Not Upper Norwood, West Norwood or South Norwood, indeed nothing to do with the leftovers of the Great North Wood in south London. Instead Norwood Green is a hamlet-cum-suburb on the Ealing/Hounslow borders, not far from Heston Services, sandwiched between the Grand Union Canal and the M4. Officially it's part of Southall but has been a separate entity for centuries, thus has a few impressively oldbits and also retains an impressively rural fringe. How had I never stopped off before?
The heart of Norwood Green is its village green, a 10-acre tree-lined triangle with houses facing all sides. It used to have a pond in one corner but that's now a playground which probably excites the local six year-olds more than a few ducks. Even at the start of the 19th century there were 40 "respectable villas" here, an ideal country bolthole for an upcoming merchant or distinguished gentleman. A particularly fine pair are The Grange and Friars Lawn on the northern edge, proper four-storey Georgian townhouses which truly stand out after you've schlepped here through more ordinary suburbia on the 120 bus. Friars Lawn was once owned by retail magnate Gordon Selfridge and later by actress Hayley Mills, and because it's on the market at the moment you can go for an impressive walkthrough with the agent, confirming that £1,695,000 goes a heck of a lot further in Norwood Green than Notting Hill.
Norwood Hall, which was designed by Sir John Soane, is larger and a tad older but also harder to spot behind the entrance to a large Sikh primary school. About a quarter of the population of Norwood Green are Sikh, not quite as high as in Southall proper but that's where the school's associated mega-temple is. I'd think twice about sending a child to the CofE primary opposite because their after-school activity is called the Kid's Club, so either only one child turns up or the staff don't understand how apostrophes work. I thought the pebbledash semis on the western side might be a little lowlier, but one had two white Rolls Royces outside with registration numbers R100LLS and R300LLS, strongly hinting at the existence of a third.
Turn up in mid-July and you'll often find a funfair on the Green, indeed at present it's half covered with whizzy rides, caravans and trailers. On the excitement front the spinny Vortex looked much scarier than the low-rise Runaway Train, with the Frankenstein-fronted Hell's Gate somewhere inbetween. The organisers are Bob Wilson's, not the Arsenal goalie but a Birmingham-based crew who do all the big events (Nottingham, Hull, Winter Wonderland) and also seem to have a regular penchant for Ealing. They've been so good at flyposting across the area that I suspect everyone in Southall knows they're here... free admission, no wristbands necessary, closing Sunday.
The oldest part of Norwood Green is a small village nucleus along Tentelow Lane. St Mary's is a flinty number with a squat tower, a 12th century arch and a few urn-topped graves overlooking the entrance. 'Do come in' said the chalkboard outside but I didn't because Revd Bookless was in the middle of celebrating her Sunday Service. Across the street is Southall's oldest pub, The Plough, a four-bay timber-framed building dating back to the early 17th century. For some reason a black door out front has been numbered '10' and a streetsign placed above saying 'Drowning Street', but then some pubs are deliberately quirkier than others. The other very old building hereabouts looks like the last in a run of small cottages but was originally the village Free School. A plaque confirms it was erected by Elisha Biscoe in 1767, before even the canal carved its way through.
Behind the pub's beer garden is Norwood Terrace, a row of 17 Victorian working-class cottages built for labourers at a nearby brickworks but now much more likely to be occupied by Ocado shoppers. Follow the footpath and you walk out into, wow, a huge wheatfield that like everything here feels a bit wrong for modern London zone 4. The National Exhibition Centre was nearly built here in the 1960s but thankfully went to Birmingham instead, preserving the rustic scene. As Heathrow-bound planes descended beyond the golden stalks I gambolled to the far side and climbed up to Osterley Lane, another delightful rural throwback. Turn right and this could be Betjeman's Middlesex, bar the skidmarks, but turn left and the lane curves abruptly across a six-lane motorway before halting at the (private) back entrance to Osterley House.
The engineers who built the M4 in the 1960s managed to find an almost-entirely undeveloped path when they drew their line from Brentford to Berkshire, bar half a street on the boundary of Heston and Norwood Green. Just south of the village all they severed was an old public right of way across a field but, being Britain, they were obliged to build a whopping great footbridge so future ramblers could continue to make the connection. To experience this benevolence I turned off the lane at an unsigned gate and followed an almost-overgrown path hemmed between two paddocks, two minutes longer than felt entirely comfortable. At the far end a long ramp climbed beside the hard shoulder, forewarned by what looked like an original sign warning locals not to cross on horseback. I stood for a few minutes above the roaring traffic on this bridge to almost-nowhere, not even well-enough aligned for a good dog-circuit, and reflected that outer London retains an almost infinite ability to surprise.
The other side of Norwood Green, by contrast, is built-up all the way to the canal. A separate village nucleus exists on the main road, once called Frogmore Green, and still self-evident when you spot the old village pump and and water trough amid a triangle of grass. There's even a Victorian terracotta police station, the signs outside misleading because it closed over a decade ago and is now flats. The shops here are proper tatty whereas the old pub is about to reopen as an even gaudier banqueting venue than it was before. Prior to going full Indian it used to be called The Wolf and gave its name to the road out front (Wolf Lane), the park round the back (Wolf Fields) and even the bridge over the Grand Union (Wolf Bridge). Amusingly the sole competing pub was The Lamb, this not yet fully devoured although it's had to evolve into a hybrid that's half traditional tavern, half spice restaurant.
Wolf Lane is now Norwood Road and offers a slightly elevated view of Southall's gold-topped gurdwara as it humps over the canal. This waterside zone is where the village once kept its industry, specifically Norwood Mill (now an industrial estate) and Norwood Vitriol Works (now a dead-end estate). It also once housed the local RSPCA cattery but that's recently been acquired by a luxury developer, no doubt with an eye on building canalside flats.
Precisely how far west Norwood Green stretches is moot - electorally almost as far as central Southall and educationally across the borough boundary, Norwood Green Primary being several streets into Hounslow. Victorian maps described a large area here very differently, a name which excitingly starts with an N so I can also bring you...
N is for North Hyde
The dull end of North Hyde is what used to be North Hyde Farm, a market garden whose orchards served the postwar population better as suburban avenues. Of far more interest is the former Ordnance Depot established canalside during the Napoleonic Wars, the hope being that gunpowder would be safer here than on the coast. The depot occupied a half-mile stripe at the northern end of Hounslow Heath, the entire complex surrounded by a rectangular perimeter of canal they called the Hanwell Loop. After decommissioning the site was purchased by Belgian Catholics who opened an orphanage, later replaced by a nunnery, then in the 1960s all this amazing backhistory was replaced by a linear wedge of drab council housing. They called it Convent Way, for hopefully obvious reasons, and it is very much looking its age.
Picture a lengthy strip of lowrise flats, since renamed after Olympic heroes, with a single tower block in the middle. A central shopping parade offers barely the basics, and one misguided local insists on putting out bowls of food so the surrounds are infested with pigeons. Unsurprisingly residents have voted in favour of fullregeneration, the council's intention to double the number of flats by building taller blocks, but sequentially so nobody is forced to move away. Planning permission was granted in 2022 but as yet absolutely nothing has happened, the phase 1 car park still a cracked concrete pigeonfest, so if you want to see what challenging housing conditions look like then catch the H32 through North Hyde.
