Greater London contains around 2000 National Grid squares, each 1km by 1km in size. What I like to do, very occasionally, is pick one at random, visit it and writeaboutwhat'sthere.
All the better if it's somewhere I'm not familiar with, but with random numbers you can never be sure.
Which random grid square did I pick?TQ2492 Where is it?Frith Manor in the borough of Barnet, a semi-rural backwater just north of Mill Hill East and just west of Woodside Park on the Northern line. An estate agent would call it Mill Hill/Finchley borders. Have I been before? Obviously yes, because I've been to every grid square in London, but somehow I've only ever grazed TQ2492 for about five minutes, in this case while walking the lower end of the Folly Brook. Have you been? Probably not unless you're local or have ridden the 221 bus.
The best place to start is probably the junction of Frith Lane and Partingdale Lane, near the primary school, partly because it has a bus stop but mainly because it's the end of the driveway to Frith Manor. For over four centuries this was the only habitation in the grid square, originally Tudor, later a farm with holdings across the valley. Dairy cattle arrived in great numbers in the 1880s, at one point a 200 acre enterprise. In 1958 the Express Dairy was about to switch from horse-drawn delivery to the buzz of the electric milk float, so decided to make Frith Manor their rest home for redundant horses. Here they lived out their retirement in fields on the edge of the Green Belt, occasionally sent out to showcase the good name of the company at such prestigious events as the Regent's Park Easter Parade and the Watford International Horse Show.
Today the site of the manor is occupied by The London Equestrian Centre, a somewhat presumptuous title for a family-run riding school that's been here since Express upped and left. They have ponies called Guinness, Tattie and Wasabi as well as several others with more sensible names, plus as a cafe offering Wine & Dine and Classic English Afternoon tea. Be sure to get the right entrance because the adjacent driveway leads instead to the Frith Manor Equestrian Centre, a completely separate livery option. To see the site more clearly take the paddocky footpath which detours round the back of both stables, although you sense the owners would rather you wouldn't (HORSES IN THE NEXT 4 FIELDS YOU WALK ACROSS. PLEASE DO NOT APPROACH FEED OR TOUCH HORSES. ALL DOGS MUST BE KEPT ON A LEAD).
The second arrival in the grid square was the British Army who bought up Bittacy Farm in 1904 and opened Inglis Barracks. Every soldier recruited for the Middlesex Regiment during WW1 was initially processed here. In 1961 this large triangular site became home to the Royal Engineers Home Postal & Courier Communications Depot, effectively the Forces' Post Office, with multiple barracks to accommodate the mail sorters and logisticians. Even the Queen popped by to pay tribute, this in 1982, unveiling a bronze copy of the famousstatue called Letter From Home. But the steady march of digital communication set in motion a future you can probably guess - the barracks closed in 2007, were sold off in 2012 and are still evolving into thousands of homes. If you've stepped out of Mill Hill East station and spotted a sales office and cranes, that's Millbrook Park.
This grid square only covers the top bit of the development, phases 3, 4 and 5, where the land is much higher and the flats are less dense. They spread out from a central greenspace called Panoramic Park from which the skykine of central-ish London can be seen, although I suspect the view will be sacrificed when they start building phases 7 and 8. Long brick-faced blocks and smart three-storey townhouses spread out along labyrinthine fingers, each quiet enough for playing in the street and with a tortuous drive to the exit. As a pedestrian I found the most difficult thing was finding a way out into the adjacent Green Belt, this not having been deemed a priority, without even a teensy footpath breaking the security fence where the barracks' back entrance used to be.
I eventually wound my way back round to Partingdale Lane, one of the other age-old trackways hereabouts, now a useful cut-through with a punishing width restriction. Here is located the only listed building in the grid square, which I'm glad I researched before I went because I'd never had guessed (nor spotted it) otherwise. It's a Cold Warcontrol centre, a single-storey surface blockhouse built secretly circa 1951, and would have co-ordinated civil defence in Barnet, Camden, Enfield, Haringey, Islington, Westminster and the City of London in the event of aerial catastrophe. Identical war rooms were built in Cheam, Chislehurst and Wanstead. But as nuclear capability ramped up they became practically obsolete, not being underground, and were all decommissioned in 1958.
English Heritage listed Mill Hill in 2002 as "an exceptionally well-preserved example of a 1950s War Room", although this didn't stop it being converted into a private home in 2009 with an additional glass-fronted storey added on top. You won't see it from the road, only its new name Planet House emblazoned on the security gates. But it looks stunning in the 2020 sales brochure - a true supervillain's lair - now with two kitchens, 1.5m-thick walls, a 956-bottle wine cellar and a swimming pool under the patio where Barnet's civil defence team never burrowed. All I got was a sneaky glimpse of the upper terrace from the neighbouring bridleway, as yet unobscured by intervening trees.
That bridleway is Burtonhole Lane, another ancient track which still heads into deep country because housing never got this far. It dips northwards through a tunnel of foliage past multiple paddocks and a cloudy ditch... and a strange alien presence in the neighbouring field. This is the Mill Hill electricity transmission station, a hum of silver coils hidden away where hardly anyone will see it, and far longer than you'd imagine it needs to be. Beyond that is the backside of Mill Hill Village Sports Club, the cricket pitch furthest from the pavilion, hence where the 4th team were exiled on Saturday when they lost to Old Camdenians. And at a remote T-junction of three footpaths, all called Burtonhole Lane, a remoter track heads deeper into the valley below Totteridge.
It's hard to believe this is the same 1km×1km grid square with the modern housing estate and the Wine & Dine meal deal. Here a thin path weaves singly through deciduous woodland, corralled on one side by rickety fencing and on the other by semi-visible barbed wire. Robins hop out between bindweed and thistles, oak trees rise above the last of the summer flowers and occasional butterflies zigzag by. Before long the ground becomes scrappier and more thickety, with blackberries free for the taking and bees at work in the undergrowth. Dry cracked clay underfoot suggests a mudbath in the winter, especially if you bear off up the sidetrack towards Darland's Lake nature reserve. Officially the footbridge across the Folly Brook is in TW2493 so out of scope, but turn right and you're soon back in the zone as the nettle-shielded stream aims for the back garden fences of civilisation.
The farthest fingers of Woodside Park Garden Suburb protrude into eastern side of the grid square. Fred Ingram kickstarted the estate in the early 1930s by proposing a development of rustic three bedroom semis, spaciously arrayed. He named the new roads after rural areas of Sussex he'd known as a child, hence Chanctonbury Way, Cissbury Ring, Rodmell Slope and Pyecombe Corner. Streets to the north of Folly Brook are slightly smarter, with houses along the curling avenue of Michleham Down blessed with leaded lights and a mild sprinkling of Range Rovers. Further south the density is a little higher and the more likely it is that the front door will look like it was bought from a catalogue, but they have the better bus service so they're laughing.
Along Lullington Garth is one of the most useless 'Missing Dog' posters I've ever seen. It alerts readers to a collarless dog lost five miles away over six months ago, and refuses to state the bitch's name "to avoid members of the public calling her and scaring her off further". But the posters on the edge of the paddock by the playing field are perhaps more dismissive, urging passers-by in large red capital letters not to feed Ned the 17 year-old donkey, Alfie the 38-year old cob or Sonic the 10 year-old Shetland pony because it makes them "very poorly". Instead they while away their days in a plywood stable with a bathtub to drink out of, at this jarring interface between city's edge and country's fringe. It's more random than most, is TQ2492.
Greater London contains around 2000 National Grid squares, each 1km by 1km in size. What I like to do, very occasionally, is pick one at random, visit it and write about what's there.
