Showing posts with label Bush Farm. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bush Farm. Show all posts

Saturday 15 October 2022

Harvest Fair at Bush Farm, Kingsbury - Sunday October 16th 11.30am until 5.30pm: music, food, stalls, dog show, bar

 


From Bush Farm Collective

This Sunday!!
 
🐕🐶Dog show
🎸🔊Live music
🎨🖌️Arts and crafts
🐴🦄 Pony rides
🌭🍔 Food
🍺🍷 Licenced bar
❤️🎶 Rapthearpy
⚽👏 Games
🔥🌡️ Fire pit 
 
And more!
 
No matter the weather we will have you covered!
Come and join us for our community event!
11.30am to 5.30pm.
Junction of Slough Lane and Salmon Street NW98YA.
Great for the whole family!
Dogs welcome but must stay on lead.
We advise you to walk, use public transport, or cycle.
There is no parking for non residents.
 
Donations welcomed- all proceeds go to other projects at Bush Farm.
 


Saturday 26 March 2022

Fryent Country Park extra! – Horse racing at Bush Farm

I am grateful to Philip Grant for this latest investigation into our rich local history 


Two years ago, I wrote the first of a series of articles about the history of the area which is now Fryent Country Park. In six parts, this told its story from more than 1,000 years ago up to the present day, but there are always new things which can come to light.

 

As a result of a reader’s comment, the “Cold War” story of the bunker on Gotfords Hill was uncovered in an “extra” article. Now, an enquiry from William, who is researching the history of horse racing in Victorian times, has led to the discovery of another piece of Fryent Country Park’s story that we didn’t know before.

 

Bush Farm stables, at the entrance to the Country Park from Slough Lane.

 

Steeplechases organised by John Elmore of Uxendon Farm in mid-Victorian times were mentioned in Part 2 of The Preston Story. As early as April 1830, Elmore was involved in organising a private race match between the wealthy owners of two top horses, “Niagara” and “Wonder”, for a stake of £300 each. “Niagara”, with Captain Martin Becher (whose name now graces a famous Grand National fence at Aintree) in the saddle, won the four-mile contest for the horse’s owner, Mr Caldecott.

 

A Harrow Steeplechase from 1864 pictured in a sporting paper. (Courtesy of William Morgan)

 

The cross-country course from Brockley Hill to Elmore’s farm on the northern edge of Barn Hill became the scene of further high stakes steeplechases. Another course, around the fields of Uxendon and Forty Farms, also proved popular with spectators, although a water jump across the Wealdstone Brook proved fatal to several horses before the approach to it was improved. John Elmore continued as organiser of and host to racing at Uxendon until the early 1860s.

 

The original enquiry Wembley History Society received was about the racecourse at Hendon, run by William Perkins Warner, the landlord of the Old Welsh Harp. I wrote about him in Part 2 of the Welsh Harp Reservoir Story, and mentioned that he had organised big horse racing meetings as part of the attractions that brought thousands of visitors to his tavern. What I didn’t realise at the time was that his steeplechases, that went across the fields of Kingsbury, were not run from the Welsh Harp itself!

 

The Grandstand at Warner’s Welsh Harp racecourse. (From the late Geoffrey Hewlett’s collection)

 

Warner had taken on the lease of the tavern, and the fishery on its adjacent reservoir, in 1858. By February 1862, he was one of the promoters of a horse race meeting, with a course that began and ended in a field beside the inn. A report on this experimental meeting, in the “Bell’s Life” sporting newspaper, said that it was: ‘just sufficiently satisfactory to prove that something much better might, with judicious management, be brought to issue.’

 

A two-day race meeting in September 1862 drew large crowds to the Welsh Harp, and by 1864 this Hendon fixture was a regular feature of the racing calendar. “The Era” wrote in 1865: ‘the Meeting held on the ground in the rear of the Welsh Harp, Hendon, on Thursday and Friday, must be pronounced the very best ever seen under the auspices of Mr Warner, who has done all in his power to place the affair on a respectable and permanent footing.’ 

