News from The Barnet Society

If residents are prepared to back a mass campaign of objection, the Barnet Society believes there might still be a chance to limit, if not prevent, the downgrading of Chipping Barnet Library.

A traffic management experiment at the junction of Wood Street and Barnet High Street is causing a headache for some drivers. There is currently no left turn from Wood Street into High Street, and no corresponding right turn in front of the parish church from High Street into Wood Street.

“Well-behaved dogs welcome” is the message that dog lovers are hoping they will hear from more and more of the cafes, restaurants and public houses along the High Street in High Barnet.

Local residents, bird watchers and nature lovers are joining forces to step up their campaign against plans to develop a natural burial ground on farmland at Arkley bounded by Barnet Road, Barnet Gate Lane and Mays Lane.

In a first for schools in the London Borough of Barnet, the Pavilion study centre in Meadway, High Barnet, is offering vulnerable and excluded school children the opportunity to get an entry level qualification in horticulture.

In the feline appreciation stakes there is currently no contest in determining High Barnet’s most sociable – and safety conscious – cat. Milly, a 15-year-old tabby, regularly stops the traffic as she walks from her home in Carnarvon Road and over the zebra crossing between Barnet Library and the Spires shopping centre.

After a career switch from his previous job as a political researcher, an aspiring High Barnet furniture and cabinet maker is gaining recognition at a series of craft and design shows.

Support for Barnet Market’s annual classic car show has proved so strong that it has become a showcase event for the increasingly-popular Barnet Classic Car Club. Thirty cars assemble each May beside the market, and around the Spires bandstand, providing an engrossing spectacle for classic car enthusiasts.

High Barnet’s notoriety as a hot spot for parking fines is to be featured yet again on national television.   Footage for a new series of Dom on the Spot was filmed in the High Street highlighting Barnet Council’s refusal to even consider a short period of free parking in order to help local traders.

Residents are being consulted about the possibility of a massive extension to High Barnet’s controlled parking zone to cope with uncontrolled off-street car parking and traffic congestion following recent expansion at Barnet Hospital.

Barnet is living up to its fame in Cockney rhyming slang: a survey shows there are more hairdressing salons in the London borough Barnet than in any other part of capital, except for the West End.

Barnet’s historic physic well, visited by Samuel Pepys, will be open to the public on Saturday 19 March offering a rare chance to walk down the brick-built stairway to see the tanks filled by spring water.

A question mark hanging over the future ownership of Barnet’s many historic almshouses has finally been resolved after the government gave an assurance they would not be included in the extension of the right-to-buy scheme for housing tenants.

Opposition is mounting to the possibility that 14 acres of woods and farmland at Whalebones, between Wood Street and Barnet Hospital, might be zoned for housing and community use.

Maintaining the great musical tradition of Barnet parish church has been the outstanding achievement of Terence Atkins, its organist and choirmaster for the last 40 years.

The future operation of the 107 bus service, which has stops in High Barnet on its route between Edgware and New Barnet, is in doubt because of a decision by Hertfordshire County Council to make further cuts in its funding for subsidised bus routes.

A guarded welcome has been given by the Barnet Society to plans for a £7 million upgrade for the Spires shopping centre. Barnet Council is to be asked to give planning permission for a two-storey fashion store and three new restaurants.

A seasonal concert that drew on the great range of musical talents at Queen Elizabeth’s Girls’ School, Barnet, rounded off the year, and also the first term of the new headteacher Mrs Violet Walker.

Whalebones Park, a 14-acre stretch of fields and woods between Barnet Hospital and Wood Street, is about to be considered by Barnet Council as a possible area to be developed for future housing and community use.

It is not well enough known that British cinema was born in Chipping Barnet 120 years ago.  Moving images were then as revolutionary as virtual reality seems now.