News from The Barnet Society

The Barnet Society is launching a Save Our High Street appeal: our town centre desperately needs more shoppers and we hope local businesses and other organisations, as well as local residents will join our campaign. Support our campaign for an hours free parking.

Once again the communities of Barnet come together on the first Sunday in December, to celebrate the huge diversity of what we have to offer in our high street and surrounding area.

Saturday shoppers queued up in disbelief to read a bailiff’s notice posted on the front door of the Oasis coffee shop in the Spires shopping centre – the seventh business to have closed within the complex in recent months.

Barnet church has its clock back at last! For almost a month High Barnet residents looked in vain when needing to check the time, but the tower of the town’s famous landmark is resplendent once more.

Love Barnet’s pop-up shop at 89 High Street promoting locally produced crafts and goods had what the staff said was a “fantastic” first week’s trading. Ten stockists are selling a range of products including hand-made home furnishings, jewellery, cards, soaps and oils and glass and ceramics.

Facelift for the Spires to be finished by the spring ready for Carluccio’s restaurant to open next summer.

British Telecom has been forced to admit that there will be another lengthy delay in providing a fast broadband service to up to 3,000 High Barnet households.

New look for Spires shopping centre: a continental cafe-style culture for Barnet High Street? A computer-generated image released by the Williams Pears property group gives an impression of the proposed new-look entrance to the Spires shopping centre and an outside seating area in front of a new Carluccio’s restaurant.

A restaurant with an outside seating area will become part of the High Street frontage of the Spires’ shopping centre if Barnet Council gives its approval. Carluccio’s will take the lease of a new restaurant that will be created out of what were originally the premises of WH Smith.

A controversial plan to demolish the twin spires to provide a new entrance to the Spires shopping centre has been dropped after overwhelming opposition from Barnet residents and shoppers.

Two designs for a new High Street entrance to the Spires shopping centre – one of which would be without the two original spires of Barnet Methodist Church – are now on public display and open for consultation. But Barnet residents have only a matter of days to give their reaction.

Local residents who are against plans for tree-felling and landfill on the site of Old Fold Manor Golf Club off Hadley Green have been promised the support of the Chipping Barnet MP Theresa Villiers.

All the fun of the fair filled the High Street for the annual Barnet Christmas Fair, which many judged was the most ambitious and best supported since the event was first held twenty years ago.

A plan to deposit landfill on the golf course that takes in part of the site of the Battle of Barnet has alarmed the Battlefields Trust. Old Fold Manor Golf Club at Monken Hadley is drawing up proposals to re-landscape the 900 yard stretch of the course which runs parallel to the St Albans Road.

Rarely has the presence of a mechanical digger been welcomed with such enthusiasm as greeted its arrival on the site of Barnet Market, heralding the start of a long-promised and much-delayed resurfacing and improvement.

While work is underway resurfacing Barnet Market, its temporary home is the area around the bandstand outside Waitrose supermarket at the Spires shopping centre. Shoppers visiting the market on Saturday morning (21.9.2013) were handed leaflets announcing that at last the William Pears property group is to start its £100,000 upgrade of the site.

While work is under way resurfacing Barnet Market its temporary home will be the area around the bandstand outside the Waitrose supermarket at the Spires shopping centre. hoppers visiting the market on Saturday morning (21.9.2013) were handed leaflets announcing that at last the William Pears property group is to start its £100,000 upgrade of the site.

The Spires' new owner wants to create a more 'enticing' entrance from the High Street that would attract more shoppers - and that may include the removal of the twin spires.

Resurfacing the site of Barnet market and installing basic facilities for the stallholders is the first test of the William Pears Group, new owners of the Spires shopping centre.

A fresh start for retailing in Chipping Barnet: the Spires shopping centre has been purchased by the William Pears Group, one of Britain’s biggest privately-owned property groups which keeps a low profile but has its roots in north London.  Contracts have been exchanged and the sale of the shopping centre by UBS Triton is due