News has been coming in from Palmers Green Community this week of a manuscript found during works to Southgate Town Hall. Apparently it was discovered by workmen when an internal wall was demolished.
The manuscript is believed to date from before the town hall was built. The find has been reported to Enfield Council, but there is no news so far about what the document contains.
The London Borough of Enfield is 50 today! No, really…
In 1960 a Royal Commission on London Government proposed radical changes in the organisation of London government. The result was the abolition of the Middlesex County Council and The London County Council, to be replaced by the Greater London Council, which of course was itself later abolished under Margaret Thatcher.
Long established districts were joined up into larger units to form the new London Boroughs, and Edmonton, Enfield and 
Southgate were amalgamated and took on the name of “Enfield” to form the London Borough of Enfield.
The new London Borough of Enfield set its best foot forward on the 1st of April 1965, fifty years ago today. And now here we all are.
Enfield will be celebrating the anniversary with a range of activities, set to include 1960s themed festivals, walking tours, a photo archive and film events, competitions and new factsheets about Enfield.
Palmers Green’s new market opened on Mothering Sunday and is now running from 10-3 every week.
Last week’s launch event included fantastic stalls heaving with bread, cakes, cheeses, pies, garden plants, fish and crafts, plus an opportunity for free Italian classes! My apologies for clearing the plants stall out of Erysimu
m Bowles Mauve, very reasonably priced at £3! And the impressively rustic bloomer, sausage rolls and pasties we took home for lunch were delicious.
The market has been revived by the statio
n kiosk’s Annita Coreia (as if she didnt have enough to do baking and serving coffee and snacks to us from 6 every morning).
If this is the kind of thing you want in Palmers Green, and you love great food and good value products, Palmers Greeners, you know what you have to do. See you Sunday.
After a run in Chichester last year, Hugh Whitemore’s play Stevie transfers to the Hampstead Theatre this month.
The biographical play follows Stevie Smith as she commutes to her secretarial job at a publishers, spending her evenings with her beloved maiden aunt here in Palmers Green, at the house in Avondale Road where she lived almost all her life. It’s a life of suburban routine, which, as in her famous poem Waving not Drowning, conceals something rather darker beneath.
The production, starring Zoe Wannamaker and Lynda Baron, has garnered good reviews from The Times and The Independent, though some others have been less glowing, about the production, and, apparently, about the life affirming possibilities of living in Palmers Green.
Stevie runs from now until 18 April at the Hampstead Theatre. Tickets are £18-£35
One of the most positive things about Palmers Green is the number of people who are prepared to put time into the community and making it better for all.
One such person is Annita Correia, who runs Palmers Green’s popular station café. Designer and former teacher Annita has in the past run the popular Waiting Room Café, which did lovely food and hosted many local events, including blues nights and craft events.
Annita now runs the recently refurbished station kiosk, whose cornbread muffins with cheese and chilli have brightened many of my mornings, and whose wonderful range of art cards have saved me from not a few last minute birthday panics. You can buy great coffee, tasty snacks and tickets for Talkies in the kiosk, and it’s a great place to meet people and find out what is going on in the area. Annita’s latest project is to revive Palmers Green’s Sunday market – and this one is a real act of love.
The old market had been ailing for some time, and ground to a halt just before Christmas. So why revive it now?
“When I moved to Palmers Green, the market was the source of my livelihood – I designed fabric and clothing. People had put a lot of work into it, and it was a positive thing for the area. To have seen it go down hill was really upsetting.”
Annita is convinced that Palmers Green should be able to sustain a market of this kind, but that it has to have local support.
“A local market is a great opportunity for people in Palmers Green to have access to products not on the high street, a chance for entrepreneurs to get a first stab at setting up new businesses, hopefully also a way of drawing more people into Palmers Green on a Sunday – we have kept the prices low – pitches will be £20 (£10 for arts and crafts)”.
The roster for the first market includes South London’s Norbiton Cheeses, Essex artisan bakers Brownbread, Brockman’s Farm Produce, Brian and Natasha’s Fresh Fish. Gringostiv’s Cut Flowers and Plants, and Karl Wager of St. Albans with his handmade Furniture from reclaimed and drift wood.
Annita’s ambitions are simple:
“To get the market up and running again, hopefully bigger and better than before, and attract new traders. I am keen for the market to have a buzz, and to develop a reputation for supplying products which are well made and affordable.”
