A Puzzle and More North London: My post today from my colour work in May 1994 begins with a plea for help. I’ve spent ages trying to find the location of this first picture and hope someone will recognise it and let me know.
As you can see it shows a street with some impressive houses beside a pond. Unfortunately the only information I recorded back in 1994 was on the back of the contact sheet containing this and a dozen other images:
Bounds Green / New Southgate
Hendon
Barnet
Vauxhall : 28 May 1994
On the film this frame comes between one which I think is from Barnet and some which are clearly at Vauxhall suggesting that this may also be in or around Barnet. But I don’t know Barnet at all well and other pictures taken there at the same time do not include a duck pond like this or any of the houses here.
Although my black and white work was fairly well organised at the time – and I was selling some and putting work into libraries, colour was then simply personal projects. At the time I was also working in south London, and this picture could possibly have been taken there. I’d like to know.
Henlys were a major car dealer in the UK mainly for British Leyland, but here they were selling Vauxhall. The New Southgate Gas Works were first built in 1859 and closed in 1972 and this gasholder was a landmark on the North Circular Road until it was demolished in 2014. It was the largest of three on the site and had been built in 1912. It was still in use in 1994 and was only decommissioned in 2001.
Planning permission was given in 2021 for tower blocks with 182 homes on the site but the developer has now dropped these and it is expected to remain empty for several more years.
I made several pictures of this Chinese Restaurant in the centre of Edgware. The reflection in the window shows the building on the corner of Manor Park Road and Station Road.
Northway House was built in 1968-70 and was a landmark office tower development on the High Road in suburban Whetstone. Back in 1994 it still appeared well-used and in good condition but by 2015 much of it had become empty and dilapidated.
Planning permission was granted to a developer working closely with Barnet Council on a “mixed use residential led mixed use development” which retained and renovated the original building and was completed in August 2025.
Formerly known as the Golden Eagle, this pub was demolished in 2002. In its place, just north of the North Circular Road is now Holiday Inn Express London – Golders Green.
There was a pub on this site in the 1930s, built by Charringtons but I think this building dated from the 1950s or 1960s. Possibly it was rebuilt following war damage or because of the conversion of the road to a much wider double carriageway
More from North London to follow.
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