 

By this time, Warner had begun organising steeplechase races, over artificial fences, on his course beside the Welsh Harp, but these did not do as well. In December 1866, in conjunction with Edward Topham (the famous handicapper, who staged the Grand National at his Aintree course), leased land from Joseph Goodchild of Bush Farm, and put on the “Metropolitan Grand Steeplechases, Kingsbury (Edgware)”. 

 

A hedge between two fields on the Bush Farm land, with Harrow Hill in the distance.

 

The course they designed for the two-day meeting was described by the “Sporting Times” as one of the best around London. The oval-shaped course was a mile and a quarter long, and each lap included seven natural fences. These would have been existing hedges between the farm’s hay meadows, cut down to a manageable size for the horses to jump, along a course marked by wooden posts. But where exactly did this race course go? 

 

The site of Bush Farm still exists, and its fields were saved from housing development by Middlesex County Council, who bought the land from All Souls College in 1938, to create the Fryent Way Regional Open Space. Although the course never appeared on any published map, a series of sketches from a meeting in September 1875, published in “The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News”, did supply some clues.

 

“Kingsbury Showers”, some sketches from a rather wet autumn race meeting in 1875.
(Courtesy of William Morgan)

 

Several of the sketches showing racegoers at this Kingsbury meeting include details of the landscape in the background. I decided to take some of these images with me, when I went for a walk on the Country Park on a bright January day, to see whether I could identify where the artist had been standing when he drew them. I believe that I had some success!

 

The approach to Bush Farm from Slough Lane, 1875 and 2022.

 

I’ve coloured in the landscape details on an extract from the sketches, to help with the comparison. I’m certain that racegoers approached the course up the driveway to the farm from Slough Lane. The present Stables building is in the same place as a farm building in the sketch, and may even still have part of the earlier structure within its construction.

 

Looking west across Bush Farm’s Home Field, 1875 and 2022.

 

I think that this second pair of “then and now” images are again viewed from about the same place. The shape of the distant hills against the skyline is very similar, as is the slope of the land. The course was described as having an uphill run-in to the finish of 300 yards, and you can just make out the “matchstick” figures of two horses and their riders approaching the final fence at the far side of the field. That would fit with the distance from the bottom corner of Home Field to where the grandstand appears in the 1875 sketch. 

 

The original steeplechase course was described as a pear-shaped oval, with the stand at its narrow end. As Bush Farm was leased from All Souls College, all of its fields will have been within Kingsbury Parish. Using all of this information, I have set out what I believe is a possible route for the mile and a quarter (ten furlongs) course, which does cross seven hedges.

 

Possible 1866 Kingsbury Vale steeplechase course (in brown), marked on an 1895 O.S. map.

 

Overnight rain between the two days of the original race meeting at Bush Farm in December 1866 ‘reduced the ground to the “slough of despond” ’. If you’ve taken a walk on Fryent Country Park in winter, you’ll understand the problems that wet clay, especially when churned up by galloping horses, would have caused. A low-lying field, like “Honey Slough” (on the left as you come down Fryent Way from Kingsbury Circle, after passing Valley Drive) did not get its name for no reason!

 

Future December meetings here were often troubled by wet ground or frost, and by competition from a Christmas meeting at Kempton Park (which still continues), but Spring and Autumn race meetings proved popular. This kept the Bush Farm course, known as “Kingsbury Vale”, in use for a dozen years. The course was lengthened to two miles, by going over the fields north of Barn Hill as far as Uxendon Farm. Part of its appeal was the open hay meadows and natural hedges, and racing papers such as “Bell’s Life” referred to it as ‘the charming Kingsbury Vale.

 

Looking north-east across Meade and Warrens fields on ‘the charming Kingsbury Vale’ course.

 

Crowds of 10.000 were not uncommon at the course, despite the lanes leading to it being narrow and in poor condition. Part of the attraction was the number of runners, including some good quality horses, attracted by the prize money offered by Warner to the winners. You can see him (with the beard) in one of the 1875 sketches above, alongside the caption “Cup presented by the owner”. 

