In this series I'm taking the train one stop beyond the Greater London boundary, getting off and seeing what's there. Today that means Carpenders Park, one stop beyond Hatch End on what will next week be the Lioness line. For positioning purposes we're two miles south of Watford, still just about in Hertfordshire, and what follows is a tale of two very different suburbs either side of the railway line, neither of which existed 100 years ago.
Best start at the station because this is 100% crucial to how the neighbourhood developed. The West Coast Main Line carved through in 1837 but it took until 1914 until the first halt was built, initially to deliver golfers to Oxhey Golf Club. Traffic picked up in the 1930s when a private estate was built on the east side of the line, which'd be Carpenders Park, then serviced by the extremities of the Bakerloo line. In the late 1940s a large LCC overspill estate was built on the west side of the mainline, entirely separate, this being the less well-to-do South Oxhey. The station was rebuilt in 1952 and is very much not a looker, an island platform accessed via a long ramp down to a crucial subway... turn left for South Oxhey, turn right for Carpenders Park. Only one road connects the two sides, an annoyingly narrow bridge some way to the south on Little Oxhey Lane, so people tend to pick their side and stick with it.
Carpenders Park is a spacious garden suburb from the days when land was relatively cheap and aspirations high. Long avenues of generally identical semis and bungalows splay out from the main focus by the station, each with a pitched gabled roof and sufficient parking space out front to keep cars off the roadway. On the upper slopes the contours fall away to reveal the opposing forces of South Oxhey beyond the rooftops of the street below, which ought to be enough to convince residents they're on the right side of the divide. If it all looks a bit inward-looking and curtain-twitchy, that may be because author Leslie Thomas once lived in Carpenders Park and set his infamous potboiler Tropic of Ruislip here, the location renamed Plummers Park.
Tucked away to the north are a slew of very different 1950s townhouses, mostly with flat roofs, added after the initial property rush. One of the twistier streets goes by the delightful name of Margeholes, this being the name of the wood opposite, although the developers clearly ran out of ideas after that because the road on the hill is called On The Hill and the road along the edge of the trees is called By The Wood. Another weird street name is Delta Gain, this the estate's hub where the main shopping parade is located. It's seen better days, the local Co-Op seemingly the only shop to have updated its frontage in years. As for the local school being called St Meryl's, you'll struggle to find her listed in Catholic canon because this Meryl was actually the wife of the estate's original developer!
At the start of the 20th century all that was here was a large Victorian mansion called Carpenders Park and a dairy farm on the other side of Oxhey Lane. In 1909 the mansion and its 250 acre estate were put up for sale ("a handsome Country House surrounded by beautiful pleasure grounds and approached by a charming carriage drive bordered by finely grown specimen trees"). The new occupant was a girls' school called Highfields who hung around until 1960, after which the property was demolished and replaced by married quarters for American soldiers stationed at nearby RAF Northwood. That's all since been replaced by private housing, obviously, while the last remnants of the farm were recently reborn as a nursing home. But a substantial portion of the mansion's grounds remain open space and now look like this...
This is Carpenders Park Lawn Cemetery, opened in 1954, where upright gravestones and permanent markers are eschewed in favour of acres of grass. Bulbs and bedding plants are permitted up to 15 months after burial, after which grave owners are given four weeks' notice and the plot is laid to lawn. It all looks appealingly sparse, apart from the area by the toilets where most of the recent interments have been. A separate section near the entrance has been dedicated to the Muslim community. Perhaps the strangest thing about the cemetery is that it's owned and run by Brent council so nobody local gets buried here, this because most of the cemeteries in Brent itself are hangovers when from inner London needed space on the outskirts. It's certainly odd stepping off a Hertfordshire street to read an anti-social behaviour order posted by a London council, also to discover that all the litter bins on site feature Brent's (former) logo.
The cemetery's finest feature, and another castoff from the original mansion, is the landscaped stream running along the northern border. This is the Hartsbourne, a tributary of the Colne which rises on the slopes below Bushey Heath. Here it runs through a heavily wooded stripe complete with rustic stonework and a former fishpond, connected via a footbridge to the cemetery's car park. Best of all a shady footpath follows it for a full half mile, a magic corridor sandwiched between back gardens where you could easily imagine E Nesbit's best loved characters playing at the water's edge... at least until you emerge through a gate round the back of a pub and the river disappears unceremoniously into a culvert.
