Brownswood Park Finsbury Park: My walk on April 1st 1990 began at Finsbury Park Station. I walked a short distance past the gates to the park and then turned right down Queens Drive.
Queen’s Drive was laid out and developed from 1869, the same year that the park, misleadingly named Finsbury Park despite being a couple of miles from Finsbury, was opened, just a few years after the opening of Seven Sister Road station in 1861. In 1870 the station was renamed Finsbury Park. Most of the street was built up by the 1871 census, largely with substantial and well decorated four-storey terraces.
Queen’s Road – later renamed Queen’s Drive – was built as the ‘best road’ in a new select suburb then known as Brownswood Park, developed at first by John Brookes Porter in 1862. You can read more of its history in the Brownswood Conservation Area Appraisal.
Like many such areas it went downhill over the years. Wartime bombing including a V2 rocket damaged and destroyed a number of houses in it and nearby streets. By the 1950s most of the houses were in multiple occupation by “students, migrants, and the working class.”
This picture is of the rear of the Pembury Hotel which is on the corner of Queen’s Drive and Seven Sisters Road, just a few yards down the road and is a post war addition.
Princess Crescent, also in Browsnwood Park, is not a crescent but two straight lengths of road at an angle joining Queen’s Drive and Gloucester Drive. The houses here were rather smaller than those in Queen’s Road. The other section of road has a two large blocks of council flats, St John’s Court on one side and a primary school on the other. From 1934 until 1960 the Finsbury Park Synagogue was there.
I walked back onto Queen’s Drive and continued to Brownswood Road, turning east and crossing Green Lanes into Lordship Park – not a park but a street.
Taken on Lordship Park and looking up Allerton Road towards the ‘castle’ designed by architect William Chadwell Mylne for the New River Company on Green Lanes, to house steam engines to pump water which had been cleaned in the adjoining reservoirs and filter beds to consumers.
The water was pumped to a large tank at the top of the main structure and then gravity fed to consumers. The towers and turrets disguise the huge industrial engines inside, initially giant single cylinder steam engines linked to pumps. These were later replaced in the 1930s by diesel and electric pumps. The gothic fantasy was felt to be more acceptable in this then select suburb than an industrial-looking building.
When the water board closed down this facility in 1971 it was saved from demolition by Grade II* listing and three years later converted into a climbing centre.
A pollarded tree in front of semi-detached houses on Lordship Park. The two story houses have some fine decoration on their doorways and windows. There are larger houses close to Green Lanes.
Notices on the house say ‘NO BALL GAMES; and NO PARKING’ but there seems to be some kind of car scrap business running here in front of once fine derelict houses.
I think these houses were just to the north of Portland Rise on the west side of Green Lanes and have since been demolished and replaced by to modern blocks of flats at 291 and 293 Green Lanes. The building at extreme left is still there.
Unusually I took 11 frames here and there are six of them on Flickr – but I’ll only post three here.
These houses were a short walk from the West Reservoir where my my next post from this walk will begin.
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