Opening soon, Kafe Ador In Hatch End with a Discount Offer

 New to Hatch End. On the same side as Hatch End Station but the other end of the Broadway.  Opening on Monday December 16th.

Upade in December 2024 - now open. See later post.

Sunflower summer flower display in Hatch End, Harrow - and Britain In Bloom

 

Sunflower in summer flower display in Hatch End high street. Photo by Angela Lansbury.

Our French au pair girl's father came to visit us in London, England and said he had no idea that the London suburbs would be so green and full of flowers. He visited us in March when the spring flowers were in bloom. England is known as a nation of shopkeepers, and English man's home is his castle, but the English are also known for the love of gardening and London has many parks and the Green Belt, a ring of protected land around the city, only gradually now being eroded - but not without a legal fight.

We also have Springtime nationwide contests for the best gardens, as well as many local gardening clubs with talks and sales of plants and contests for flower displays and home made jams.

I wrote in Facebook:

Such a great design. Please copy. A tall yellow sunflower in the centre of a flower display planter in the Hatch End high street, called The Broadway, because it is broad. Hatch End Association organizes the summer flowers and Christmas tree. 

Useful Websites

See

 www.hatchend.org

https://www.rhs.org.uk/get-involved/britain-in-bloom

Green Belt land, Open Spaces Society

https://www.oss.org.uk/protecting-green-belt-land/

Brick Expressionism and Bricks in London and Europe

I was admiring the brickwork in London in buildings built in the 1930s. Walking slowly around Hatch End to take photos, I discovered many more surprises. Some of the walls had brick mixed with other materials. Others had elaborate patterns.

One seemingly plain wall I had passed several times but not noticed, had bricks of mixed colours, red, white, yellow and grey. As a child I had heard the song in The Wizard of Oz about the yellow brick road. I was puzzled, because I could not imagine a brick road. Yet many houses nowadays have bricks in their driveway.

Nor could I imagine yellow bricks. Yet here in Hatch End are the yellow bricks. You hardly notice that they are yellow.

One seemingly plain brick wall I photographed because adjoining buildings had contrasting colour bricks. When I looked at the photo later, I discovered that the join was crenellated vertically with contrasting colours in square blocks. The effect is as if the two buildings are interlocked by the bricks, like hands joined together, clasping each other, with alternating fingers.

I wondered whether the elaborate brick patterns all dated from the Nineteen Thirties or earlier, in Georgian or Victorian times. I looked up brick and Thirties and eventually found an article in Wikipedia on Brick Expressionism.

"Backsteinexpressionismus describes a specific variant of expressionist architecture that uses bricks, tiles or clinker bricks as the main visible building material. Buildings in the style were erected mostly in the 1920s, primarily in Germany and The Netherlands, where the style was created.

"The style's regional centres were the larger cities of Northern Germany and the Ruhr area, but the Amsterdam School belongs to the same movement, which can be found in many of the larger Dutch cities like Amsterdam and Utrecht."

An article on brick history jumps from ancient times to modern but shows the different styles of brickwork in America and Britain.
http://www.brickdirectory.co.uk/html/brick_history.html

I was searching for the words to describe the patterns and shapes of brick. The ends of the brick are called headers, whilst the long ones are stretchers. How do they lay them out. Here's a hint from an article in Wikipedia called Brickwork, which also gave me the name of the pattern Herringbone.

Birck positions from Wikipedia.
Photos taken in Hatch End, The Broadway, by Angela Lansbury, 2016, copyright.
For more photos of The Broadway, Hatch End, see my previous posts on Art Deco.
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.

Art Deco In Hatch End Dated 1933

Here's one facade with the words The Broadway and the date 1933. I thought there was only one. When I went back and looked again, I saw there was a second.

One is above Kingsmill Carpets, which you reach first, walking from Fellini Italian Caffe Restaurant.

The other is above Sea Pebbles, which you reach first, walking from the other direction.

Seeing Dates Inscribed Overhead
The first time I noticed the dates, I was passing in a car. To see them, and photograph them, when on foot, you must walk away from the shop windows back to the kerb and look up. Alternatively, on the opposite side of the road, walk away from the shop windows and go near the kerb for a closer look.

Who Can Remember The Nineteen Thirties?
Over dinner I was thinking and discussing how old you would have to be to remember these buildings being built. If you were one hundred years old, an age reached by several centenarians and older people featured in local papers, you were born in 1916. So in 1933 you were seventeen years old. A person who is 90 years old in 2016 would have been about seven years old in 1933, just old enough to remember buildings being constructed in the early 1930s.

To get the dates clearer in a photograph, I had to crop the picture to blow up the section with the writing, increase the contrast, increase the colours, and increase the focus. Four is very good for softening faces with wrinkles or looking romantic. I moved to frame the building with the tree, and to get the lamp post to the side of the building.

But to read out of focus writing or inscriptions you need to intensify the sharpness.

Later, when editing again, I cropped the photos so that I and you could see the date.

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.

Mrs Beeton plaque and statue

Photo of Mrs Beeton plaque by Angela Lansbury. Copyright 2016.

