East Finchley
East Finchley, Barnet
A distinctly different community from its parent district, which lies across the North Circular Road to the north-west
As early as the 14th century a chain of little hamlets took root beside Hornsey Park on the newly created Great North Road (as it later became), and were collectively known as East End.
The extended settlement slowly acquired more cottages, a couple of inns and a succession of large houses on the higher slopes but at the end of the 17th century it remained surrounded by open fields, now mostly denuded of trees. Pigs were reared on the common and traded at the Hogmarket.
From around 1800 the Bishop of London began to sell building leases – and villas soon lined the Great North Road and Fortis Green Road. At the heart of the village, humbler dwellings multiplied and by the 1850s East End was the most populous part of Finchley, crammed with tenements and terraced houses. Expansion accelerated following the arrival of the railway in 1867 and the sale of more building leases from 1878.
The centre of population shifted eastward as hundreds of inferior cottages were built, while larger houses were subdivided into lodgings when the wealthier classes fled. Conditions were often insanitary and East Finchley (as it had now become) gained a reputation for drunkenness, godlessness and a lack of moral restraint.
Dating from 1910, when it began life as the Picturedrome, the Phoenix is one of the oldest working cinemas in the country.
Extensive bomb damage during the Second World War prompted the council to radically remodel the district afterwards. The first blocks of eleven-storey flats went up in the mid-1950s and municipal building continued for the next two decades.
East Finchley remains relatively godless: at the 2011 census 27 per cent of adults said they had no religion – up from 19 per cent at the previous census and by far the highest proportion in the borough. The ward also has Barnet’s highest number of people living in flats.
East Finchley is home to the UK headquarters of McDonald’s but Barnet council denied the company permission to open a restaurant here following local resistance.
East Finchley residents have included comedian and actor Peter Sellers, musicians Vivian Stanshall and Feargal Sharkey, and US chat show host Jerry Springer, who grew up on Chandos Road.
Postal district: N2
Population: 15,989 (2011 census)
Station: Northern line (zone 3)
Further reading: Carola Zentner, Insider’s Guide to Muswell Hill, Crouch End, Highgate and East Finchley, Searchlight, 1995