An occasional series in which I miss a bus, decide to walk to the next stop but then spot something interesting in a place I've not been to before.
Hanger Hill is an actual hill in north Ealing with a crest 70m above sea level. Ealing Broadway's more like 35m, for comparison. The name comes from the Old English word hangra meaning a wooded slope. There used to be a big mansion at the summit called Hanger Hill House, built in 1790 and home to local landowners the Wood family. When they moved away a gelatine entrepreneur's son moved in - Sir Edward Montague Nelson - who in 1901 became Ealing's first Mayor. The house then became the clubhouse for the local golf course but was demolished in the 1930s as part of a swish estate repurposing the fairways for housing. Nothing to see here.
The country lane crossing Hanger Hill was called Hanger Lane, indeed still is, although it's no longer a sylvan rural backwater but a seething stretch of the North Circular. Such are the differences a century makes. At the foot of the northern slope is the concrete maelstrom of the Hanger Lane roundabout, also the subway-infested Hanger Lane station, but today's post is more interested in what's up top. I understand the view's quite good but to see over the trees and rooftops it helps to be on the top deck of a bus and as I said I missed mine, so saw nothing.
What first drew my attention was Hanger Hill Park, mainly because it had a lot of contours and some impressively varied old trees. Normally when you find diverse conifers in a scenic setting it means this was once a rich man's garden, but in this case it's just because Ealing Borough Council took their landscaping duties seriously when they opened the park in 1905. The hilltop ridge has acidic sandy soil so was deemed ideal for leylandii and giant redwoods, whereas oaks were better suited to the clay at the toot of the slope. The newest addition to the park is Hanger Hill Tiny Forest, a brief arc of assorted saplings now just over one year old. There are about 40 such mini-woods across London designed to encourage wildlife, community engagement and children's curiosity, hence the benches here can double up as an outdoor classroom.
A substantial portion of the park is occupied by the Hanger Hill outpost of the London Footgolf Centre. This used to be a pitch and putt course but the 18 undulating holes are now used for sequentially kicking a football around (1755 yards, par 65) because that's a sport these days. They say it's ideal for birthday parties, stag dos, corporate team building and school trips, but by the looks of it the target audience is sporty 20-somethings who'd otherwise be playing football and/or golf. The 'clubhouse' is an ugly retro hut with no indication whatsoever of opening times, just a lot of boards advertising the ice creams they'd sell should the building ever be unlocked. Checking the website you can't book online you can only ring up, and it seems if you simply turn up with your own football for a guerilla round in midwinter nobody will notice and you can save £12.
Hillcrest Road is well named and dominated by what looks like a lofty watchtower. It's not, although there was once a lookout here called Mount Castle Tower (supposedly Elizabethan) which in the 1780s was used by the Anglo-French Survey as the northernmost vertex of a trigonometric chain linking London to Paris. It survived as a tearoom until 1881 when it was demolished to make way for Fox's Reservoir, a storage facility named after the Chairman of the Grand Junction Waterworks Company (Edwin G Fox) who officiated at the opening ceremony. A considerably larger reservoir was built across the road in 1889, boosting the burgeoning suburbs of Ealing by delivering a clean water supply, hence the water tower that dominates the skyline. Still there, still doing its job.
Fox's Reservoir was drained in 1943 to prevent German bombers using it as a highly reflective nocturnal navigation aid. The council duly bought the space (and the surrounding ancient woodland) and it's been a nature reserve since 1991, providing a contrasting adjunct to Hanger Hill Park. Being flat it's ideal for sports pitches so if you turn up on a Saturday morning it'll be swarming with footballers from Acton Ealing Whistlers, the local youth football club. An ancient track called Fox Lane runs alongside, while a former field-edge footpath called West Walk runs quarter of a mile downhill towards the throbbing metropolis around Ealing Broadway station. Look, the first crocuses are already emerging, winter must have turned a corner.
I thought I'd seen it all at this point so planned to escape on a 226 bus. It's Hail and Ride around here, but when I stuck my arm out the driver totally ignored me leaving me adrift at the top of Mount Avenue. And that's when I stumbled upon this extraordinary house name. Wow, I thought, here are two neighbours who really don't get on.
Let's call the disputing parties X and Y. Mr X moved into Mount Avenue in 2014, buying up a plot behind the main row of houses to build a modern home. In 2016 he wanted to add a new garage so Mr and Mrs Y let him knock down part of their back fence on the understanding he'd put it back later. He didn't, so 10 months later they went ahead and rebuilt the fence themselves. Mr X was livid, convinced the new fence was six inches closer than it should have been. He accused the Ys of erecting the fence on top of his drainage pipe, they accused him of laying his pipe on their land in the first place, and both sides embarked on a legal slanging match accusing each other of trespass.
By the time the case reached court in February 2020 Mr and Mrs Y had spent £10,000 in related costs and Mr X had spent £60,000 on legal fees. If you find your neighbour aggravating it clearly helps to be a millionaire property developer with bottomless pockets. I haven't been able to determine the outcome of the case because it seems themedia only reported on the trial, not the verdict, but I can tell you that the sign saying 'Boundary Dispute House' appears in the front garden of Mr and Mrs Y. The neighbours on the right of the photo weren't part of the dispute, although one of their upper windows is emblazoned with weird distrustful signs so goodness knows what's going on there. Also if you try to check on Google Street View it turns out this entire section of Mount Avenue is missing, so perhaps give thanks that you don't live anywhere as furiously litigious as this.
You really never know what you'll stumble upon if you miss your bus.