 

The drink which was freely available (also supplied by Warner, from his Welsh Harp tavern) and the opportunity for betting, on races that (as far as Warner could ensure) were not “fixed”, were also reasons why these race meetings were popular. But they were not popular with everyone! By 1873, letters from local residents were appearing in “The Times”, and other papers, complaining about the ‘ruffians’ and ‘thousands of the biggest scoundrels and blackguards’ which the race meetings attracted to Kingsbury.

 

Warner found himself before the Magistrates Court several times for allowing illegal cash betting to take place on the course. Prosecuted for this offence at the December 1877 meeting, he was fined £7-10s plus costs, despite providing evidence that he’d done his best to prevent it. The fine was relatively small, but a bigger blow came when the Edgware magistrates refused him a licence to sell refreshments (alcohol!) at his race meetings. 

 

The loss of income from drink sales meant there was now little profit for Warner from this horse racing venture. The final straw came when the December 1878 meeting had to be cancelled because of frost, and the Kingsbury Vale course was abandoned. It would have become illegal anyway, under the Racecourses Licencing Act of 1879, which banned unlicenced horse racing within 12 miles of Marble Arch.

 

I’m glad that dealing with the enquiry has helped to identify where the Kingsbury Vale race course was. It has also given me the chance to share its story with you. I am grateful to William Morgan for allowing me to use information from his forthcoming book, “Strongholds of Satan” (volume 1 – covering the lost Victorian race courses of the south-east and East Anglia), to help tell that story.

 

Young people enjoying a horse ride on Fryent Country Park. (Photos courtesy of the Bush Farm Collective).

 

Horse racing at Bush Farm ended more than 140 years ago, but there are still a few horses kept at the stables on its former site, which continue grace the fields of this part of Kingsbury. Now, they are not ridden to jump the blackthorn hedges, but to give enjoyment to youngsters (and some adults) for recreation, as part of the many attractions of Fryent Country Park.


Philip Grant.

 

 

 


Saturday 14 August 2021

REMINDER: Bush Farm Family Funday Day in Fryent Country Park Sunday 12-5pm

 



By 83 or 302 bus alight at Slough Lane and walk along Slough Lane to the junction with Salmon Street (5 minutes). Walk straight across to Fryent Country Park entrance (be careful - there's a bend in the road).  The event takes place in the large paddock to the right as you enter.

Saturday 25 April 2020

The Fryent Country Park Story - Part 5

The fifth is a series by local historian Philip Grant

 
The Fryent Country Park Story – Part 5

So far, our journey has brought us from Saxon times up to the late 1930s, when the land which is now our country park was first protected as “open space”. If you missed Part 4, you can find it here.
 
1. An autumn field in Fryent Country Park.

When war broke out in 1939, it was clear that the country needed to produce more of its own food. By the following year, at least one field behind Slough Lane had been turned into allotment gardens, but most of the meadows were still grazed by sheep belonging to a farmer from Edgware. Then, in 1942, Middlesex’s Food Production Committee had 56 acres of the old hay meadows on their Regional Open Space ploughed up, to grow wheat.
 
2. Threshing the wheat at Little Cherrylands field in 1942. (Brent Archives – Wembley History Society Colln.)
One long-time Kingsbury resident, who was a schoolboy at the time, remembers stacking sheaves of wheat in Richards Field East, to help with the harvest, as a number of local people did. He also remembered that there was a military observation post at the top of Gotfords Hill. There is rumoured to be a bunker underneath the hill, reached through a trap door, but that was supposed to be top secret! (Recent comments suggest it was 1960s Cold War, not WW2.)*

 
3. Muriel Jefferies helping with the harvest at Bush Farm in 1942. (Photo courtesy of Martin Francis)
In July 1944, a V1 flying bomb exploded in Salmon Street, killing a lady in a house there. One of the five others injured was blown from the top of a stack of straw, at nearby Little Bush Farm. By that time, the end of the war was in sight, and the government was beginning to look ahead to post-war problems, such as the urgent need for new housing.

