St John the Baptist, open, is essentially a Victorian building incorporating the old medieval church by William Butterfield but it's one of the better ones. Inside are some good Henry Holiday windows and a notable range of furnishings. Having said that it's slightly on the crisp side.
ST JOHN THE BAPTIST. The church points with its E end towards the High Street which comes up the hill from London. To its l. and r. the main roads fork to Watford and to St Albans and Hatfield. The architecture of the church, which is largely Victorian, makes the most of this position, more than the medieval church had done. This was built at the expense of John Beauchamp who died in 1453.* When William Butterfield was commissioned in 1875 to enlarge the old building, he decided to keep the medieval nave and N aisle and to add to it a new higher nave with its own aisle to the S. He also removed the old chancel and tower. So the present church seems to have two naves and two aisles. From the N you see a low aisle and a nave with a clerestory of three-light windows. These clerestory Windows on the S side look into Butterfield’s nave. His own clerestory has somewhat perverse alternating three-light and circular cinquefoil windows. The old church was of flint with sparing stone dressings; Butterfield’s has plenty of stone-bands and chequerwork to enrich the rhythm of the flint work. His W tower is most impressive, big and broad, a beacon when you come up from London, and a dominant accent for the town. Inside, the mid C15 church has an arcade with piers with four attached shafts, four hollows in the diagonals, and complex mouldings in the two-centred arches. Butterfield’s piers and arches are much more robust. - STAINED GLASS. N and S windows of the aisles, good Arts and Crafts style of the 1880s. - PLATE. Small Cup, 1679; Cup and Paten, 1706. - MONUMENTS. Thomas Ravenscroft d. 1630, excellent recumbent alabaster effigy under canopy. The details of the canopy an interesting example of Gothic Survival: cusped arches, rib-vault, quatrefoil frieze of the top cornice. - James Ravenscroft d. 1680 and his wife d. 1689, two fine small marble busts in an altered, Neo-Gothic surround.
* See the inscription in the spandrel of one of the arcade arches.
The London Borough of Barnet is a combination of the former boroughs of Hendon and Finchley, and the former urban districts of Barnet, East Barnet, and Friern Barnet. It includes the villages of Totteridge, Monken Hadley, Mill Hill, and Edgware. It lies to the north-north-east of the Greater London area, with high ground at Barnet, Mill Hill, and Hendon, and is watered by the Dollis Brook, the Mutton Brook, and the Brent. The Borough has a population of approximately 316,000 and covers an area of 22, 123 acres (35 square miles).
The Borough of Barnet takes its name from Chipping (or High) Barnet which lies to the north. Until 1965, Barnet with Totteridge and Monken Hadley lay within the county of Hertfordshire. The origins of Chipping Barnet are told in its name. The whole area was once a part of the great dense forest that covered Middlesex and beyond. A path led southward down the steep hill to the Dollis Brook and beside it a little village grew up in a burnt clearing - in Anglo-Saxon bare net, hence Barnet. To that village King John gave in 1199 the right to hold a market, and so Chipping was added to Barnet for it is derived from the Anglo-Saxon ceap, a bargain, as in Cheapside in London. That market became Barnet Horse Fair held in the first week in September, and famous till the First World War for the number and quality of animals which changed hands there. Today there is still a three-day fair, and in 1969 some 300 horses were on view there with plenty of traps, gigs, and chaises for sale as well, besides the more usual swings and roundabouts. The faces of the horse dealers were a study - pure-blooded gypsy or straight out of a Hogarth drawing.
The path through the forest gradually broadened and developed till it became the Great North Road. In coaching days, Barnet was the first stage out from London and its chief inns were the Red Lion, the White Hart, and the Mitre. The first two have been rebuilt but the Mitre remains unaltered, looking as it did in 1660 when General Monk, Cromwell’s former lieutenant, stayed there in his march south to put Charles II on the throne of England.
Today, the approach from London is dominated by the parish church dedicated to St John the Baptist. It is a fine bold building with an impressive west tower and a spire. A church stood here in Norman times but was replaced about 1420 by another built partly at the expense of John Beauchamp, a wealthy maltster of Barnet. In 1875, William Butterfield was called in to enlarge the old church. The exterior he rebuilt, making it more imposing and dressing it in flint with bands of stone and chequerwork, but inside he retained the old nave and the north aisle, adding to them a new longer nave and a south aisle. In one of the spandrels of the old arcade with the clerestory windows above, is a red tablet with yellow letters recording Beauchamp’s work, with the date 1453. The corbels that supported the ancient roof are still in place, though the roof has gone. What remains of the old tower is now part of the new nave and one of the old arches leads into the new tower. On these stones are mason’s marks and set in the thick walls are two niches, one with a grimacing head in its tracery, the other with carved flowers. The mediaeval chancel has become a vestry and its old piscina is set in the east wall; there is another piscina at the end of the mediaeval north aisle. The vestry has a 15th century doorway with the old door still on its hinges, with an ancient ring and a massive lock. St John’s original font is now in St Stephen’s Church in Bell’s Hill, having been thrown away and then found, after many years, in a garden in Totteridge. The present font has a cover rising nearly 15 feet high, with eight little carved statues.
