"High Barnet: Highest point on the London-York road" London Things to Do Tip by CatherineReichardt

High Barnet is best known as the terminus of the Northern Line, and is well off the beaten track for all but the most enterprising of tourists. However, if you're planning to spend some time in North London, Barnet is a nice place to pass a few hours and has a couple of unlikely claims to fame.

Take High Barnet for example. No prizes for guessing that it's, well, high, but who would suspect that it is in fact the highest point on the Great North Road (A1000) between London and York? And, despite the fact that it is only 134m above sea level, apparently if you were to draw a line across from the top of the Church, the first time that you'd encounter a higher point would be in the Urals, some 2,000km east. I can personally attest to the fact that High Barnet can be unmercifully cold in winter, and I can still recall the icy wind whipping mercilessly around my schoolgirl knees when I used to change bus here!

Why is Barnet so (comparatively) high? Well, Barnet village - which has since been subsumed by London's suburban sprawl - is located on the northern edge of the Thames Basin, close to the southermost extent of the great Anglian glacier, which extended only a few kilometres south to approximately the line of the North Circular Road. However, once the glaciers of the last Ice Age melted about 10,000 years ago, the water released gave the river greater erosive power to carve down into the landscape, thus allowing the river to cut a course at its much lower current elevation.

As passengers leaving High Barnet tube station (which is sadly located some way below the brow of the hill) will note, Barnet Hill is extremely steep. You can at least take comfort from the fact that it used to be even worse: Samuel Pepys visited in 1660 to take the waters at Barnet Physic Well in 1660, and noted that, “only one path and torne, plowed, and digged up, owing to the waggoners carrying excessive weights of over one ton, with more than five horses and oxen to a team”. Indeed, the road was so challenging that haulage became big business for local entrepreneurs, with additional teams of horses being located at Underhill (close to the present Barnet football ground) to provide coaches and waggons with extra assistance: even so, it was common for unfortunate passengers to be forced to alight and scale the hill on foot in bad weather.

The steepest section of the hill was finally levelled out in the 1820s when an Act of Parliament was passed to allow the Highgate and Whetstone Road Trust to improve this section of road and recoup the construction and maintenance costs by charging a toll. The surveyor James McAdam supervised the levelling of the slope by placing fill excavated from neighbouring areas, and the cost of these earthworks work was enormous, as reflected by the toll fee of 3 shillings per carriage (then a very sizeable sum). However, despite the punitive toll, northbound traffic had little alternative but to use this route, and the heavy weight of traffic on the road is indicated by the fact that the right to raise tolls was put out to auction for £7,530 per annum: to put this into perspective, this sum would have required the passage of over 50,000 carriages per year to break even. This nice little earner was abruptly curtailed by the growth of the railways in the 1850s, which provided a faster and cheaper alternative to road transport and greatly reduced traffic on this route.

If you've made it to the top of the hill, be sure to take the time to take a (flat) stroll over Hadley Common, where livestock were grazed prior to being sold at the Barnet Fair and visit Hadley Highstone, where there is a monument to the Battle of Barnet, the final battle of the War of the Roses.