Neighbours, if that is something you would like to see in Palmers Green, you know what you have to do.
Melton Mowbray has its pork pies,
Eccles has its cake,
Devizes has its ciders,
But what does PG make?
At first glance, we do seem to be a little lacking in our culinary specialities, though I know that some will right now be thinking of the dolmade, the kleftiko, and the gently, deliciously oozing, nutty, honey filled baklavas of Aroma.
But perhaps the truly authentic Palmers Green originating speciality doesn’t really exist – or exist yet. Palmers Green Pudding? What would be in that, I wonder….? Please send in your recipes!
But there is one overlooked localish speciality that perhaps we should be tucking into. It doesn’t belong to Palmers Green, but it does come from a place not much more than two miles from here, though in a sense, like all our delicacies, it simply belongs to us all. I am talking, of course, of the pink, square, delight, Tottenham.
As I get older, as in the adage, my taste in music gets sweeter, and my taste in food gets more savoury (have you tried to eat a Kola Kube recently?). But perhaps my liking for Tottenham is hereditary.
My mother tells of how as a child just after the war, she’d get up in the darkness for a trip with my granddad, Charlie Freeston, to Spitalfields Market to buy fruit and veg for his shop in Ongar high street. First would be a visit to the market itself (and with luck, a sixpence from Mrs Kent, who kept a keen eye on the money sitting on high on her perch), then a trip to the wholesalers in Leytonstone, and then, best part of all, a warm-up with tea and Tottenham at a stall outside Bearmans department store on Leytonstone High Street.
A bite through the soft icing and into the springy madeira-like sponge with a gulp or two of hot sugary tea must have made a fine restorative. As equally it might today.
Note by the way, that in my family at least, it is ‘Tottenham’, not Tottenham Cake. The ‘cake’ is superfluous. We always know what you mean.
The origins of Tottenham like many of these things are not entirely clear, but Tottenham is certainly well over one hundred years old. It was baked by the North London’s Quakers, with the pink icing traditionally made from the mulberries from the Tottenham Friends’ burial ground (the Quakers built their first Meeting House in Tottenham in 1714).
Many websites will tell you that the cake was popularised by Thomas Chalkley, who sold it for a penny (or half a penny for misshapen offcuts), and that it was given away to the children when Spurs won the FA Cup in 1901. Local historian Peter Brown and his wife Doreen describe it as a children’s cake, a crowd pleaser, reflecting values of simplicity, sharing and equality, a view echoed by a cook book from 1931, quoted on Haringey Council’s website:
It sometimes happens that a large number of pieces of cheap cake are required at very short notice for such functions as children’s treats or tea meetings, and in such circumstances it may be almost impossible to prepare some thousands of buns or small cakes. Resort is then had to cheap sheet cake, which is easily made and looks large at the price at which it is sold. The cheapest cake of this sort that may still give entire satisfaction is Tottenham cake.
Give entire satisfaction it does. You can buy it from Greggs’ or Percy Ingle, as sadly we no longer seem to have a proper baker in Palmers Green (other than the aforementioned, excellent but Tottenham-free Aroma patisserie), but why not make your own? The Browns have continued the tradition of baking the cake for the Friends, using their old recipe, tried and trusted for over 50 years – in 2013 Doreen appeared on the Great British Bake off.
This is the way they make it:
Quantities as for a 7″ round tin (38 square inches)
• Cooking margarine – 6 oz
• Caster sugar – 6 oz
• Eggs – 3
• Self-raising Flour – 8 oz
• Vanilla essence – a teaspoonful
• Grated nutmeg (if desired) – a little
• MilkMix margarine and sugar (as for Madeira cake) beat eggs and mix in. Fold the mix into the flour. Add vanilla, nutmeg and mix well. Add milk as required to form a ‘dropping’ consistency. Pre-heat oven and bake at 150°C for 50 minutes. o achieve a flat-top cake, cover with foil.
Icing: This is either lurid pink or shocking pink: Icing sugar. Mulberry juice – from the Friend’s Mulberry Tree, (or Blackcurrant, or Cherry). Add Lemon juice if desired. Coat the cake with a weak mix of icing sugar and warm water, and allow to soak in. Coat the cake with the lurid (or shocking) icing.
This article first appeared in Palmers Green and Southgate Life