The Old Freehold Houses of Friern

This is the story of 31 surviving old houses in a mid-Victorian "freehold road". The aims, in 1853, were both "political" and "commercial". The political aim of the Middlesex Freehold Land Association was to enable "the working man" to buy a small plot of land cheaply. This piece of land would give him the right to vote in Parliamentary elections. The land had been 36 acres of fields, beside and near the Great North Road in the parishes of Finchley and Friern Barnet. The 1853 engraved plan divided it into 256 long, narrow plots. Houses were built gradually and in different styles on this freehold road in semi-rural outer Middlesex. The designs reflected changing Victorian and early Edwardian choices. There were often classical features or, less often, a whole classical facade (with Renaissance detail in one case); flat-fronted economical Georgian types of two or more storeys, embellished with bays as the years passed; vernacular and Gothic-type gables combined with classical features; Queen Anne Revival red-and-white; two 1910 Arts and Crafts-style houses.The varied social mix of occupants and owners ranged mainly across upper-working and middle classes, but there were also labourers. Middle-class tenants found the road appealing. But upwardly mobile craftsmen/tradesmen tended to prefer houses of their own. Today the surviving houses are dotted along a suburban road in North London. This is their history - of their beginnings, their styles and their people.