Plus ca change! - A few random local memories

Many things have changed locally. The shops, the pubs even the churches have come and gone! Over the years, the local music scene has also changed. When I started my band, locally we had all manner of festivals that have long since disappeared. We also had a thriving culture of benefit gigs. Things seem very different now.

Lets  start with a little picture of Station Road Mill Hill in 1995.  If you click here, you'll see how it looks now!

What interested me is that every single business in this picture has been replaced. Thinks move on. 

In 1994, Mill Hill lost a landmark. The Sacred Heart Church was redeveloped. My mum took this picture in the middle of the works

Another Mill Hill Landmark was the three Hammers. It was completely renovated about 20 years ago and has never been the same since. This was taken about 1995, when the main entrance was still opposite the bus stop

Then there is our local music culture. My band has played all sorts of weird and wonderful local gigs over the years. Here's a little tour of the best bits of memorabilia. 

Back in 1984, my band, the False Dots had a residency at the Bald Faced Stag. One of the gigs we did, we did as a benefit for the Greenham Common protest. For many who know the Stag, this may seem a bit incongrous, but it was a great night.

A video was made and to our excitement, this was reviewed by the Edgware and Mill Hill Times. I was so thrilled, I saved it in my scrapbook.

Another regular gig of ours was the Grahame Park Festival. This was taken in 1984. We had a dep bassist. A friend of mine's Dad was the organiser, although I don't recall if I knew at the time. It was always fun. You can see half of me and my guitar!. In 1984, it was raining so was indoors. 

In 1986 the weather was better and we played in the open air.  I dug the white suit and the shades out! It was a glorious day as I recall.

We also did a free concert in Montrose Park in 1984. It was the fairwell gig for that line up. Three weeks later I suffered a burst ulcer and nearly died. The gig was fun though. The support band featured one Mr Steve Pankhurst, who went on to make millions as the founder of Friends Reunited and I still see at football at Hadley FC. I can't recall what the surprise or two were.

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The band played a lot of benefit gigs,  in 1980, we played a CND benefit gig in 1980 at Harwood Hall in Mill Hill

Here's the letter of thanks we got!

But perhaps the biggest change in our locality was the coming of the M1. My Dad took this picture of the concrete being laid at the back of Millway in 1965

The Barnet Eye Advent Calendar - Sunday 7th December

Welcome to the Barnet Eye advent Calendar. Every day during advent, we'll be giving you a little treat and also plugging a great local charity, so you can be entertained and then show your goodwill to all men!

So today our treat is a Pathe News film of the Hendon RAF display in 1937. I am just old enough to remember the days when Hendon was a working airfield and I can remember the Red Arrows flying over for the display. The site became Grahame Park Estate. You don't realise what an enormous area it was until you see a film such as this. It is interesting to note that only two years before World War II the pride of the RAF was largely bi planes, with only a cameo appearance of a couple of single wing planes. I also wonder whether we'd get such a glorious display of bombing in a London Borough today.



Today, with the feature on Hendon, we look at one of my favourite charities, the PDSA which have a shop in Hendon - http://www.pdsa.org.uk/charity-shops/hendon-pdsa-shop - for many people with pets, who cannot afford the huge cost of private vet bills. Families receiving benefits or getting help with Council tax payments qualify for medical treatment for their pets with the PDSA. Pets provide asource of friendship and companionship for many people. If you have a pet and you are struggling to make ends meet, please consider getting help from the PDSA. You can click here to find out if you live in an area where they can help you and if your animal qualifies for treatment - https://www.pdsa.org.uk/pdsa-vet-care/eligibility
If you can afford petcare, please consider a donation so the pets of those that can't don't suffer unnecessarily.


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Let us know of gems in your neck of the woods and charities you'd like us to feature.

The tragedy of Grahame Park

I was rather upset when I read Vicki Morris blog today about the scandalous butchering of trees on the Grahame Park Estate. It struck me that Vicki's report was probably the first nice thing I've ever read about Grahame Park anywhere. I suspect that most of the ruling Tories would rather like to outsource Grahame Park Estate to Brent Council. As Vicki notes, when they talk about keeping Barnet green, they don't mean the little bits of green in Grahame Park or the other estates. Places like Grahame Park where trees are few and far between are the type of place that need tree preservation orders, wheras leafy Totteridge has trees coming out of it's ears.

What about the people who live in Grahame Park? Unlike the impression you get from the local press, I've a few friends who live there and strangely enough they are as normal as the rest of my friends. Unlike the gated lanes of leafy Totterdige, people generally know their neighbours. Sure there are plenty of problems, but there are a lot of people on the estate. It may surprise you to know that one of my fondest memories is of Grahame Park. In 1985 my band, The False Dots played the Grahame Park festival. What made this special was that it was one of only two times my Dad ever came to watch the band play. He probably wouldn't have come to that gig, but my cousin, who is a Roman Catholic missionary Priest, then working in Kenya, was over on holiday and he wanted to go. It was an open air gig on a balmy day. The band on before us had been given a hard time by some naughty scallywags who'd realised that the band were, shall we say, not very comfortable in the environment.

As my Dad, Mum & cousin settled down and got a beer and a burger, I started a bit of banter with the kids. I invited them up to tell a few jokes as a warm up and soon they were in to the spirit of the festival. We played a pretty good set (got a write up and a picture in the Edgware Times) and everyone went home happy.

Later that day, I went around to my parents for a beer and a chat with them and my cousin. He said that he thought the festival was fantastic. He said that he'd only ever heard bad things about Grahame Park, but he thought that the sense of community was brilliant. He said that where he was in Africa, things like that happened all the time, but he'd never really seen it before in London. My Dad said to me that he hadn't realised that I actually took music seriously before (strange given that we'd toured the UK, Sweden, Finland & Belgium) and he said he was really impressed with the way we handled the kids. I asked if he liked the music, he said "some of it was OK, I prefer stuff with more of a tune". Years later my cousin told me that he'd used some of the ideas he'd seen at the festival in community festivals he'd helped organise in Africa. He said that the biggest lesson he'd learned was that if you engage with the scalliwags and make them part of the show, then you can transform the situation. Too often they are just treated as a problem to be dealt with.

And there my friend is the tragedy of Grahame Park. The great and the good of Barnet think they know all the answers. Sure they come down and hold "consultations", but they don't listen. They make their decisions, safe in the knoweldge that they will never have to live with the consequences. If it was me, I'd let the residents of Grahame Park set up a committee and give them the cash to spend as they saw fit. I doubt that chopping down trees would be very high on their list of priorities. Idoubt that they'd waste it in the way that Freer & his buddies seem to.