newly married, headed out to India. Within a year she was dead. Aged just 23. It's not clear where in India she was buried.

Her husband was an 'A.S.P. India', by which I take it that he was an Assistant Superintendent in the Indian Police Force. Jocelyn Tanner outlived his wife by almost sixty years, dying in 1973. He appears to have made his career in the Indian Police and was awarded the King's Police Medal. He married again, and his new wife, Aileen, lived until 1983. They are buried in the same grave at Haughley in Suffolk.

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Andrew Whitehead's
Blog

The London library that's bounced back to life

Why Waterlow is London's loveliest park

Highgate's other cemetery

HISTORY

THE BURIAL GROUND

THE CRYPT

A new look at the Whittington

Full on Victorian Gothic: Holly Village - UPDATED

UPDATED: June 2021

The villa on Archway Road

The other India House

The rebirth of Brookfield Lodge

No more Ripping Yarns

A Passage to India

Andrew Whitehead's blog

Archives

Categories

​Andrew Whitehead'sBlog

HISTORY​

THE BURIAL GROUND​

THE CRYPT​

UPDATED: June 2021​

Andrew Whitehead's blog

Archives

Categories

Andrew Whitehead's
Blog

HISTORY

THE BURIAL GROUND

THE CRYPT

UPDATED: June 2021