Parks of New Barnet and East Barnet: A Walk along Pymmes Brook

Ah, you there, bucolic stream of silver that trickles through the rolling hills of old...



Well actually... here we are by the Pymmes Brook, which runs next to a carpark. A big sandy functional carpark, which I have to admit sort of breaks up a walk that one might have along Pymmes Brook, which is a modest brook (a small minor tributary of the River Lea) that is more famous for being troublesome and being the source of floods, rather than for its natural beauty.



Here is a documentation of a walk through the rolling hills of New Barnet. You might ask, in what way is New Barnet new? Well its just a mile away from the so-called original High Barnet, so named because of the High street being located there, although High Barnet is also supposed to be one of the highest settlements in London itself. This is the approach to New Barnet from Oakleigh Park. Rolling downwards towards the lowlands of Tottenham, as it were.



An old sign of New Barnet



Another sign about the history and heritage - fighting the good fight to remain legible before being scratched off with graffiti...



I love that this sign is in caps. Its like someone unreasonably shouting BROOKSIDE at you.



Something draws me to this place. It could be the quaint little public toilet in the middle of this scene, next to all the bins stacked higgledy-piggledy together.



Although this is in an extremely residential and dense area of Barnet, the Pymmes Brook offers some escape...



You can, for a moment, pretend that you're in some wooded forest.







If you follow the river southwards you'll get to Oak Hill Park.





No jokes, they're asking for people to identify graffiti tags here.



Going further south it enters more endless residential suburbia.



As I trod noisely along the banks of Pymmes Brook, I alarmed a wee little moorhen. Also known as 'skitty coot' because they are the most nervous of waterfowl that churps and twitches its tail nonstop whilst fleeing when it sees huuuumans.



Naturally, there were balls to be found in Pymmes Brook. It seems that on every single walk I seem to find a lost ball.



Pymmes Brook leads me into Brunswick Park.



It is a genuinely lovely park with an expansive field and lots of beautiful grand trees to the right. Pymmes Brook still runs to the left.



And scenes like this.



There were many open pathways in this park and it had the ability to make you feel like you were in a huger park than just somewhere in Barnet.



Problem is that I still wanted to follow Pymmes Brook, but for some reason if you follow Pymmes Brook into Brunswick Park, it just stops with a huge hill in its way. There was no way around this hill it seemed. So... I had to go up this hill.



After crawling up some muddy hill (also because I am very bad at climbing and ascending slopes) I found myself mysteriously inside a cemetery!!! Was there a better way to go about going from Brunswick Park into the cemetery? I don't know but I also hadn't expected that it would be such a vast cemetery.



Worse still, I could see from the light that it must be getting very late (ie: the sun would set at 4 or 5pm) and in winter most cemeteries don't open till late! Meaning there was a genuine risk of being locked into this cemetery...





So I began running for the gates of the cemetery.



Along the way I saw this curious rock with a flower logo next to it.



Just a flower symbol. I still don't know what it is. Any ideas?



I made it out of the cemetery just in the nick of time but by now it was too late to try to find where Pymmes Brook eemerged on the other end of the Former Great Northern London cemetery.





So I eventually found my way back to New Southgate Station where I could get straight home from...

The Walk:

Multi-electrification system on Hertford Loop Line: Drayton Park's electric sizzle

FUN FACTS ABOUT THE HERTS LOOP TRAINS!: An interesting fact is that the Moorgate to Drayton Park segment of the Hertford Loop line is underground and uses third rail DC (750V). Whenever trains stop at Drayton Park from either direction, you'll always hear an electric sizzle followed by the engine cutting out, and the lights on board the train will black out temporarily, as it being switched to or from overhead AC (250kV). Due to the gradient of the train and timing in which the driver conducts the switch, the electrical switch is usually more apparent when coming down from the North to Moorgate.

Most of the trains I've taken have involved only one railway electrification system, a multi-system rail like this usually only occurs where trains cross a boundary, such as a national boundary, where two different countries have implemented different electrification systems.

Lavender Hill Cemetery: what is your likelihood of being crushed by a falling headstone? and what's happening to the design of baby memorials in the UK today?

