Eleven HHS members and friends took part in an enjoyable walk round Stroud Green on October 30th, starting at Finsbury Park Station. The excellent weather gave us some splendid views from the vantage points of Finsbury Park and Mount View Road and the tour was enlivened by the reminiscences of several local members.
This is the story of the encounter Hornsey High Street had with trams during the first half of the twentieth century.
Our articles on the development of the Piccadilly Line extension cover some of the commercial and political elements of the process, but here are a few of the logistical points of interest.
As we’ve seen, Parliamentary powers to build the Piccadilly Line extension were given in June 1930 and the first section of the extension from Finsbury Park to Arnos Grove opened for business in September 1932. Just over two years between conception and opening seems exceptionally speedy by today’s standards when large infrastructure projects seem inevitably to overrun. In fact, The London Electric Company (LER) under the stewardship of Frank Pick had been quietly working on the extension for many years.
Does reading the Hornsey Journal extract from November 1919 give you a feeling of déjà vu? Not only was the fervent promise to get a tube to Muswell Hill within three years not kept, an underground line to this north London suburb never materialised. Why did William Kennedy Jones, Conservative and Unionist MP for Hornsey at the time, make such an extravagant promise to his constituents? What were the issues?
A Report from the Hornsey Journal, 14 November 1919
A tube to Muswell Hill and a solution of London’s traffic congestion were promised by Mr Kennedy Jones MP at a meeting of his constituents held by the Muswell Hill ward of the Hornsey Conservative and Unionist Association at the Presbyterian Hall, Princes Avenue, on Friday night. Mr J T Plowman, the newly elected chairman of the ward, presided and a large and enthusiastic audience was present.
An editorial from the Hornsey Journal, 10 October 1919
Everybody in Hornsey has suffered by the great strike of the railway men, some in one way, some in another. And the effects of it have not ceased with its cessation. We can travel with as much freedom as before but for a full week all available means of transport were utilised for the conveyance of food.
An article from the Hornsey Journal, 3 October 1919
Every railway station that serves Hornsey – Great Northern, Midland and ‘Tube’ – were closed in the early part of this week owing to the strike of the railway men and the public took to the King’s highway as it has probably never done before. Happily, the weather for the most part was propitious to pedestrians while the putting back of the clock one hour on Sunday made early rising a matter more of habit than compulsion.
In October 1919 a repeating feature in the Hornsey Journal was the story of the national railway strike, which lasted nine days from midnight on the night of the 26-27th September until the 5th October. However, this was part of a much bigger strike movement in Britain. In 1919 the number of strike days went up from 6 million in 1918 to 35 million, with 2.4 million British workers going on strike. But why did the railway strike take place? And what was its impact, locally as well as nationally?
We take it for granted today that from the more northerly reaches of the HHS district it can take under thirty minutes to get to central London by tube. This was not always the case.