Dear Readers, I have lived in the London Borough of Barnet for nearly fifteen years, but yesterday I realised that I’d never been to the Barnet Museum. Located in Chipping Barnet (closest station: High Barnet) this is an extraordinary collection of ‘stuff’ that has been donated and found over the years. Unlike many museums, this is run entirely by volunteers, and what a cheery, informative and knowledgeable lot they are! The building (which used to be the Brewmaster’s house for the local brewery) is absolutely stuffed to the gunnels with everything from cannonballs from the Battle of Barnet (1471) through WWI and WW2 paraphernalia, from Pearly King and Queen outfits to the Barnet Ventilator. Here are just a few of my personal highlights.

The Battle of Barnet was part of the Wars of the Roses, and no one is quite sure where it was actually fought. There’s a Battle of Barnet guided walk pretty much every year, so I shall gird my loins and go along next time.

Upstairs there’s a sign for the Barnet Horse Fair ( no dogs or chickens  for sale). At one point (1834 to be precise), this was the UK’s largest cattle market, with over 40,000 animals for sale. These days it’s still a fair, but features carousels and helter-skelters rather than  livestock. And incidentally, for anyone interested in Cockney rhyming slang, ‘Barnet Fair’ = hair (these days usually shortened to ‘Barnet’.

And how about this sign? My mother and grandmother were evacuated to Slough during WWII. Having not seen a single bomb in Stratford, East London, an incendiary device landed outside their place of refuge on the first night that they were there. They were back in London by the end of the week.

Below is a model of the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum, which had the longest straight corridor in Britain  when it was built – it would apparently take a visitor two hours to walk from one end to the other. 2,500 unfortunate people were ‘housed’ here when it opened in 1850. It was finally closed in 1989 when someone had the bright idea of ‘Care in the Community’. Amongst its patients were Adam Ant and the author Jenny Diski, and Lindsay Anderson’s film  ‘Britannia Hospital’ featured the exterior of the building. Nowadays the building is ‘Princess Park Manor’ and has been converted into luxury flats.

More cheerfully, here are some examples of the Barnet Ventilator. You’ll note that it appears to have saved the life of the young Elizabeth Taylor – she became ill with pneumonia when filming ‘Cleopatra’ with Richard Burton in Pinewood Studios. She was rushed to Barnet Hospital, and was apparently intubated for three days. The machine was so new that the hospital had four of them made ready in case one of them broke down. Taylor recovered, and the rest of the filming was done in the sunnier climes of Italy and Spain.

And how about this? I had a desk identical to this when I was at primary school (Park  Primary in Newham). One of us used to be the ink monitor, and their job was to keep the inkwells topped up. And this was in 1965 lest you think  I’m the longest-lived Victorian in the world.

There are some interesting artifacts from both world wars. From WWI, there are examples of the medals that were sent to the bereaved parents or wives of soldiers who had been killed, along with a letter commemorating them.

From the Second World War, there are maps of the bomb damage around High Barnet. It seems like a lot of bombs for what was a pretty leafy suburb at the time, but there was a railway, and I imagine that no pilot wanted to return to Germany without dropping their full complement of explosives.

There were gas masks that you could put your baby into…

And ‘Micky Mouse’ and ‘Donald Duck’ gas masks for children. My mother remembers skipping off to Park school (yes, the same one that I went to) with her gas mask in a little bag. She also remembers being in the underground cloakroom with the teachers and all the other children while a bombing raid was going on, singing endless verses of ‘Ten Green Bottles’. How parents sent their children off to school every day, not knowing if they would ever see them again, and how the teachers held their nerve is worthy of some consideration, I think.

On a much more cheer note, this is a Victorian Overmantel – I’ve been looking for one to go above my fireplace for the past fifteen years, so if anyone notices one, give me a shout!

And finally, here are the costumes of the Pearly King and Queen of Barnet. I’ve written about Pearly Kings and Queens before (in particular Henry Croft, the first ‘Pearly King’ who is buried in St Pancras and Islington Cemetery). In Barnet, the Pearly King was Jack Hammond, with his wife and daughter being the Pearly Queen and Pearly Princess. The horseshoes on the costumes refer to Barnet Horse Fair (as described above), Each of the pearl buttons was sewed on by hand, and the Pearly King costume weighs in at 32lbs.

So, it was well worth jumping on the 263 bus to Barnet to see the Museum, and I was so impressed by the sheer amount of local history here, and by the sheer enthusiasm of the volunteers. There are events on regularly at the Museum, and if you’re a North Londoner I can heartily recommend a visit. We don’t have to go into central London to learn about our community and our history.

You can read all about Barnet Museum here.