Five o’clock in the morning.
Easter Sunday.
April 14th, 1471.
A thick fog hangs over a stretch of countryside north of London.
Thousands of armed men are waiting for the order to attack.
Swords.
Axes.
Bows and arrows.
And two men, each determined to decide who gets to wear the crown of England.
Four hours later, thousands of men will be dead or wounded.
And one of the most powerful men in England will be lying dead on the battlefield.
The man they called the Kingmaker.
Welcome to Barnet.
London Calling. London Walks connecting.
This is London. This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
And today, another of our London boroughs.
Barnet.
Now, if you think Barnet is just a rather pleasant, leafy stretch of North London, with comfortable houses, good schools and a Tube line running through it, think again.
This place has seen some action.
Kings fighting for their crowns.
Highwaymen lying in wait.
Cattle being driven down from Scotland.
Prizefighters slugging it out.
And, believe it or not, a fair that gave Londoners a new word for the hair on their heads.
But first, that battlefield.
The Wars of the Roses.
York against Lancaster.
Two great dynasties battling for the English throne.
On one side, King Edward IV.
On the other, Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick.
Known to history as Warwick the Kingmaker.
And with good reason.
Warwick had helped Edward become king.
Then they fell out.
Spectacularly.
Warwick changed sides, helped restore Henry VI to the throne, and suddenly Edward found himself out in the cold.
Well, Edward wasn’t having that.
He returned to England with an army.
And on Easter Sunday, 1471, the two sides met just north of Barnet.
And the fog!
That extraordinary fog.
The battle began at about five in the morning.
In the confusion, one part of Warwick’s army attacked another part of Warwick’s army.
They’d mistaken their own men for the enemy.
One commander’s badge showed a star with rays of light.
Edward’s badge showed a sun with rays of light.
In thick fog, apparently, a star can look remarkably like a sun.
Friendly fire.
Panic.
Cries of treachery.
The Lancastrian line began to fall apart.
And Warwick?
Warwick the Kingmaker was killed.
The man who had made kings couldn’t save himself.
And here’s something to remember the next time you’re up that way.
The Battle of Barnet is London’s only officially registered battlefield.
There’s a monument to it.
Hadley Highstone.
A sandstone obelisk put up in 1740.
And nearby, in those quiet suburban streets, the echoes of that dreadful Easter morning.
But let’s go back further.
Much further.
To the origins of Barnet itself.
Because the name is rather wonderful.
And it brings us to our Word of the Day.
Barnet.
But first, its original meaning.
The name comes from the Old English bærnet.
A burning.
More precisely, a clearing in woodland made by burning.
Imagine the scene.
An immense forest.
Trees being cut down.
Undergrowth being set alight.
Smoke rising through the branches.
The flames die away.
And there’s a clearing.
Land for settlement.
For farming.
And eventually for a town.
Barnet.
A place created by fire.
And there’s another name worth pausing over.
Chipping Barnet.
Chipping comes from the Old English word cēap, meaning trade or bargain.
It’s related to our modern word cheap.
And to Cheapside, in the City of London.
Chipping Barnet means Market Barnet.
And what a market it was.
In 1199, King John granted a charter for a market.
And in 1588, Elizabeth I granted a charter for a fair.
Barnet Fair.
A great, sprawling, noisy affair.
Horses.
Cattle.
Dealers.
Drovers.
The smell of animals.
The shouting.
The bargaining.
The clatter of hooves.
Cattle came down from Scotland.
Imagine that journey.
Hundreds of miles on the hoof.
Dusty roads.
Rain.
Mud.
The drovers sleeping in barns or under the stars.
All to get their animals to market.
And in the nineteenth century, Barnet Fair was enormous.
In the 1880s, it was said that 40,000 cows were bought and sold.
Forty thousand!
And there was entertainment.
Horse racing.
Boxing.
In 1787, the Prince of Wales himself came to watch the racing.
And there was a prizefight featuring the celebrated Jewish boxer Daniel Mendoza.
Barnet Fair was quite the place to be.
And now we come to the second half of our Word of the Day.
Because Barnet Fair gave us one of the best-known bits of Cockney rhyming slang.
Barnet Fair.
Hair.
And then, in the usual Cockney fashion, you drop the rhyming word.
Barnet Fair becomes simply Barnet.
Your Barnet.
Your hair.
So when somebody says, ‘Blimey, look at the state of your Barnet,’ they aren’t talking about the London borough.
They’re suggesting you need a haircut.
A medieval market town.
A great livestock fair.
And a modern London expression.
All connected.
Isn’t language wonderful?
Now, Barnet had another great advantage.
Its position.
High on a ridge.
On the Great North Road.
One of the principal roads out of London.
Northwards to York and Scotland.
Before railways, this was one of the great highways of England.
Stagecoaches.
Mail coaches.
Wagons.
Horses.
Travellers.
And highwaymen.
