New Streets
Prospect Place (1825) was the first new road to be built and joined East End Road to Hogmarket. Cottages were built there in 1841 and Chapel Street, named after the Congregational Chapel, cut across the old common in 1853. The street patterns were obliterated in the 1960s redevelopment.

A tale of two cemeteries
Two cemeteries sprang up on farm land and were opened within a year of each other. Both cemeteries were designed by Barnett and Birch.

In 1853 the Parish of St Pancras bought 87 acres of former Horseshoe Farm alongside the High Road and the first interment took place in 1854. Some of this land was sold to Islington, but in 1877 a further 94 acres was bought and shared between them.

Meanwhile 47 acres of land adjacent to East End Road on what previously been known as Newmarket Farm was bought by St Marylebone Burial Board in 1854 and the first interment took place in 1855. The crematorium followed in 1937.

The railway arrives
Further impetus to development came from the railway. The Edgware and Highgate railway was built by Great Northern Railways as a feeder line for their main service out of Kings Cross and it cut East Finchley in two in 1867. The route continued on via Church End Finchley, Mill Hill East and on via the Hale to Edgware. The station opened as East End (Finchley) and changed to East Finchley in 1886. In 1872 a new branch was opened from Finchley Central to High Barnet.

EF gains some independence
Finchley became an Urban District Council in 1895 and was divided into 3 equal sized wards in 1899. East Finchley ward stretched from the Spaniards Inn to Little Wood and Green Lane to Squires Lane and Strawberry Vale brook. Finchley became a Borough in 1933, and in 1951 the three wards were subdivided into 8. Modern East Finchley ward has lost the Garden Suburb and everything north of the North Circular Road.

Hectic development
Building really got going from 1875-9 when the Ecclesiastical Commissioners released land in East Finchley on 99 year leases. Early developments were between Long Lane and East End Road. The largest area of development was the Park Hall Estate, which included almost all the common land to the east of the High Road up as far as but not including Creighton Avenue. The roads and services were designed and built as an entity but local builders bought small lots on auction for speculative development. By 1895 about one third of the High Road terraces were in place and by 1910 almost all was built or under construction (including all the County Roads). South of Church Lane was developed later.

The present day Phoenix Cinema first opened its doors in 1912, around the time that British and Colonial Films had a studio on the High Road.

Manufacturing
While much work in East Finchley was to service the needs of travellers and of London (soot and manure out of London was swapped for hay and coal into London at the Dirthouse, located below the station) some manufacturing took place. Hamilton Walter Dickinson founded a car manufactory on East End Road in 1909, now a carpet warehouse, and cricket bats were made off Church Lane, now Hobbs Green. Pottery and bricks were made at
the site where Baronsmere and Park Hall Roads are today. The largest employer, however, was the Simms Factory. Simms motors bought the Grange (six acres) in 1919 but only started production in 1926. As a Lucas CAV factory it closed in 1991. Before this the Grange for a brief period had been a piano factory.

Hampstead Garden Suburb comes to East Finchley
At the turn of the century, when much of East Finchley’s corner of the Finchley triangle was built up or projected, the valley of the Mutton Brook remained mostly rural.

The imminent arrival of the tube railway in Golders Green with a station at North End spurred Henrietta Barnett into a bid to protect the area from piecemeal development. Eventually all the land in Hendon belonging to Eton College would be developed as an enlightened housing experiment, using the Heath Extension as an amenity on its doorstep. Contracts were signed in spring 1907.

Before the central squares (designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens) were complete, the HGS Trust acquired from the Ecclesiastical Commissioners a lease on land in neighbouring East Finchley, stretching down the hill to the Mutton Brook and up the other side. Little and Big Woods were trimmed to fit in, and opened to the public. The development spread to most of the remaining rural land up the valley, to The Bishop’s Avenue, to East Finchley Station and up as far as East End Road.

New Trunk Roads
The North Circular Road through Finchley was constructed throughout the 1920s, following the line of the Brent Brook and Strawberry Vale Brook, which were put into culverts. The Ministry of Transport in 1923 announced plans for a Barnet Bypass cutting though Hampstead Garden Suburb, following the Mutton Brook and the work was completed by 1928.

Cherry Tree Wood
By the exit from the former Bishops’ Hunting Park was a wood where the Mutton Brook flowed though a waterlogged area known as the ‘Quag’. By 1894 the Ordnance Survey map of East Finchley shows that much of the Quag had been obliterated by the railway. At that time the Wood was known as Dirthouse Wood, after the building opposite, the forerunner of the Old White Lion. The boundary with Hornsey cut diagonally across the wood, with most of it on the Hornsey side. Watercress beds are clearly marked but had disappeared by the time the 1912 map was published.

The Wood was bought by Finchley Urban District Council from the Ecclesiastical Commissioners in 1915 and opened to the public. Subsequently it was renamed Cherry Tree Wood, presumably from its position by Cherry Tree Hill (also known as great North Road, formerly New Gate Lane) rather than from the trees it contained, and the Finchley/Hornsey boundary was rerouted around the outside in 1930 along with other changes.

The northern boundary of the original hunting park, dating back to the 1200s, remains as the northern boundary of the Wood. Glebeland (90acres) was acquired in 1932.

The tube arrives
The underground was taken into public control in 1933 and plans to link the Northern line at Highgate were resurrected. The Northern line was extended in a tunnel from Highgate to a new East Finchley station in 1939 and on to Barnet by 1941. Plans to double and electrify the line from Finchley to Edgware and on to Bushey and electrify the line from Finsbury Park were interrupted by the war and never resurrected, but the single track to Mill Hill East was electrified during the war for access to the army barracks. Instead, these lines were closed down, leaving us with the Northern line familiar to us all. East Finchley’s famous Archer by Eric Aumonier was unveiled in 1940.

East Finchley towers
The shops largely migrated to the High Road. The old centre of East Finchley around Market Place suffered extensive bomb damage in November 1940. The whole area was redeveloped in the late 1950s, early 1960s, resulting in the three high-rise blocks that can be seen for miles around. The imposing Congregational Church on the corner of High Road and East End Road that had replaced the burned down chapel in 1878 was replaced by Viceroy Parade. Prepared for REEF by Tony Roberts on behalf of The Finchley Society. For a list of books on which this is based visit www.finchleysociety.org.uk/acthistlist.htm.

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