News from The Barnet Society

High Barnet’s long-standing blot on the landscape, the derelict nurses’ home on the Marie Foster Centre site, is finally about to be demolished.

Resident guardians who have had temporary homes in the former Marie Foster Centre in Wood Street, Barnet, are moving out following the approval of plans to build a 100-room care home on the site.

Barnet’s pioneering role in the development of care for young people suffering from multiple sclerosis has one lasting memento – a plaque commemorating the opening of the Marie Foster Centre by the Duchess of Gloucester in November 1973.

A planning application has now been submitted to Barnet Council for a large-scale private care home for the elderly on the Marie Foster site in the heart of the Wood Street conservation area.

Most High Barnet residents are familiar with the Marie Foster Centre – awaiting demolition for redevelopment – but few probably realise that when opened in 1973, the 30-bed hospital in Wood Street was the first purpose-built home in the country for young people suffering from multiple sclerosis.

Local residents and nearby businesses are to be consulted over a plan to build a 100-bed care home for the elderly on the site of the former Marie Foster Centre in Wood Street, Barnet.

After lying abandoned and derelict for years the former nurses’ home in Wood Street, Barnet, is to be demolished to make way for a new care home for the elderly to be built on the Marie Foster care home site.

Big new housing developments such as Elmbank, opposite the Arkley public house, are changing the face of High Barnet – and plans are likely to be presented during 2018 for several more sizeable schemes.

Feasibility study begins on future use of abandoned Marie Foster Home: could it become the site of a new GP surgery for High Barnet?