Livre d'Or

Twentieth-Century Radlett is a product of the railways: specifically, the Bedford to St. Pancras railway which we now call Thameslink, and the convenient stop in Hendon.

Older people I dine with occasionally in Rose Walk have mentioned how inconvenient it was, when the Bed-Pan line was closed at weekends, getting home from Hendon with their parents… However, I have no idea how closely one should read an anecdote from an aside to an offhand conversation about living in a place with just one railway line.

I wasn't aware of similar communities in Essex: it would be interesting to hear that you can get there by train from Clapton and from Stoke Newington - although there's only so much you can read into that, as the postwar suburbanisation (and subsequent migrations beyond the Green Belt) of the *huge* community in Whitechapel would logically have gone eastward out of Liverpool Street (trains to Clapton & Newington) as well as Essexward via Fenchurch Street or to the distant branches of the Central Line.

Which leads to a question of geography, history, and culture: when did the community in Hendon become a nucleus, or 'attractor' ? Was it an existing centre of Anglo-Jewish culture that drew the suburban migration of other communities, or was it founded by the Polish and Russian community of Whitechapel?

Or are the roots of Whitechapel even more complex than that? Not all the French who fled the post-Dreyfus persecution went to Germany, but the only historic Francophone communities I know about are from an earlier migration of gentiles - the Hugenots.