We need a statue to Mrs Beeton. Why? I'll tell you.

I am pleased to see that the plaque to Mrs Beeton is still on the outside of a new restaurant in Hatch End, a Lebanese restaurant, which has taken over from Serrata. That plaque, on one of Hatch End's many restaurants, recalls Mrs Beeton who is Hatch End's link with keen cooks of the past.

Mrs Beeton lived in Hatch End with her husband, the publisher who inspired her to write the book of household management. How did she find a publisher for her book? She didn't. Her publisher husband inspired her.

I suppose the moral is that I should first marry a publisher. So here's my quotation for the day, 'Authors, to succeed, first marry a publisher."

As a child, I thought Mrs Beeton was merely a pioneer cookery writer, merely an anachronism. My mother used to quote, 'Take a dozen eggs,' which seemed absurdly extravagant, in post war Britain. Another line which seemed funny to both mother and me when I was a child, because nobody had chickens in post-war Britain, 'First kill your chicken.' (In those days, mother read the recipe, then phoned the grocery shop to deliver our groceries.)

Much later in life when I was an adult, I discovered that Mrs Beeton had copied the system of writing recipes in a standard format. She started with the list of ingredients for you to shop or gather in the kitchen. Now it seems the obvious and natural way to start because that is how it is always done. Apparently somebody else had done it previously, one of many writers who all had different systems. Mrs Beeton chose and made popular the system every recipe writer and reader uses today.

Since Mrs Beeton, many others have written cookery books. Cookery books are still best sellers.

My friend Ruth, who used to run a tea-shop in Pinner, and now gives cookery classes to U3A and others, says she uses Mrs Beeton's cookbook regularly.

Another mystery about Mrs Beeton solved, why did she die so long. I don't like to be the bearer of bad news. But my book group read her biography and modern writers reveal that Mrs Beeton probably caught what I shall politely describe as an infection from her husband. He had visited a prostitute either while she was pregnant or earlier, before marrying her, or both. Such was life, in her day and modern times, that when men cannot get sex at home they sometimes look elsewhere and fall sick. How lucky we are that women have better medical care and nowadays most survive childbirth.

I was reading about a campaign to add to the number of statues of women in London and Britain. Apart from Queen Victoria, we have few statues of women. Most worldwide are royals, Goddesses or mythical characters.

Mrs Beeton is a great character for a statue. Where should we put it? Hatch End has no statues. A good location where more can see it would be Pinner Park, near the Heath Robinson museum. But a better statue there would be Heath Robinson, shown sitting drawing. In Hatch End we should have a statue of Mrs Beeton, either writing her book, or cooking, or sitting in a kitchen of the day, or perhaps with eggs and a chicken. Not a dead chicken. Not a horizontal chicken. A live chicken, sitting on eggs. Does a chicken have more than one egg at a time? How little I know about eggs. Yes, we need a statue of Mrs Beeton, a cookery book, a chicken and an egg.

Where should the statue go? On the same side of the road as where her house was standing.

I used to wonder who had knocked down her house and why. I assumed that it was destroyed to make way for the row of shops. But a book in the new Heath Robinson museum shows Hatch End and Pinner and Ruislip and other areas of North West London destroyed by bombs in World War II. One tends to think of the East End of London being bombed, near the docks, and Coventry. But even the little suburban houses were destroyed. So sad.

The bright note is that now no trace of that remains, except the war memorials. Hatch End has bustling restaurants, employing people from around the world, who have chosen to come to England, not just the city centre but the suburbs, serving a range of cookery styles.

The restaurants have started to put chairs and tables in the open air on pavements. This began when smoking was banned indoors. On the Mrs Beeton side of the road is the slip road for parking.

On the other side of the road you have more space for a cordoned off area. Sea Pebbles fish restaurant, Fellini restaurant and Italian caffe on the corner. As we drove through Hatch End I remarked that it was a street wide enough for all the pavement seating. 'Yes,' said a member of my family, 'That's why it's called The Broadway.'

The Broadway must have room for a statue. Hatch End makes room for a giant Christmas tree at Christmas time. We could have an area of seating around the statue of Mrs Beeton.

I think a statue should perform two functions. Remind us of a person who inspires us. Show them in action to remind us to copy that action. So Mrs Beeton should be shown either cooking or writing a book. Hatch End is in the London Borough of Harrow, and Hatch End and Harrow are known for good writers and good restaurants.

I must write to a newspaper, or two, or three, and propose a statue to the wonderful Mrs Beeton. Will you help me?
Isabella Mary Beeton (née Mayson; 14 March 1836 – 6 February 1865).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabella_Beeton
This should be the first step towards a museum, or a room in the heath Robinson Museum, about famous writers and personalities of Pinner and Harrow.

WHAT TO SEE
* Plaque to Mrs Beeton on wall outside restaurant on Hatch End Broadway
* Gravestone of Mrs Beeton and her husband in Norwood cemetery, south of the Thames river, in historic Norwood cemetery, one of London's magnificent seven cemeteries.

Angela