Wembley Council had said that it wanted 400 of the temporary factory-made bungalows, which the government planned to produce. By November 1944, land near the southern end of Fryent Way had been identified as one possible site for these “prefab” homes. Middlesex C.C. refused permission, as this was part of its Regional Open Space. However, in 1946, after Wembley had used up all its sites at the edge of parks and sports grounds, the County Council relented, on the promise that the land would be returned to open space after the 10-15 years these prefabs were due to last.

 
4. A row of prefab homes at Pilgrims Way, c.1950. (Photo from Brent Archives)
Work had hardly begun on the 114-home estate when the severe winter of 1946/47 intervened. It was too cold for the German prisoner-of-war labourers to lay the concrete roadway. By April, work was underway again, and the first aluminium bungalows began arriving on site in October. All of the new homes were occupied by July 1948, and the Council had named the estate Pilgrims Way. This was because the ancient footpath (“Eldestrete”), which ran across it, was thought to have been used by pilgrims visiting the shrine of Our Lady of Willesdon, in the late 15th and early 16th centuries.

One of my best sources for what the area was like in the 1950s and 1960s are the memories of children who grew up on the Pilgrims Way estate, collected as part of a “Prefabs Project” ten years ago. Maureen said: ‘it was an amazing place in which to spend the long summer hours of our childhood. A huge area of rolling hills, trees, woods and fields.  Many of the fields with cows in them. At the top of Barn Hill there was a pond that was the focal point, which as a child l thought was massive. Wally me and the other kids would spend hours fishing in this pond for ‘red throats’ and other tiddlers using a jam jar with string tied around the top.’
 
5. Barn Hill pond, c.1950. (Photograph by Ian Stokes, courtesy of Barn Hill Conservation Group)

Paul remembered the woods and fields as ‘a child’s paradise to play in’, and not just in summer. ‘When it snowed we’d sledge at great speed down a very long steep hill next to Barn Hill pond, stopping only when the barbed wire fence of the cow’s field at the very bottom loomed into sight.’ Sheila’s summer days included: ‘just playing in the fields, making endless daisy chains, looking for grass hoppers, climbing trees, walking amongst the cows, never feeling unsafe only popping home for a slice of bread and jam then out again.’

 
6. Cattle grazing in a field on Barn Hill, c.1960s. (Source unknown!)

The cows belonged to a farmer from Edgware, as all of the active farmsteads along Salmon Street had gone. The farmhouse at Bush Farm was demolished around 1939, Little Bush Farm after its V1 damage in 1944, and Hill Farm to make way for housing in the 1950s. In the 1960s, the farmer began ploughing up some of the old meadows to plant crops. When he started to cut down some of the centuries-old hedges, the recently formed Brent Council put a stop to this, and ended his tenancy.


7. The Pilgrims Way prefab estate, and fields at the southern end of Fryent Way, mid-1960s.
                         (Brent Archives – aerial photographs collection)

Brent had inherited the Pilgrims Way estate when Wembley joined with Willesden to form the new London Borough in 1965. Although only meant to be temporary, the last of the prefabs there remained in use until 1972. All of the land was supposed to be returned to open space, but the Council persuaded the Greater London Council (which had taken overall responsibility for this “Green Belt” land when Middlesex C.C. was abolished in 1965) to let them retain three acres for housing. A new Pilgrims Way was built, with two Closes off of it, called after old local field names, Saltcroft and Summers.

 

8. The “Pilgrims Way” footpath in 2019, and the old estate entrance at the top of the hill in Fryent Way.

The rest of the former prefab estate was allowed to become woodland, with its old entrance still just visible. But what should the Council do with the land they had taken back from the farmer? One group of Labour councillors, mainly from the Willesden wards, said that Council housing should be built on it. Another group, of Conservatives, thought that it should be turned into a municipal golf course. In 1973, however, Brent Council decided to retain the fields as meadowland, that would be open for the public to use.

There was one more threat to our future enjoyment of this open space that had to be overcome – the Olympic Games! Fryent Way had been part of the course for the marathon at the 1948 Games (British athlete, Tom Richards, won the silver medal, after a Korean runner ahead of him dropped out on the long climb up the hill from Kingsbury, in the final stages of the race back to Wembley Stadium). In 1980, London wanted to bid for the 1988 Games, and the fields at Fryent Way were the only suitable site for the athletes’ village that would be needed. Luckily, the government decided to back a bid from Birmingham instead (which was unsuccessful).

