epw062814 ENGLAND (1939). Copthall Drive and environs, Mill Hill, 1939

As a child in Burnt Oak, Mill Hill was rather off the radar but the eastern edge of the Watling estate reaches almost to Mill Hill, separated from it by the mainline railway and now also by the M1. Some years back an elderly lady told me how as a child she would occasionally walk with her mother across the fields to Burnt Oak. It was with some bitterness that she recalled the building of the Watling estate as a barrier to such childhood pleasures. She said that Mill Hill folk would refer, rather unfairly, to the LCC Watling estate as "little Moscow", which fact is also mentioned in Alan A Jackson's excellent book "Semi-detatched London" (2nd edition, Wild Swan, 1991).