in 2011. Barnet’s libraries, once the pride of the borough, have gradually had their services cut back and face a bleak future, as do many library services throughout London.
ANGEL COTTAGES
1966
R. Seifert and Partners
NW7 1RD
KINGSHEAD HOUSE
1982
Gerd Kaufmann
NW7 1QX
Mill Hill remains one of the most rural parts of the borough, and the village contains a number of interesting post-war houses. Angel Cottages is a group of four houses overlooking a pond, built in red brick with timber boarding and tiled roofs. They were designed by the firm of Richard Seifert, famous for office buildings like Centrepoint and nearby Ever Ready House, who also lived in the village. Just around the corner is Kingshead, a brick house with multiple sloping roofs by Gerd Kaufmann, reminiscent of his house in Kerry Avenue, Stanmore (see Harrow here).
HENDON HALL COURT
1966
Owen Luder
Brutalist-style luxury flats designed by the Owen Luder Partnership for developer E. Alec Colman Investments, for whom the firm designed the Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth and Trinity Square car park in Gateshead. The site contains fifty-four flats, in a mixture of two and three bedrooms and maisonettes. The flats, set in the grounds of the Hendon Hall Hotel, are constructed of reinforced concrete designed to contrast with and become part of the landscaped gardens, bringing a slice of béton brut to this corner of Barnet.
ST JOHN’S UNITED REFORMED CHURCH
1967
Jon Finlayson and Iain Langlands
Hidden but striking post-war church on a side street in New Barnet. It has a steep slate-lined roof, whose eaves come down to ground level, and long thin windows to draw light in from its awkward position. The building was built to replace the previous church, and one of its architects, Jon Finlayson, was a member of the congregation.
FINCHLEY UNITED SYNAGOGUE
1967
Dowton and Hurst
Barnet is home to a number of synagogues, some more modernist than others. Finchley United is a large synagogue overlooking a green next to the North Circular. It was designed by Dowton and Hurst with a front elevation of angled Portland stone and has stained glass work by R. L. Rothschild. Other modernist synagogues in Barnet include the deco Hendon United (1935) by Cecil J. Eprile and the North Western Reform in Golders Green (1936) by Fritz Landauer.
83 WEST HEATH ROAD
1971
Peter Turnbull of Michael Manser Associates
One of many post-war modernist houses in this area of Barnet, which takes in Golders Green and Hampstead. Designed by Peter Turnbull of Michael Manser Associates, this house is a one-storey brick building with a prominent steel frame, featuring a glazed central courtyard. Another post-war house with prominent steel construction is 21 West Heath Close (1961) by Anthony Levy, built overlooking Golders Green Park. It has a pleasingly simple design, consisting of a one-storey rectangular box, supported at one end by thin steel columns. Unfortunately, at time of writing, it is looking very dilapidated.
BRENT
Brent has an interesting architectural history, split between the urban southern part featuring Willesden and Kilburn, which developed first, and the more rural northern areas at Wembley and Kingsbury. Wembley is the most significant area in terms of modernist design, being the place used for attracting people out to the suburbs, first through the failed Watkin’s Tower and then the more successful British Empire Exhibition of 1924–5. The exhibition was modern in construction rather than design, with the Owen Williams-planned reinforced concrete structures such as the Palace of Engineering paving the way for his more radical Empire Pool on the same site a decade later. The influx of visitors to the exhibition, 25 million by the time it closed, also provided a population boom resulting in modernist-style homes, designed by Welch, Cachemaille-Day and Lander for the Haymills Ltd, being built on the slopes of Wembley.
At the same time as those flat-roofed houses were appearing, Ernest Trobridge was producing more historically inspired designs in Kingsbury. Like the exhibition buildings, designs like Trobridge’s flats on Highfield Avenue hid contemporary reinforced-concrete construction. Like most of the boroughs featured in this book, Brent has a few underground stations by Charles Holden. At Sudbury Town, Holden produced his breakthrough box design that he spent the next decade refining. Post war, the progressive interwar legacy was not taken on, with local authority housing like the Chalkhill Estate, Wembley being quickly built and equally quickly torn down. Also demolished were the buildings of the Empire Exhibition, now only remembered by the India Pavilion, turned into a warehouse.
FORMER INDIA PAVILION
1924
Charles Allom and Sons