The 19th century woodwork is particularly interesting and varied. The pulpit is by J. C. Traylen and on it are figures of six missionaries and preachers - Hugh Latimer, John Wesley, Canon Liddon, St Augustine, St Aidan, and St Hugh of Lincoln. The canopy is richly carved and there is more elaborate carving on the choir-stalls, while on 159 pew-ends there are scenes or devices in relief, among them Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop, the Good Samaritan, the Stoning of Stephen, and the Vision of Paul.
The new south aisle leads us into the Ravenscroft Chapel in which Thomas Ravenscroft lies on a huge canopied tomb, a dignified figure in ruff and puff sleeves, with much painted heraldry about him and the heads of three angels. He is declared to have been a man of untarnished integrity, of a happy disposition, exceedingly well known for the greatness of his mind. In the wall above the vestry door is a tablet to his wife, who died in 1611, and
Whom Nature made a lovely modest maid,
And marriage made a virtuous loving wife.
The bust of his son, James Ravenscroft, is on the wall of the chapel, with that of his wife, beautifully carved little portraits set in niches. Both the Ravenscrofts were benefactors to Barnet.
Outside the church is a plain cross, raised as a war memorial and to the west stands Barnet Technical College. The college has a fine new building but the site has a long association with education for here was the Queen Elizabeth Grammar School founded in 1573 for the boys of Barnet. The school flourishes today in modern premises in Queen’s Road, and the old red-brick building with its octagonal stair-turrets and Great Hall is used for staffrooms and student meetings. In the middle of the hall rises a solid oak post that supports the roof and must often have been used as a whipping post.
Just behind the Technical College are the nine acres of Old Court House recreation ground - the new Court House is southwards, down the hill. The little park has been well landscaped and beyond it, off Wood Street, is Wellhouse Road where, among suburban houses, a Wellhouse still marks a spring that Samuel Pepys used to visit for its healthgiving properties. He reached it at seven o’clock on August 11, 1667, after a bitterly cold coach journey, on his way to Hatfield.
Further along Wood Street, there are a number of pretty 18th century houses and cottages, one of which houses a local museum and another a maternity hospital, and beyond are four groups of almshouses. Nearest to the church is Jesus Hospital founded in 1679 by James Ravenscroft for six poor women; the founder’s initials are on the gate-piers which are topped with lions. Beyond them in Union Street, surrounding three sides of a green courtyard and screened from the road by fine iron gates, stand the Leathersellers’ Almshouses. Originally founded in 1544 by James Hasilwood near St Helen’s Bishopsgate in the City of London, they were moved to the purer air of Barnet in 1837, largely at the expense of the Master of the Company, Richard Thornton, and since 1964 have been rebuilt as 19 flats to the design of that fine architect, Louis de Soissons. Nearby are houses for six elderly couples built in 1873 but supported by lands left in 1558 by Eleanor Palmer, and a red-brick group of dwellings for six old ladies founded under the will of John Garrett who died in 1728.
Wood Street leads on to Arkley on the way to St Albans, and there the Gatehouse public house marks the site of a former toll-gate and can be recommended for its hospitality, while to the east of the road, Arkley windmill still stands, now in the grounds of a private house, but opened occasionally to the public in aid of the local church féte.
If we follow the Great North Road which runs to the right of St John’s Church, we pass on our right the Hyde Institute founded in 1888 by Miss Julia Hyde who left £10,000 for the purpose; it is now part of the public library system. A mile along the road, there is a broad green with a grey stone obelisk upon it. The stone, erected in 1740 by Sir Jeremy Sambrook who lived at Gobions near North Mimms, marks the supposed site of the death of the Earl of Warwick at the battle of Barnet fought in a heavy mist before dawn on the morning of Easter Sunday, April 14., 1471. The battle lasted some three or four hours but by ten o’clock news had been brought to London and the bells of the City were ringing out for Edward IV, because Warwick the Kingmaker, who had turned his coat to support Henry VI, was lying dead, with some 1500 men from the two armies beside him, on Hadley Green and the ground beyond, called Deadman’s Bottom to this day. Edward and his men refreshed themselves in Barnet and gave thanks to God, possibly in St John’s Church, and then marched on to London where the gates were opened to him. Henry VI was deposed, paraded through the streets, and murdered on May 21.
