History of North Finchley - Woodhouse and The Rough Lots

Woodhouse and The Rough Lots

The Woodhouse area of Finchley began with three houses called the Woodhouses sometime before 1655. In the mid 18th century there was a single house of this name and it was home to the well-known plasterer Thomas Collins. It was reconstructed in 1888 and in 1925 it became Woodhouse Grammar School (Now Woodhouse College).

Summers Lane existed from at least the 18th century as a short cut from the main road through to Friern Barnet. Below it and to the east is a small pocket of woodland called Coppetts Wood, one of the last remnants of the medieval Finchley Wood. Close to Coppetts Wood a sewage farm was established by Finchley in 1885, of which, since the area's sewage was diverted to Deephams Sewage Treatment Works, Edmonton in 1961, only the manager’s cottage remains.

Between 1882 and 1922 there was a small isolation hospital with 18 beds which was closed when Coppetts Wood Hospital was opened.

After enclosure the eastern end of Summers Lane was developed by Henry Dunger, owner of the Flower Pot brewery in Dunger Place (now Summers Place), from the 1830s until the 1870s.

The area popularly called the Rough Lots, officially called the Glebe Land, was the location (from 1879 until the early 20th century) of John Lawford's brick works. On a site where Summers Lane meets the High Road a gun battery was placed in World War I as a defence against early German air raids.

Finchley football club (now Wingate and Finchley F.C.), founded in 1874, started playing football on the Glebe Lands in 1932. Ken Aston, late president of the club, was the man who started the system of red and yellow cards use by referees.

The Finchley Open Air Pool was a lido opened by Finchley Borough Council in September 1931. A tour de force of art deco, the main pool was heated until World War II. During the 1948 Olympic Games the pool was used for the water polo. (Only a men's event in those days.) The pool was the first element in a Finchley complex which was to include a Town Hall for which plans were drawn up in 1936 but never realised.

In 1938 the War Office built a drill hall at the bottom of the hill for the 61 Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regt RA (TA), better known locally as the T.A. centre. The open air pool was closed in 1992 and replaced by the present complex in May 1996 The T.A. centre was demolished in 2004.