OK, let's switch sides.
SouthOxhey is a different kettle of fish, still with sprawling avenues but laid out for Cockney migrants rather than owner occupiers. The London County Council compulsorily purchased the site for a paltry fee and built 4000 new homes between 1946 and 1952 using rubble from the London blitz as hardcore across the estate. As a nod to the history of the area, if not to the interests of the incomers, all the streets on the new estate were named after golf courses. The housing stock remained under the control of the GLC until 1980 when it was transferred to Three Rivers council, and today (thanks to the right to buy) it's estimated that over three quarters is privately owned. But you'd never guess any of this as you step out of the station because it all looks stonkingly new.
When I was last here in 2013 the central square was surrounded by tired lookingshopping parades including a Nisa Extra, Sunny Boy's Cafe and a pub called The Ox. All have since disappeared as part of the £150 million South Oxhey Regeneration Scheme, a much needed boost to the local psyche, fully replaced by a dense stack of flats in the same brick vernacular you can find all over London. Upstairs now has two extra storeys stretching much further back, and down below are a characterless pharmacy, a mere Nisa Express and a full-sized Lidl. Over at the Marketing Suite the cheapest one bed apartment can be yours for more than the LCC paid for the entire estate in the first place.
The shops closer to the station have been similarly replaced by a staggered terrace of brick cuboids, this time untopped. Most are food related, including a Greggs, a Bangladeshi takeaway and a chippie, but residents can also frequent a bed showroom, a betting shop and a funeral directors. It says a lot for the imposed division of the railway that the Post Office here is just 250m from the Post Office in Carpenders Park. Pride of place is given to a jaunty cafe in a skew timber pavilion, ideally located to catch anyone funnelling off a train. In a move early residents would have found baffling it specialises in Portuguese pastries which can be eaten at swanky wooden tables while sitting on chairs with embroidered white cushions, because gentrification has arrived even in WD19.
To see the estate as it was, step back from the area around the station along a variety of meandering spine roads. These are lined by chains of council houses, some resembling squished semis, others cottage-style, as are the numerous intermeshed streets to either side. Variety was not the architects' watchword, although later owners have added myriad porches, shrubbery and even the occasional green telephone box to brighten the visual impact. When I went to school in the area we always looked down on fellow pupils from South Oxhey as coming from the bottom of the heap - sorry Ian - but walking round now it didn't feel overly dour, other than the mass of used firework tubes littering the green by the Moortown Road play area. Admittedly most communities of this size don't need their own police station, but equally when Gareth Malone turned up to start a community choir in a televisually unpromising location nobody thought it'd still be thriving 15 years later.
The only surviving building from before WW2 can be found beside the sports centre on Gosforth Lane. It's not the pyramidalparish church because that's not even the original All Saints built for the new estate in 1953 because that proved too large for later congregations and was demolished in 2000. Instead turn your gaze to the flinty building alongside, a freestanding chapel dating back to 1612... and yes that's the original oak door. The chapel was built for one of James I's barons when he moved into Oxhey Place (a house on the site of a former monastery), then repeatedly restored by several subsequent owners (including Thomas Blackwell of the Crosse & Blackwell dynasty). My favourite chapel fact is that when its roof collapsed during the chilly winter of 1963, Yehudi Menuhin bought the tiles for his Highgate cottage. These days the chapel is under the protection of the The Churches Conservation Trust so invariably locked, but weather permitting you can get inside for the All Saints carol service on 22nd December.
One of the best things about living in South Oxhey is the proximity of thick woodland, ancient and new. Oxhey Woods is huge, as you'll know if you've walked through it on the London Loop, and currently delightfully scrunchy underfoot. It's so large it's been chopped into three by local roads, but you don't have to go too far off piste to find wild service trees and, in the right season, bluebells and anemones. The survival of so many tongues of woodland also helps to explain some of South Oxhey's convoluted street pattern, and also why the local bus route has to follow a doubly meandering path to ensure nobody's left out. Carpenders Park has a much worse bus service, a far less exhilarating choice of dog-walking circuits and nowhere to buy pastéis de Nata, indeed some might argue it's been overtaken by its upstart neighbour across the tracks. There aretwo sides to every station, especially here one stop beyond.