Photo documentation of a circular walk around Gordon Hill, Lavender Hill, Strayfields, and Hillyfields



It appears to me as if travellers on the Herts Loop are the target market for Class B Bricks; I have seen this ad on several of the stops just beyond Zone 4. Class B are those generic red engineering bricks that are most commonly used in Britain - cheaper than Class A,



Gordon Hill is in Zone 5 which makes it an affordable and quick stop to get to from Harringay. On this walk I decided to hit up a couple cemeteries and do a sort of circular walk around the area.



You'll notice that on the side there is a little sign indicating that this cemetery contains Commonwealth War Graves. When I visited it in March I did not really understand what "Commonwealth War Graves" meant, but now after having visited many cemeteries and memorials I can recognise the distinctive standardised headstones.



Lavender Hill Cemetery Church



A stately cemetery



It seems many of the stones in Lavender Hill have been recently subject to a H&S audit...



"Failed memorial"

Naturally, on seeing this, one might wonder whether this is health and safety completely gone mad - and what are the real risks involved with falling memorials. Is it true that falling headstones pose a credible threat to public health and safety? Or is it unnecessary mass hysteria and the circulation of an urban myth? So I did a little googling and found this: From this britarch discussion post:

SUMMARY OF ACCIDENTS RELATING TO MEMORIALS 1982 - 2003

3 year old boy crushed by gravestone - Fatal (Wear Valley)
2 year old child injured by falling gravestone - non fatal (Sunderland)
2 year old child injured by falling gravestone - non fatal (Preston)
9 year old child crushed by gravestone - fatal (Liverpool)
9 year old child crushed by gravestone - non fatal (Burnley)
4 year old child trapped by falling headstone - non fatal (Westminster)
20 months child, struck by recently erected headstone - non fatal (Plymouth)
3 year old child, trapped by fallen headstone - non fatal (Port Talbot)
44 year old man, trapped by fallen headstone - fatal (Belper)
5 year old child, crushed by memorial - non fatal (Chester)
6 year old child, crushed by falling memorial - fatal (Harrogate)
2ft high memorial in Dukinfield cemetery fell onto a woman's leg and
took her skin off down to her ankle, then trapped it against a kerb and
broke it in five places - non fatal (25th September 2002)
Young man killed in a Salford Churchyard - fatal (2003)

Also I also remember the case of the freak accident of the 8 year old boy instantly killed by a headstone in Glasgow: BBC: Ciaran Williamson killed 'instantly' by falling headstone (2015). However if these represent the statistics of the whole of the UK over 20 years then I say YOUR RISK OF BEING FATALLY CRUSHED UNTIL DEAD BY FALLING HEADSTONE IS INDEED GREATLY EXAGGERATED!



But, er, I suppose it doesn't mean you should intentionally lay your head underneath these headstones that have just failed their H&S test.

Although then again, no one can really stop you from doing that. I suppose the weird thing about all of this H&S/compensation culture is that whilst usually an institution or organisation or cemetery in this case may be expected to have a duty of care to the people they employ or interact with, the public don't really need to have a duty of care towards their own safety...



There was some dramatic weather...



As the weather began to turn and I walked further into the cemetery.... I noticed the graves getting more.... decorative?



I realised this was the baby and young children section of the cemetery.



What on earth started this trend in which Britain's bereaved parents design their child's memorial entirely out of garden ornaments, plastic decorations and children's toys?



Although they're meant to be memorials for babies and young children, I can't help but feel that there's also some sort of contest going on when they are laid out side by side; it looks like some wild and crazy amateur garden decorating contest or something occurred here, especially with the little garden fences erected around these plots. "Competitive grieving, on your marks, get set.... Erect the plastic windmills! Pile on the Poundland tinsel! More B&Q solar powered lights and garden ornaments!"





I'm now really curious to see whether baby memorial designs have also gone all plastic in other countries and regions...

The World's First Cash Machine and New River Swans: A walk through Enfield Town, World's End and Cockfosters

In my years of living in Stamford Hill and Harringay, Enfield has always felt so close because we were right by the stations with direct train services going to Enfield (Abellio Greater Anglia's Lea Valley Line and Great Northern's Hertford Loop). And I suppose it is typically still referred to as the "London Borough of Enfield", even though it is technically Middlesex and it has its own postcode zone (EN). And if one considers the distance, a trip to Enfield honestly is a trip out of London. If Harringay is given a rough estimate of being about 5/6 miles away from Central, then Enfield is a whopping 10/11 miles from Central, depending on what you want to refer to as the centre of London. On the map it looks like this:



So what is there to see in Enfield?



