Suburban options are extremely limited for the letter Q, indeed just two, so I've plumped for Queensbury over the better known Queen's Park. You'll find it two stops from the top of the Jubilee line straddling the boundary between Harrow and Brent, should you ever choose to find it at all. It's essentially a heck of a lot of houses plus a Morrisons and has zero history prior to the 20th century, being the ultimate posterchild for "previously this was all fields". Again boundaries are somewhat woolly so I'll be starting at the station and working outwards, this precisely the development policy enacted in the 1930s.
Queensbury station opened in the middle of nowhere on 16th December 1934, part of an expansion of Metro-land on an extension to Stanmore. The government had welcomed the despoilation of unspoiled Middlesex countryside because the engineering works and subsequent housing development would deliver thousands of jobs at a time of high unemployment. So empty was the local area that the name for the new station was chosen in a newspaper competition, ultimately plumping for Queensbury as a companion to Kingsbury one stop down the line. At the time it was on the Metropolitan line but this branch was rebranded Bakerloo five years later, and in 1979 switched again to the Jubilee. And immediately outside the station they built a shopping parade with a spikedroundel as a focal point. Bravo.
Four arms of shrubbery spread out from the central pole with a silver maple in each quadrant, an arrangement best seen from above. As roundabouts go it's unusual in that you can park on the inside ring, this deemed better than providing an actual car park for the surrounding shops. Space on the outside is instead occupied by a bus stand, this for non-TfL services arriving from Hatfield (ideal for Hertfordshire residents making a leap to the Underground). A long tongue of greenspace stretches off to the east, this grassy geometric infill also a feature of the wider estate. Crusty visits from the local pigeonfeeder appear to take place daily.
The shops here include the usual range of minimarts and salons but the food options trend subcontinentally as befits an area with a high Hindu population. One is simply called Rice & Curry (because being upfront pays), Dalina's Savouries are 'Pure Vegetarian' and the fascia at Hungry Head reads 'Pizza Chips Chicken Chapati Burger'. By far the widest restaurant is The Regency Club which for over 30 years has served grilled Kenyan/Indian fusion to its private members, ideal for a large family celebration. The only place where the retail perimeter breaks is where the cinema once stood, initially the Plaza (1938), then the Essoldo (1950), then the Essoldo Bingo Club (1967), then the Classic Bingo Club (1972) and finally flats (1985-ish). The cinema lives on only in the name of Essoldo Way, a drab service road where Brent council have squeezed a scant few homes between the back of the shops and the Harrow boundary.
Across the railway the original town planners incorporated a stripe of factories and light industrial works so that the new resident population would have somewhere to work. Only one of these buildings survives, its windows suspiciously shuttered, the rest having been replaced by a conveniently not-out-of-town trading estate. The chunkiest facilities are two self-storage units, seemingly competing for local clutter, while the largest by acreage is Queensbury's quintessential Morrisons. Here the bag-luggers and boot-fillers of NW9 and HA3 come for their Price Cut deals, a free local paper and perhaps a free 10 minute aircon check in the car park while they shop.
The sole survivor from 100 years ago is Honeypot Lane, then an isolated rural track, now the local spine road. It runs almost two miles from the edge of Stanmore to where Kingsbury didn't used to be, lined mostly by semi-detached pairs. It's a great name for a road so several businesses take advantage, notably the Honeypot Cafe (Good Food Good Mood), a grocery store called Hunny Pot and the original estate pub. Queensbury doesn't really do pubs any more so it's now called Everest Spice and "Offers A Refined Indian Dining Experience", naturally including Hyderabadi handi murgh and chilli garlic mogo. Elsewhere down Honeypot Lane a few modern vernacular blocksof flats now intrude, looking every bit as 2020s as the rest of the street looks 1930s.
For a kickabout you want Queensbury Recreation round, or Queensbury Park depending on which sign at which entrance you read. This is also the best place, indeed the only place, to see the local river which is the Kenton Brook. This piddling stream runs for barely a kilometre from a source opposite Morrisons to become the sole tributary of the Wealdstone Brook. Ten years ago Thames 21 did a wonderfuljob of releasing a short section from its culvert and looping it out around a freshly-dug wetland scrape. I was looking forward to seeing it but instead saw zero water whatsoever, partly because of the drought we've been having but mainly because it's now fully surrounded by reeds and thick undergrowth - great for rewilding, less good for noticing it exists in the first place.
You might think Queensbury Circle would be the lovely loop outside the tube station but instead it's the name of a larger roundabout on Honeypot Lane sponsored by Sheetal's Hair, Beauty & Laser Clinic. Here the Metro-land planners built a larger shopping parade which spreads up Streatfield Road with layers of flat-roofed flats on top. Typical units include a launderette and a betting shop, while atypical units include Sri Lankan groceries, the Warsi Shopping Mall and the Bollywood Paan Centre (offering a chewier alternative to vaping). But the place of greatest pilgrimage is Skipjacks, a 44 year-old local chippy with a proper sitdown restaurant nextdoor. It won the award for Best Chip Shop in London & South East England about 20 years ago, and still hangs a banner proclaiming the fact out front. I note they do Fried, Grilled, Matzo, Mediterranean or Halal, also the cod portions look well chunky, also last week was their annual holiday and they're reopening on Tuesday.
The other local parade is on Mollison Way, northwest of the tube station, and occupies Queensbury's sole slice of pre-history. In 1916 a flying school was established on fields west of Burnt Oak Farm, the site then purchased in 1920 by the de Havilland Aircraft Company and named Stag Lane Aerodrome. Here the Tiger Moth was built and made its first flights, also several world speed records were broken, also Amy Johnson earned her pilot's licence. For a few short years the skies fizzed with innovation, then in 1930 de Havilland shifted aircraft production to Hatfield and in 1933 the airfield was sold for £100,000 with planning permission for 1200 homes. The very last landing was in August 1934, just four months before the Underground arrived, and today rather more than 1200 homes cover the site.
I like the scribbly silver planes that grace the front of some of the more recent flats, these obviously on de Havilland Avenue. The airfield offices were last to be demolished, replaced first by the GPO's international telephone exhange (the world's largest) and then by the Bacs offices where a computer centre processed most of the UK's inter-bank payments. None of those merit a plaque but Stag Lane Aerodrome does on the front of one of the flats, also the whole shebang is commemorated by a Mollison Way Heritage Trail with information panels outside the shops. Alas one panel's missing, one's grubby and one which appeared to have a map was surrounded by a gathering of local children so I never got a look. Whether the far end of the aerodrome is genuinely part of Queensbury is debatable but there's definitely something worth coming back to explore, one day when I'm not mostly focusing on Morrisons and the station.
