Bounds Green
Bounds Green, Haringey/Enfield
An increasingly multi-ethnic area located just under a mile to the north-west of Wood Green
The name was first recorded as Le Boundes and may derive from a family that lived here in the 13th century. Bounds Green remained a small farming hamlet until the late 19th century, with a few cottages, a tavern and a brickworks.
Suburban houses began to appear with the outward spread of Wood Green, and Bounds Green infants’ and junior schools were built in 1895. Electric tram services began in 1906 and many Edwardian properties survive from the consequent phase of housebuilding.
The suburban build-up was completed following the opening of Bounds Green station on the London Electric Railway (now the Piccadilly line) in 1932. Like others on this stretch of line, the station was designed by Charles Holden but its appearance is more angular than most.
In October 1940 a Luftwaffe bomb killed 17 people who were sheltering in the tunnel at Bounds Green station, and four others who were at home nearby.
Factories were established in Bounds Gren in the years before and after the Second World War, at first individually and later on an industrial estate. In the late 1970s an old warehouse was converted for use by Middlesex Polytechnic (now University). The building has since been converted again, into residential apartments. Elsewhere in the locality former industrial premises have been replaced by housing.
Since the early 1980s Bounds Green has attracted an growing number of Greek, Turkish and Asian residents, relocating from longer established communities a mile or two to the south-east. Around half the pupils at what is now Bounds Green school & children’s centre have English as a second language. Among the school’s many ethnic minorities, the most distinctive is a Congolese contingent.
Jerome K Jerome, the author of Three Men in a Boat, probably had his first experience of boating on a waterlogged brickfield in Bounds Green.