It is a straggling, broad-streeted village, with a breadth implying the originally small value of the land, and encroachments here and there upon the old building-line proving both the implication and the fact that, many years ago, there were those who, having the foreknowledge of a coming betterment, and more daring than their neighbours, grabbed while they might. Many inns, laundries, dairy-farms, great black-timbered barns, and a few rotting hoardings and unfinished houses make up the long street and tell alike of a vanished rusticity and of an arrested development.

Chaplin, the great coach-proprietor, had large stables here, his first stage out of London on the northern roads. They were placed here, rather than at Barnet, in order to avoid expenses at Whetstone Gate, situated down the road, near Greenhill Cross. Whetstone Gate gave travellers going north the welcome intelligence that they had finally passed Finchley Common and come to the better roads and more reputable society of Barnet, where they were safe from highwaymen.

The road across Finchley Common was in passive alliance with these gentry. When Pepys visited Barnet, in 1660, partly for sake of its now forgotten medicinal waters, he found the highway “torne, plowed, and digged up,” in consequence of the heavily laden wagons and their long struggling teams of horses and oxen, which had made havoc with what had been a fairly good roadway. Progress was difficult, even in the best circumstances, and when stress of weather made it almost impossible, the highwaymen robbed with impunity, and absolutely at their leisure.

The road remained more or less in this condition up to the early years of the nineteenth century. This was partly owing to the mistaken local patriotism which had prevented the remodelling of it in 1754, when the rustics of Whetstone routed the surveyor and his labourers at the point of the pitchfork. Better counsels prevailed in the first decade of the new era, and the eight miles of highway under the control of the Whetstone and Highgate Turnpike Trust rose in 1810 to be considered as good as any in the kingdom. It then became possible, for the first time in its history, for the Barnet stage to leave for London and to reach its destination without the necessity of stopping on the way for tea. The Trustees were naturally pleased with their road, and so in 1823 received with some surprise, under the new Act for the improvement of the line of road from London to Holyhead, a demand for the reconstruction of the highway between Prickler’s Hill and the southern end of Barnet town. They pointed out how greatly superior their portion of the road was to others, but to no purpose. The Government admitted the excellence of the surface, but boggled at the severity of the gradient, and practically insisted on its being reduced.

The Trustees were dismayed. Telford and Macadam supplied rival plans, and both foreshadowed heavy expense. Telford’s idea was to slice off the top of Barnet Hill, and to run the road through a more or less deep cutting through the street; a plan which, if adopted, would have left the houses and the footpaths in the position of buildings overhanging a cliff. Fortunately for Barnet the scheme drawn up by Macadam prevailed. It was for the partial filling up of the dip in the road between Prickler’s Hill and the excessively steep entrance into the town, an entrance even now by no means easily graded. What it must originally have been may readily be judged by looking down from the present embanked road to the old one, seen going off to the left, in the hollow where the old roadside houses still stand, among them the “Old Red Lion,” on the site of the inn where Pepys stayed. The end one of a row of ten or twelve cottages, at the corner of May’s Lane, was once a toll-house.

The work of making the new road, begun in 1823, was not completed until four years later, at a cost of £17,000. A large portion of this heavy sum went in compensation to the Sons of the Clergy Corporation, for land taken. The cost of these improvements came eventually, of course, out of the pockets of travellers along the road. On this Trust they were mulcted severely, for the Trustees, finding the existing tolls to be utterly inadequate to their expenses, obtained powers in 1830 to increase them. They considered themselves hardly treated in being obliged to undertake such costly works on the eve of the London and Birmingham Railway being constructed—a railway which would have the effect of withdrawing traffic from the road, and reducing receipts at the toll-gates to a minimum; but the end, although not far off, was not yet, and on the 3rd of July they succeeded in letting the tolls by auction for one year at the handsome sum of £7,530. Accordingly they commenced to pay off their debts, and succeeded in liquidating the whole of them by the beginning of 1842, notwithstanding two successive reductions of tolls in 1835 and 1841.

It was in 1833 that the London and Birmingham Railway obtained its Act, and it was opened throughout on September 7, 1838, the first of the railways which were to contribute to the ruin of Barnet’s great coaching and posting trade. The annual takings at Whetstone Gate immediately fell to £1,300, but it lingered on until the Trust expired, November 1, 1863.

It is interesting, as showing the growth of road traffic, to compare the figures still available, giving the annual sums at which the tolls at this gate were let in the old days. Thus, in Queen Elizabeth’s time, they were farmed at £40 per annum, and in 1794 they fetched only £150. But few vehicles passed then. Forty years later, no fewer than ninety coaches swept through Whetstone Gate every twenty-four hours!

XIII

Barnet, or Chipping Barnet, or High Barnet, as it is variously called, stands on the summit of a steep and high ridge running east and west. On the east the height of Muswell Hill, now suburban and crowned conspicuously with that unfortunate place of entertainment, the Alexandra Palace, is prominent; and on the west are Totteridge and the range of hills stretching away to Elstree. Other Barnets, old and new, are plentiful: East and Friern Barnet, and the modern suburb of New Barnet. Chipping Barnet derives the first part of its name from its ancient chepe, or weekly market, granted by Henry the Second, and its more common prefix of “High,” from its situation on the ridge just mentioned.