The horses would come clattering into Barnet, exhausted after the long pull up the hill.
And Barnet was ready for them.
At one point there were twenty-five inns in the town.
Twenty-five!
A veritable forest of inn signs.
The Red Lion.
The Mitre.
The Antelope.
Coaching yards.
Stables.
Ostlers.
Fresh horses.
Food and drink.
Rooms for the night.
The whole apparatus of a busy coaching town.
And then the railways came.
And everything changed.
In 1850 Barnet got its railway station.
Suddenly London was much closer.
People could live out here and work in town.
The population began to grow.
Fields became streets.
Farms became housing estates.
The old market town was becoming a suburb.
And the Barnet we know today is much bigger than that old town.
The modern London Borough of Barnet dates from 1965.
It brought together five former local authorities.
And it’s an enormous spread of North London.
Hendon.
Finchley.
Edgware.
Golders Green.
Mill Hill.
Totteridge.
Hampstead Garden Suburb.
And what a collection of stories those places contain.
Let’s pick out a few.
First, Finchley.
And a man named Harry Beck.
Now Harry Beck wasn’t a kingmaker.
He didn’t command armies.
He wasn’t a famous novelist or a great statesman.
He was an engineering draughtsman.
But he changed the way Londoners see London.
Think about the London Underground map.
Those coloured lines.
Those neat little stations.
The whole complicated system reduced to a beautifully clear diagram.
That was Beck’s great achievement.
Before his map, Underground maps tried to represent the actual geography of London.
Which made them increasingly difficult to read.
Beck had a brainwave.
Why not stop worrying about geography?
What passengers really needed to know was where the lines went.
Where they connected.
And where to change.
So he straightened out the lines.
Simplified the angles.
Turned the whole thing into something like an electrical circuit diagram.
His revolutionary map appeared in 1933.
And it became one of the most influential pieces of graphic design in the world.
And here’s the Barnet connection.
Beck lived in Finchley.
And at Finchley Central station there’s a reproduction of his original map.
A little local tribute to a man who changed the way millions of people navigate a great city.
Now let’s go somewhere altogether different.
Totteridge.
One of the leafiest corners of Barnet.
And there, in the churchyard of St Andrew’s, stands an extraordinary old yew tree.
The Totteridge Yew.
It may be two thousand years old.
Think about that.
Two thousand years.
Perhaps it was already growing when the Romans arrived in Britain.
Perhaps it was there when London was founded.
The Saxons.
The Normans.
The Tudors.
The Great Fire.
The Industrial Revolution.
All those centuries.
All those generations.
Coming and going.
And the old yew still standing there.
A living witness to history.
Of course, dating an ancient yew is a notoriously imprecise business.
But even at the more conservative estimates, this is a very, very old tree.
And that brings us to another Barnet story.
A human one.
And, to my mind, one of the most moving.
Cicely Saunders.
Born in Barnet in 1918.
A nurse.
A medical social worker.
And eventually a doctor.
A woman who looked at the way people were being cared for at the end of their lives and thought, surely we can do better than this.
Because for a long time, dying patients were too often regarded as people for whom medicine had nothing more to offer.
Cicely Saunders refused to accept that.
She believed that even when a person couldn’t be cured, there was still an enormous amount that could be done.
Pain could be relieved.
Suffering could be eased.
Dignity could be preserved.
And in 1967 she founded St Christopher’s Hospice in South London.
She became the pioneer of the modern hospice movement.
And her influence spread across the world.
So think about that contrast.
In 1471, at Barnet, thousands of men fought to take lives.
Nearly five hundred years later, a woman born in Barnet helped transform the care given to people at the end of theirs.
History has a way of doing that.
Putting extraordinary opposites side by side.
And there’s still more.
East Finchley has the Phoenix Cinema, one of London’s great surviving early picture houses.
Hendon has the Royal Air Force Museum, on a site intimately connected with the early history of flying.
Golders Green has its splendid old Hippodrome.
And Friern Barnet takes us back to the Knights Hospitaller, the medieval religious order that helped give the district its name.
You could spend days exploring this borough.
And still be scratching the surface.
But let’s finish where we began.
On that ridge north of London.
The road heading out of the capital.
The old town of Barnet.
The market.
The coaching inns.
The distant sound of horses.
And beyond them, the fields where the Kingmaker met his end.
Because that’s the extraordinary thing about London.
You scratch the surface of an apparently ordinary suburb.
And out comes a king.
A battle.
A medieval fair.
An ancient tree.
A world-changing designer.
And a woman who helped teach modern medicine how to care for the dying.
Not bad for one London borough.
And if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to have a look at my Barnet.
It could probably do with a trim.
And finally. Though I daresay a lot of you will have guessed. Barnet is the second borough Charlie ventures into and through on his London Camino. The Ultimate London Walk. That’s why we’ve called its number today, just a day or two after we took a peek at its next door neighbour, Enfield
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
And thanks for listening.
See you tomorrow.