45 Squared 8) HALLIDAY SQUARE, UB2
Borough of Ealing, 70m×30m
I had high hopes for Halliday Square because it's surrounded by all sorts of intriguing historic stuff, specifically Ealing Hospital and the asylum that preceded it, many of whose Georgian buildings survive. Alas none of the good stuff is in Halliday Square itself, only nearby, nor was it built on the site of anything specifically interesting, not quite.
Halliday Square is a typically 1980s development, maybe 1990s, I haven't been able to determine which. It's a long thin quadrangle surrounded on all sides by three-storey townhouses, all terraced together so you can't walk round the back. The third storey is tucked away in the roof space which saved the original residents from having to fork out extra for a loft extension. Front doors open straight onto the street, are topped by an extremely slimline porch and are lit by a circular lamp. A couple of four-storey blocks of flats straddle the central alignment, also in two shades of brick, and when I said Halliday Square wasn't especially interesting I wasn't kidding.
Many London squares have a pleasant lawn in the centre but here it's all about car parking, one space each, overshadowed by a line of trees that've got pretty tall by now. Ball games are not permitted, the number of parked cars making this both impractical and unsafe. The most recent community notice on the board in the middle of the square advertises a bike event in 2021, while the "Missing Kitten" poster has had its centre ripped out so only the peripheral sellotape remains. It'd all be really quiet were it not for the footpath that runs across the middle, conveniently located for a bus stop on the Uxbridge Road so a relatively busy thoroughfare. The only vaguely interesting thing here on Halliday Square is a road sign with a spelling mistake, having been written with only one L instead of two.
But step through to the south and a decent flank of rather splendid institutional buildings appears. This is the former Middlesex County Asylum, the first purpose-built asylum built in England following the Madhouse Act of 1828, laid out on 74 rural acres between the Uxbridge Road and the Grand Union Canal in the vicinity of HanwellLocks. It was also pioneeringly progressive thanks to its first Medical Superintendent Dr William Ellis who believed in the 'therapy of employment' and tried to make the asylum self-sufficient. The west wing of the panopticon originally housed over 1000 female patients, and two centuries on is now a gated development called Osterley Views, although for many the view is actually of the access road to Halliday Square.
The rest of the asylum still caters to mental patients but as St Bernard's Hospital, accessed through a particularly fine arched gatehouse near the aforementioned bus stop. This is administratively separate from the better known Ealing Hospital whose stark concrete stack was built in 1979 on the site of the asylum's playing field and running track. Meanwhile the open space to the west of the old hospital was redeveloped as the Windmill Park Estate, a slice of modern suburbia running down to the canal, of which Halliday Square is an outlying part. Its stand-out feature is a curved wall of flats bored through by an access road, watched over by a knobby obelisk marooned on a roundabout, where a Spar supermarket is the last remaining shop.
What we have here is a fascinating pre-Victorian asylum whose sprawling buildings have been multiply repurposed and its grounds sequentially sold off for development. But what I was supposed to be writing about is Halliday Square, which as far as I can tell merely squats on the site of an ornamental garden just inside the main entrance, and maybe a tennis court in the hospital's later years. Best merely walked-through, or skipped altogether.
