Pension lawyer meets world: Highgate

My friend Elaine kindly invited me over to Highgate for Sunday lunch. But the forecast was so awful we brought it forward to Saturday. Eating outside in the rain is little fun, even if under cover. And there is the little matter of getting there. Highgate really isn't all that far from me - about 4 miles, but that still means a good hour and a quarter on foot. And frankly even if I tried public transport it wouldn't take much less time. Otherwise it would be a great destination for me and I would be hanging out there all the time!

Highgate is really second only to Hampstead in desirable North London villages in which to live. It was an important medieval village, once owned by the bishops of London. It was the main exit route north from London, and was the bishops hunting grounds when bishops didn't need to waste much time pretending to be religious like they have to do now. Then you could concentrate on the key duties of wealth accumulation and having fun.

Anyway, to start let us have a look at Highgate. As I come in from the north I go through the Queens Woods - Highgate has two remaining bits of ancient woodland - Queen's Wood and Highgate Wood. I come along a street called Wood Vale which is lined with between the wars suburban houses until you hit the woods and then when you get to the other side you are in the previous century - seriously big and very attractive Victorian houses. The finest, for a real one off, is this one below

But another feature of Highgate, which it shares with Hampstead, is the desire by people to live in a beautiful historic Georgian/Victorian neighbourhood, which is attractive exactly because of that architecture, and then build utterly jarring modern buildings as if to say to the rest of the area "F**k you, I am going to show how amazing I am by making a statement with absolutely no regard for the locality, because that is how important I am."

As I say, the area does have woods.

And I made a little diversion to take in this modest suburban house a little bit away from the village in Priory Gardens. Nothing remarkable about the house, but it used to be the home of Bridget Dowling and her little boy, William Patrick. Still mean nothing to you? Ok let me give you the little boy's surname. Hitler. His mother married Adolf's older brother, Alois. They emigrated to America in 1939. By then you probably didn't want to trumpet your relationship with your uncle.....

Nearby is a little terrace of very modest older cottages - the workers needed to live somewhere. This one also is only remarkable for its former resident. This is the childhood home of Peter Sellers, who obviously later in life could afford much more palatial homes.

This was apparently the first plaque set up by the dead comics society because English Heritage's then board seemed rather stuffy about setting up blue plaques for mere comedians.

Taking a little side alley up something called sweetly Park Walk..

..one comes out at North Hill. These flats might seem extremely bland to the untrained eye, which is because they are. But they are also much lionized because this is Lubetkin's Highpoint apartment block complex, built in the 1930s as the height of modernity.

A nicer house which Elaine pointed out to me is this one, again it's fame resting on a former resident, albeit for only a fleeting stay in 1832 - Charles Dickens.

This is just a row of really fine large houses that I thought attractive.

Although this one also has a famous resident - the blue plaque you can just see by the door is for the poet AE Houseman of Shropshire Lad fame.

This is the chapel to Highgate School, a prestigious independent school. Jonny Borrell, lead singer of Razorlight went there

In non-covid times I might have fancied a pint in the Gatehouse, so called as there was a toll booth on this site to collect money from travellers going through the London bishops' road.

Just behind the village's main high street is a lovely "square" (not a geometrically accurate term here) called Pond Square from when it contained the village pond. It is the unlikely home of frozen chicken. Apparently the philosopher Francis Bacon attempted to preserve a chicken here using snow that had fallen on the square, but then promptly caught a chill and died in 1626. But comforting that philosophers in those days did some actually useful thinking.

One side of the square contains the wonderfully high minded Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution

There are a series of wonderful Dickensian houses around here. This one is Church House which apparently did feature in David Copperfield.

Moreton House, once home to the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

And here is another modern house, which was nominated for the Stirling Prize and the Guardian apparently described it as the most important house built in Britain in years, both of which accolades of course damn it as an appalling carbunkle. It is a glass box, well set back from the road, possibly out of shame....

With delicious irony, its owner objected to a futuristic extension on the house next door, which I think must be this one....

Ok, back to finer houses that don't need screening because of their ridiculous impracticality. This is the Old Hall, which apparently dates back to the 1690s, although it sits on the site of Arundel House which once got a visit from Elizabeth I. (To be fair, she got about a bit...)

Next door is St Michael's Church, reputed to be the highest church in London. Not the tallest obviously, but Highgate is built on a hill.

And so to the Flask and lunch. I found that it is called the Flask because it used to sell flasks of Hampstead Spring water (and indeed Hampstead has its own Flask pub). It dates from the 1660s and claims to have Coleridge, the artist William Hogarth, Dick Turpin and Karl Marx among its former boozers.

For us its great advantage was that it served food in an outside space with heating (albeit not very much heating - was decidedly cold when we left!) So here is Elaine, with Zoo Zoo and a hot chocolate.

I went for grilled chicken with pearl barley - and a mug of steaming mulled cider. It was that kind of day. Food was lovely but the barley very quickly went cold. As I say, that kind of day. Elaine and I discussed the pub food differences between our respective areas. Every pub in Highgate is a gastropub, while where I am, none are. However much they give colourful descriptions and put menus in italics, in my neck of the woods it is only burgers, fish and chips, scampi and chips and pies. We both felt a little variety in both areas would be nice.

Opposite the pub is a green and on the other side another fine set of highly desirable residences, but ones that are hard to photograph appropriately for all the parked cars