45 Squared 27) POND SQUARE, N6
Borough of Camden, 90m×90m×90m
The thing about Pond Square is it doesn't have a pond and it's more of a triangle. We're on the northern edge of Camden off Highgate High Street, shielded behind Oxfam and the pink-fronted cake shop if you choose to filter through and look. In medieval times sand and gravel were extracted here to maintain the Great North Road, the pits converted to two ornamental ponds in 1845, but these became full of dumped litter and increasingly a health hazard so in 1864 were filled in for good. Today we find two ring-fenced enclosures amid a sea of tarmac, overhung by voluminous plane trees the council leaves unpruned, so potentially a nice place to hang out if your needs don't include grass and summer sunlight. Pond Square also boasts a chalet-like public convenience, properly tended, which is good news if you intend to rest awhile with hot drinks from the Village Deli or a beer out the back of the Prince of Wales. Do not under any circumstances take a wee in either of the two phone kiosks because they're both K2s and fewer than 250 remain in use.
» Please note that Pond Square is officially a Village Green, also officially Common Land and is also listed in the London Squares Preservation Act 1931.
» Please note that Pond Square's tarmac only gets properly full during the annual carol-singing gathering (next scheduled for Saturday 13th December 2025) and the stall-packed Fair in the Square (next scheduled for Saturday 13th June 2026).
There are some lovely characterfulhouses round the perimeter, many of them Georgian, including Rock House with its twin oriel windows and Moreton House with its redbrick dressings and string course. Burlington House is merely Edwardian but its doorway is set off with splendid sunburst brickwork. If you live round here you're doing well and also in terribly good company because the square's had some very famous residents. Samuel Coleridge came to stay at Moreton House in April 1816 in the hope that lodging with his doctor might help stave off his opium habit... and never went back home. Church House was the childhood home of Harry Beck, fabled creator of the diagrammatic tube map, although English Heritage chose to slap their blue plaque on his birthplace in Leyton instead. There is however a pink plaque on a lamppost celebrating Dame Stella Rimington, the first female director of MI5, who I'm guessing has had her precise local address successfully redacted.
» Please note that the eastern side of Pond Square is officially on a street called South Grove, but I've ignored this technicality else most of the previous paragraph would have been out of scope.
» Please note that I have not mentioned Francis Bacon's ghost chicken because spectral poultry is plainly fictional, also the 400th anniversary is next April and I might want to run a special feature then.
Two cultural touchstones sit side by side at the top of Swain's Lane, the hill that descends past Highgate Cemetery. The broadest belongs to the Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution, an early Victorian friendly society founded for self-betterment, and still reeling in middle class membership for a programme of discussions, education and all things cultural. Chris Lintott, Nick Higham and Vernon Bogdanor are booked in to deliver lectures soon, while afternoon classes include contract bridge with Victor, intermediate Spanish with Esperanza and tree identification with Bettina. All are welcome to view art in the Highgate Gallery, although the next free exhibition isn't until September. Meanwhile the building nextdoor at 10a is leased to the Highgate Society, a more outward-looking institution seeking to improve the locality with events including guerilla gardening and monthly litter picks, and I wonder if cultured Highgate residents pick one or the other or align with both.
» Please note that number 10a was previously a school for Jewish boys, a handbag factory and a workshop supplying stonework to Highgate Cemetery.
» Please note that I have copied a lot of this information off a board at the southern end of the square installed by The Highgate Society, I'm not just intrinsically knowledgeable.
» Please note that The Highgate Society also publish a splendid Visit Highgate leaflet, grabbable from their lobby, the astonishing thing being that the fold-out map is marked with 114 points of interest and every single one of them has a proper description in the key. Most London suburbs couldn't run to 20, let alone so eruditely.
» Please note that Highgate is proper lovely, as well as way out of your reach.