9. A cutting from the "Wembley Observer" about the Olympic Village site, February 1980. (Brent Archives)
I apologise for the poor quality of the picture above, but hope that, as well as its caption, it shows the sorry state the hedges were in then. Something needed to be done to improve this area of ancient Middlesex landscape. Please join me next weekend, for the final part of The Fryent Country Park Story to discover what that was (there’s a clue in the title!).

As before, please add any information, memories or questions you have in the comments section below.

Philip Grant

* Comments by readers of Part 3 have provided information about, and photos of, the
bunker at Gotfords Hill, referred to above. An “extra” article about the bunker will
be published in the next few days.


LINKS TO OTHER ARTICLES IN THIS SERIES
 









 





Saturday 11 April 2020

The Fryent Country Park Story – Part 3


 The third in a series of guest posts by local historian Philip Grant



If you have already read the first two parts of this history of our local country park, welcome back. If not, you can find them by “clicking” on Part 1 and Part 2.


1. The pond on Barn Hill.

We left the story in the late 18th century, when most of the fields on what would become the country park had been turned over to growing hay. Some of the local landowners, though, did not need to rely on this seasonal crop for their income. 

The Page family had been farmers in the Wembley area since at least 1534, when John Page rented land from Archbishop Cranmer (and later purchased some of it, after King Henry VIII had taken it from the Church in 1545). They had become wealthier over the centuries, and when Richard Page inherited another fortune from a spinster aunt in 1792, he wanted to show off his estate in the most fashionable way.

Page hired the famous landscape architect, Humphry Repton, to create beautiful grounds for his home, which he planned to rebuild into a mansion. As well as his fields to the south of Forty Lane, he also included the Barn Hill section of his Uxendon lands. Repton drew up a planting scheme that would frame the hill with a line of oak trees, which have been a feature of the landscape ever since, with many still there.

2. Humphry Repton's sketch of what the view of Wembley Park from Barn Hill would look like.

Repton believed that having grazing cattle would ‘enliven the scene’ when viewed from the Wembley Park mansion, as hay meadows lacked interest. He also built a ‘prospect tower’ on top of Barn Hill, from which Mr Page’s visitors could enjoy the view across his estate, ‘as well as forming a dwelling house for those who should have the care of the prospect rooms, and the dairy’. It is likely that he also had the pond created on top of the hill, close to the tower and dairy, so that the cattle had plenty of water to drink.

The 1793 plans for Wembley Park were never fully completed, after Richard Page fell out with Repton over his designs for the mansion. The history of the Page family does not end well, but that’s another story!

The Pages were exceptions to the rule, and with small farms let on short leases and a single basic crop, the hay farmers of Kingsbury did not become rich men in the 19th century. They hired casual labour to help with the haymaking, and in years when the weather was bad at harvest time, they often went into debt. It didn’t help that, at times of agricultural depression, the local parish rates were higher, to provide relief for the poor.

 
3. A modern view of the Kingsbury meadows at haymaking time.

One unfortunate farmer was William Nicholls of Bush Farm. He had been declared bankrupt, and his belongings were sold to help pay his debts. An advertisement in March 1842 lists his farm equipment. This included ‘two capital road waggons, nearly new’, twelve hay, dung and other carts, hay making machines, a heavy pasture roller, a large number of rick cloths, two stack scaffolds, plus ladders, hay racks and forks.

By the late 1840s, many haymaking labourers were itinerant Irishmen, who had left their homes because of the potato famine. Bishop (later Cardinal) Wiseman was head of the recently restored Catholic church in London, and in 1849 he asked the Passionist religious order to send over priests from Dublin, to minister to these agricultural workers. They rented a barn at Hyde House Farm in Kingsbury (where the writer, Oliver Goldsmith, had lodged from 1771-74), before moving to a house in Wood Lane three years later.

