It seems that this is a year
for anniversaries. Our local volunteer-run
newspaper is celebrating twenty years of reporting on East Finchley, and
the London
Underground is now 150 years old. You don’t have to look very far to spot
the link between the two.
For over seventy years, the iconic
archer
statue has overlooked the Tube station and the suburb, becoming the symbol
of East Finchley. ‘Archie’ has inspired the
names of our local paper and the
new free school, features on the benches on the High Road and even
represented the London Borough of Barnet on one of a series of 2012 Olympics commemorative
pin-badges.
“Brilliantly sited,
fantastically realised, impishly styled and enduringly relevant, the archer
sums up pretty much everything worth celebrating about the Underground,” says
blogger Ian Jones, whose study
of the Tube’s “finest features, sensations and oddities” has become an
online hit.
There has been a station at
East Finchley since 1867, when a railway
linking Finsbury Park and Edgware opened. This later had branch lines to
High Barnet and Alexandra
Palace added and came
under the control of London Transport in the 1930s, when the plan was to
electrify the railway and make it a part of the Northern Line. This was just a
part of the Northern
Heights plan, under which the line would also be extended north from
Edgware, from which trains would be able to run trains south via both Highgate
and Golders Green. Highgate station was to become a multi-level station with
the original (and still
visible) ground-level platforms being used as well as new underground ones.
To facilitate this, East Finchley needed to have four platforms as trains would
be running south at both ground level and in the tunnel which was being
extended north from Archway, the Northern Line’s original terminus (which was originally
called Highgate but had its name changed in 1939 to avoid confusion with
Highgate station).
The plan was certainly
ambitious, and it took a combination of the Second World War and post-war Green
Belt legislation to ensure that it was only partly realised. The line north of
Edgware never happened, although you can still see the remains of what was
going to be Brockley
Hill station by the A41. Of the line between Finchley Central and Edgware, just
the spur out to Mill Hill East was retained, and that was only as a matter of
wartime expediency due to that station’s close proximity to Mill Hill barracks.
One part of the plan that
did come to pass before the war put a stop to things was the rebuilding of East Finchley station with its four platforms, two of
which are largely redundant now as the multi-level Highgate station (see above)
didn’t become reality. The architect was Charles Holden
(1875-1960), the man responsible for many of the Tube’s strikingly art deco stations
that were built during the inter-war period.
He wanted several of the new
or rebuilt stations on the Northern Line to have statues, and the sculptor Eric Aumonier (1899-1974)
was commissioned in June 1939 to produce the East Finchley
archer which, due to the war, was the only one to be completed. The decision to
have him in a kneeling position, looking like he has just fired an arrow down
the line to the entrance of what was then the longest railway tunnel in the
world and still is the longest on the Tube (17.3 miles via the Bank branch),
was deliberate. As a London Transport staff publication noted at the time: “It
is more than a decorative device – it is powerful symbolism.”
As well as pointing out that
Tube travel is fast and direct, the statue commemorates the fact that what is
now East Finchley used to be a part of the ancient Forest of Middlesex
and was the Bishop of London’s hunting ground in the Middle Ages. Further evidence
of this can be seen locally in various street and pub names (Bishop’s Avenue,
the Bald Faced Stag), and on the
old Finchley Borough Council coat of arms which is visible on the façade of
East Finchley Library.
Unveiled on 22nd
July 1940, Archie is almost twice natural size and was made from six
hundredweight (672 lbs, or just over 300 kg) of beech timber round a steel
armature (whatever that is), covered by sheet lead. The bow was made by bending
English ash with steam and coating it with copper and gilt. It’s reckoned that
the sculpture was constructed in three sections which were assembled on-site.
As for his arrow, it is said
that this was located at the other end of the tunnel (Morden) but it was stolen.
However, as Morden station – another Holden design – predated the rebuilding of
East Finchley station by over a decade, I
suspect that this is an urban myth.
(NB: This piece is a
significantly extended version of an article I
wrote for The Archer which appears in
the February 2013 edition.)
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