As we head towards the awkward end of the alphabet London's suburban pickings get slimmer. I discounted Upney as too well known, Upper Belvedere as too focused and Uxendon as too obscure, instead plumping for a decent-sized U with an ultra-prosaic name. This Barnet neighbourhood is so named for the exceptionally obvious reason that it's under a hill, this hill, hence Underhill.
In the stagecoach era Barnet Hill was one of the first major obstacles on the Great North Road, thus a number of coaching inns were established up top as an ideal place to change the horses. In the 1720s another was built at the bottom, this the Old Red Lion, where additional horses known as the 'Hercules Pair' could be hired to assist with the challenging ascent. In 1823 Thomas Telford was charged with making improvements, his solution to bypass the steepest climb by digging up a huge amount of adjacent soil to create the gentler embankment we see today. A small hamlet grew up around the pub, this called Underhill, until eventually cars replaced carriages and houses replaced fields. Suburbanisation was kickstarted by the arrival of a railway terminus across the street in 1872, now the top end of the Northern line. The station served the town above so was called High Barnet, but in terms of contours it'd more appropriately be called Underhill because it is.
In the 1930s the Red Lion was repurposed and rebuilt as an estate pub, and remained a tenable business until 2015 when the owners gave nine days notice of closure. It was pretty soon replaced by a terrace of six modern brick townhouses, which took ages to sell, and alas even the inn sign was swiftly uprooted so no evidence of the historic watering hole remains. What killed pub viability was the local football team moving out, this being Barnet FC who were established just round the corner in 1907. Underhill Stadium was always a lowly affair, the kind of place where black and gold souvenirs were sold from a portakabin and the grandstands were made from corrugated metal. Facilities became increasingly inadequate when the team found themselves in Division Two, so when negotiations over the lease became fractious the chairman decided to move the club to a fresh site in the borough of Harrow instead. The council then gifted the Underhill site to the Ark Pioneer Academy, thus headteacher Su now oversees 1100 pupils where The Bees once thrashed Burton Albion ten nil.
The alleyway down the side of the stadium remains, that's Priory Grove. It leads to a St John Ambulance depot and a former scout hut/community centre where you can now practice grappling, fighting and self-defence three nights a week. At the far end the path opens out into the top end of Barnet Playing Fields, immediately alongside the huge chunk the academy nicked for their sports pitches. Ridiculously Barnet FC now want to occupy most of the remainder to build a New Underhill stadium, having tired of The Hive in Canons Park in favour of returning to the town they're actually named after. If the mercurial chairman gets his way nine acres of green space would be replaced a 7000 seater, plus car park, plus coach park, leaving just a top wedge that's already part-sealed off due to an infestation of oak processionary moths. Thankfully the council refused planning permission last year, but the intention remains and we're only one decision away from a football reinfestation instead.
For now the playing fields are mostly used for kickabouts, playgrounds, sports practice and walking your dog round the perimeter paths. The Barnet Table Tennis Centre is also here, in case you'd ever wondered where that is. The grass stretches down to a meandering tree-line boundary within which flows the Dollis Brook. It's relatively minor here, no more than about two metres wide, but its waters were still capable of scouring the incredibly obvious valley on whose slopes Underhill rests. One thin stripe of suburbia was squeezed between the playing fields and railway in 1933, including an arc of 16 brick almshouses overlooking the greensward. The estate is an isolated dead end so TfL kindly send an hourly bus to the bottom and back, this the 389, London's shortest route and 2nd-least used service. I can confirm it now uses electric vehicles (a real step-up from the muck they used to send out), also the driver has to negotiate some very closely parked vehicles at the foot of the hill, also the loop had at least six passengers yesterday.
All of this area is classic Underhill, and the wording on a modern Ordnance Survey map would agree. But over the last century the name has also crept west along the only road to precede development which is Mays Lane. This once tracked all the way to Arkley at a safe distance from the river, serving a sparse handful of cottages and a couple of farms. Some of the fields near Underhill once hosted the biannual BarnetFair, a livestock jamboree established in 1588 which by the mid 19th-century was said to be England's largest cattle market. Later horse racing became the priority but that ended when High Barnet station swallowed up the site, and these days the event is probably best known as rhyming slang for hair, even with the 'Fair' left unsaid. The other pre-suburban intrusion, this time south of Mays Lane, was a sewage farm established in 1874 to help remove High Barnet's effluent. This survived until 1957, for many years supporting the fertilisation of plots of oats and vegetables, after which the Dollis Valley housing estate was built across the site and oh my word.
They built 600 homes here in the 1960s, the most appealing being the lowrise three-bedders closest to the river. These were arranged to take full advantage of the green setting with front gardens opening onto the meadow, hiding all the ugly garages and road access round the back. The remainder of the accommodation was in long five-storey blocks of flats, these having aged far less well to the extent that the council is sequentially replacing them with something modern. There are now eight streets of sleek brick townhouses, desirable as anything, one of which has the impossible name of Unicorn View. But once you get halfway down the estate the last phase of concrete flats remains, decanted and decaying, because council and developer fell out over affordability quotas. Some inadequate understanding has been reached, but for now to walk down Dollis Brook Drive is to experience all aspects of postwar housing in one depressing sweep. The interface from whipsmart to derelict is particularly sharp, suddenly entering a world of dumped mattresses and damp curtains behind smashed glass, beyond which the secluded setting of the riverside homes is grimly diminished.
Hundreds of Underhill's older houses stretch down several steep avenues to the north of Mays Lane, these your more typical interwar semis. They run in parallel and are inadequately connected, in one case enclosing a long stripe of tennis courts accessible only from top and bottom. Manor Road came first and thus leads to Underhill's commercial heart, a row of six shops including Mays Lane's Co-op. The quirkiest is Coopers of Barnet, a true Aladdin's cave of hardware including garden tools, haberdashery, suitcases and every hue of plastic container strewn across the pavement. Almost as offbeat is May's Pet's, an infuriatingly-apostrophied grooming parlour and treat shop, where the traditional small ads in the window include a plug for Louise's Avon catalogue and an irresistible plea... Can You Offer A Home For A Few Stick Insects A Fascinating Low Maintenance Pet Come In The Shop And Meet Them. I can also confirm that at The Local Offey the lottery is working now, and this is why you should always shop local.
I did wonder if this could still be Underhill, being over half a mile from The Old Red Lion, but one of the other shops is the Underhill Barbers so yes it definitely can. Even more convincingly the neighbouring establishment is Underhill School and has been since 1932, where they fully embrace the letter U with a stated ethos of Understand · Uplift · Unite. It seems the Underhill name has spread far along the valley, this because it's still appropriate for thousands of residents who have to schlep up a steep-ish slope to reach the proper shops and services up top in High Barnet. But if you go too much further along Mays Lane the neighbourhood definitely become Ducks Island instead, a completely different suburb and very much non-U, so best stop here.