For one it is the site of the FIRST CASH MACHINE IN THE WORLD! A modest blue plaque stands outside the Barclays Bank in Enfield Town, proclaiming the words "LIVES MADE MUCH EASIER". As I began writing this some months after having visited Enfield Town on several occasions (the most recent of which was 3 March 2017, to which this post will be dated), I realised that today (27 June 2017, the date that I" writing this post) is coincidentally the 50th anniversary of the unveiling of this machine!

The first cash machine or hole in the wall was opened by comedian Reg Varney (the star of "On the Buses", which if you're not familiar with, is truly a show of its time - ultimate 70s bawdy innuendo - and speaking of Enfields, Harry Enfield together with Paul Whitehouse did do a hilarious On the Buses spoof).

All you could have taken out from this cash machine at the time was £10, but according to Bank of England's Inflation calculator, £10 back in 1967 would have been the equivalent of £166.57 in 2016. Nevertheless it was already supposed to have been a revolution at the time - getting cash out from the bank on the weekend? Oh my! How things have changed in 50 years; here we are in 2017 and the bank I use has just closed every single branch that I've ever used within London!.



This is the same New River which flows from up in Hertfordshire, past our house in Green Lanes, and all the way down to the Woodberry Wetlands in Stoke Newington. Neither actually a River nor "new", this is an artificial waterway dating from 1613 which supplies London with fresh drinking water from the River Lea.

In 1823 in his Essays of Elia, Charles Lamb raged and railed against the New River after apparently witnessing a dear friend nearly drowning in the New River, which he apparently felt as a swan-less spirit-less man-made tributary was not worthy of claiming the lives of poets:

Waters of Sir Hugh Middleton—what a spark you were like to have extinguished for ever! Your salubrious streams to this City, for now near two centuries, would hardly have atoned for what you were in a moment washing away. Mockery of a river — liquid artifice — wretched conduit! henceforth rank with canals, and sluggish aqueducts. Was it for this, that, smit in boyhood with the explorations of that Abyssinian traveller, I paced the vales of Amwell to explore your tributary springs, to trace your salutary waters sparkling through green Hertfordshire, and cultured Enfield parks?—Ye have no swans—no Naiads—no river God—or did the benevolent hoary aspect of my friend tempt ye to suck him in, that ye also might have the tutelary genius of your waters?

Oh if Charles Lamb were still alive to see the New River now... it is teeming with swans!



Swans!



SWANNNS!!



And also loads of Canadian Geese.



Enfield's Millennium Fountain



New River Loop...



I walked around the New River and by the banks there were these lovely plants...



Which insisted on taking a ride on my hand.



I probably need to write a post entirely dedicated to lost balls.



I walked westwards towards a place called "World's End". If you've been around London/UK you'll often see the term "World's End" which basically refers to anything which people melodramatically feel is so far away its basically at the end, or the boundary of their world. (or church parish)



Indeed there are some vast fields which really feel like you're in the countryside.



On google maps it is hard to tell sometimes if a field or green area can be crossed. That is if one takes the assumption that all green areas can be crossed by pedestrians, but this is not true. For the most part, if a green area is not publicly named, then it is probably not land in which the public has right of way. Which is unfortunate because sometimes you just want to walk from one place to another in a straight line and there's a temptingly open field in the way!



World's End consists of private land with significant amounts of barbed wire so don't be as foolish as me as to make an extended excursion around the perimeter of what looks like grassland when none of it can actually be entered/crossed.



By this point I had already walked so much that I thought I may as well head on to Cockfosters via the A110, a thoroughly bleak highway with little to no pedestrians on it on a winter's day.



There was some distant neighing.



Eventually the road converged back into civilisation.



I did finally reach Cockfosters and its distinctively designed station, designed by Charles Holden and built in 1933.

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The Walk:

[I'm still backdating this post to 3 March 2017, which is when I took the pictures...]