When the Ordnance Survey published a booklet in 1865, giving details of all the land shown on their 1:2500 map of Kingsbury, all but two of the 200 fields in the parish were meadows. Almost every farm had a plot of land, generally of between a half and one acre, specifically described as “stackyard and sheds”.

Some of the meadows were put to other uses as well. John Elmore, who farmed at Uxendon in the mid-19th century, held popular steeplechase races across his land. The Wealdstone Brook ran through his fields, and provided a ‘sensational water jump’. Even after Elmore’s death, this course was used occasionally as part of long-distance horse races from the Old Welsh Harp tavern, until an Act of Parliament in 1879 banned unlicensed race courses within ten miles of the centre of London.

While Kingsbury was still a rural backwater, it was beginning to be recognized as a place for recreation. From 1870, people in the crowded Metropolis could take a train to Hendon, and an 1880s book, “Our Lanes and Meadowpaths”, encouraged them to enjoy Saturday afternoon walks in nearby countryside, after their 5½ days of labour. It’s author, H J Foley included several routes through Kingsbury.
 
4. Haymaking near Kenton c.1880. (An illustration from H J Foley’s “Our Lanes and Meadowpaths”)

For one walk he tells his readers to ‘… make for Piper’s Barn just beyond the Green Man.’ From there, he describes a footpath to Harrow, which for nearly four miles ‘simply threads its way through one meadow after another, round the base of a big green hill.’ That was Barn Hill, and the path can still be followed today, from alongside St Robert Southwell School in Slough Lane. This “meadowpath” is all across fields, until the bridge over the Jubilee Line leading to Shakespeare Drive, apart from where you cross Fryent Way, near the end of Valley Drive.
When Wembley Park Station was opened on the Metropolitan Railway in 1894, it did more than just bring visitors to the new Pleasure Grounds there. By the following year, the Wembley Golf Club’s course had been laid out on the Barn Hill section of Repton’s century-old landscape. The second of the 18 holes on the 4,500-yard golf course had the tee on one side of the hilltop pond, and the green on the other!
At the start of the 20th century, Kingsbury had become an Urban District, but hardly deserved that description. Its total population at the 1901 census was just 757 people, and many of these were still involved in agriculture. At Little Bush Farm, for example, the two adult males living there were listed as a “carter” and a “hay loader”.
The last entry on the census return gives the address as ‘Encampment at Salmon Street’, and lists three “households”. One was headed by Miss L. Sanders, a licensed hawker and pedlar, aged 41. She had two sons, aged 5 and 3, born at Uxbridge and Hampstead, and a male “boarder”, aged 22, whose occupation was ‘clothes peg maker’. Both of the other family groups included pedlar/hawkers, and all had been born at various locations around London.
 
5. A gipsy camp at Alperton, early 1900s. (Photo by Bertram Wickison, from “Kingsbury & Kenton News”, 1952)

I can remember, as a child in the 1950s, when gipsy women would sometimes visit our estate, and go door-to-door selling clothes pegs, and sprigs of “lucky” white heather. That was probably what this group were doing, camping for a time on a piece of common land beside Salmon Street, and getting the wood for their peg-making from the local hedgerows. By chance, a local newspaper’s reminiscences feature in 1952 included a photograph, taken at Alperton in the early 1900s, which may well show Miss Sanders!
By around 1900, Most of Uxendon Farm’s fields had been taken over by Preston Farm, and the remaining part was used as a shooting school. When the Olympic Games came to London for the first time in 1908, the farm became the venue for the clay pigeon shooting competition. Because Uxendon was hard to get to along untarmacked lanes, the Metropolitan Railway was persuaded to open a new “halt” for its trains at Preston Road.

6. Uxendon Farm, in a 1908 Olympics photo (“Evening Standard”), and on the 1920 edition O.S. map.

The map above, surveyed just before the First World War, shows fields, farms and the edge of Repton’s belt of trees around Barn Hill (also visible in the photograph). It also shows a small new development of houses on Preston Road, the start of a period of major change which will continue in the next part of the Fryent Country Park Story. Look out for it next weekend.

Philip Grant.

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