The Nightingale Tavern - a window on Wood Green's development

The Nightingale was on the west side of the northern part of Wood Green High Road, opposite what was to become Wood Green's first Town Hall, Woodside House. During its first century, it was interchangeably referred to as the Nightingale Tavern and the Nightingale Hotel.¹

Built in the mid-nineteenth century on the edge of Wood Green's first suburban development, the tavern-hotel's grounds and facilities were used to host an active calendar of entertainments, civic and musical events. By the beginning of the twentieth century, its importance in Wood Green seemed to be endorsed when it became a tram terminus. After a short period of notoriety as one of Haringey's mid-twentieth century pub rock venues, the establishment ended its life rather ignominiously as an ugly truncated single storey somewhat down-at-heel north London local, finally being demolished in the opening years of this century. No matter how ignoble its demise, however, the ingredients that go to make up its 140-year life bear some scrutiny for what they reveal about the story of Wood Green and the light they cast on the area's social history.

1. The Nightingale with its fenced garden, c1905

Beginnings

The first proprietor of The Nightingale was William Jones. Born in Holborn in 1819, Jones arrived in Wood Green in the 1850s. Before moving out to the suburbs, he had been working as an artificial flower maker in Chapel Street Islington, on the edge of Clerkenwell, one of the centres of flower-making in mid-nineteenth century London.

Artificial Flower Making

Artificial flower making was a bustling industry in London and was a mainstay of employment in Clerkenwell. It was a delicate Victorian craft which transformed silk and feathers into intricate floral creations, from floral hats to fashionable fascinators and artificial flowers.

2. Spray of artificial flowers made to resemble wild flowers, 1898–1935. (Image: London Museum).

These floral embellishments weren't only popular with high society ladies; women from all walks of life would incorporate them into their outfits. They were also used for interior decoration and theatrical set dressing.

3. Clerkenwell flower makers, 1896 by Samuel Melton Fisher (Image: Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa)

Most people who worked in the trade were very poorly paid. Jones however seems to have risen above the lowest worker level. He had become a "master" artificial flower maker by the 1850s and the trajectory of his life after that point suggests a modicum of financial success, or at the very least that he was a very careful manager of limited financial resources.²

What can be unequivocally established from the records is that in July 1854 Jones bought one, possibly two plots of land on the Wood Green Estate from his local Clerkenwell-based freehold land society.³ One of them was to be used for the Nightingale.

Wood Green Estate

4. Wood Green Estate shown on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, 1873 (surveyed 1863-69). (National Library of Scotland).

At a time when having the vote was reliant on owning property, in an effort to enfranchise the Working Class, freehold land societies started buying estates and reselling them at an affordable price to those who would otherwise be unable to meet the expense of property ownership. In 1852 the Clerkenwell-based Finsbury Freehold Land Society purchased 60 acres of Wood Green Farm, resold it in 480 lots and oversaw its development as the Wood Green Estate.⁴ Laid out over five roads (Clarence Road, Commerce Road, Finsbury Road, Nightingale Road and Truro Road) with frontages on Green Lanes and Bounds Green Road, development began on the estate in 1854.⁵

William Jones would either have purchased his plot/s through accruing the necessary funds in the preceding years by weekly subscription to the Society's 'uncompleted shares', or by buying outright 'completed shares' on issue. If he used the former route, any balance owing would have been paid by mortgage after plots hade been 'allotted' to him. The number of plots to which he was entitled would have been in line with the number of shares he held.

Once the land had been purchased, Jones would still have had to finance the construction costs of any buildings to be erected. Records suggest that in addition to buying the plot for the Nightingale on the corner of Nightingale Road and Green Lanes, he bought another plot or plots on Nightingale Road immediately behind the first. He then used part of the second plot to build himself a house and part to extend the grounds of the business.⁶ By 1861 he was living in Hawthorn Lodge, Nightingale Road, very probably in a house he'd had built for himself on land at the west end of Nightingale Road, directly behind The Nightingale.⁷.

The Nightingale

Jones's Nightingale Tavern was operational by 1863⁸and just two years later the an alcohol licence was granted for the premises.⁹

The tavern was clearly designed to be a centre for community entertainment. It had function rooms and grounds sufficient to include a large garden, a bowling green and a quoits ground.

5. Advertisement for the Nightingale Tavern, London City Press 19 May 1866. (British Newspaper Archive).

In 1867, Jones applied for a music and dancing licence. In his application he said that "he had expended £5,000 upon the premises which was his own freehold, as well as the surrounding land, and he thought he was entitled to all those privileges which it was in the power of the Court to grant to a man in his position". He was duly given his music licence, but the magistrates said that they "could not see any necessity for a dancing license".¹⁰

By 1869, it seems that business was flourishing and the former artificial flower maker expanded his business by building a 60 foot long room, sometimes styled as a lecture-hall and described as being "partly over the kitchen and partly over the subscription skittle saloon, with two staircases and two landings."¹¹ The new room was inaugurated with a banquet given by the members of the Lewis Lodge of Freemasons. Given that before long the room was being referred to as the "Masonic Hall", we might suppose that this was the first of many occasions on which the masons made use of it.

Jones ran the Nightingale until 1876 when he retired and moved out to a house on Bounds Green Road, selling both his home on Nightingale Road as well as the business.

Westbury House

Two years after the Nightingale opened, East India Company merchant Thomas William Smith Oakes built an Italianate style villa, Westbury House on land he'd purchased directly opposite the tavern. After less than a decade, Oakes moved out. In 1874 and the house was taken on by recently widowed Catherine Smithies and her son Thomas. Both were tireless campaigners for social justice: she focussed on temperance and animal welfare, he on the plight of the Working Class. The Smithies renamed the house as Earlham Grove. Just under twenty years later it was bought by the newly formed Wood Green District Council. In 1963 the house was renamed once more: this time as Woodside House.

6. Westbury House (later Earlham Grove then Woodside), c 1870. 

7. Details of sale of Westbury House, North Middlesex Chronicle, 2 May 1874.

Police Station next-door

Opposite Westbury House and across Nightingale Road from the tavern at the corner of the High Road, in August 1866, Wood Green Police station was opened.¹² This first building stood until 1906 when it was replaced by a new building which today serves as police operational centre with a 40-cell custody suite for the borough.

8. The 1860s Wood Green police station on the corner of the High Road and Nightingale Road, c 1905, (Private collection).

The Nightingale as a centre of entertainment

Pub games

Jones made ample provision for various games for his patrons. He seems to have been particularly proud of his subscription skittle saloon which he described as 'the handsomest in the kingdom'.

Subscription skittle saloons were not uncommon at this time. The fee seems to have been about 10 shillings a year. They may have come about from the desire to create a club environment for regulars or perhaps the origins relate to the bad name the game developed for its link with gambling which led to a city-wide a ban on skittles in pubs in the late eighteenth century.

It's probable that the game played at the Nightingale was 'London Skittles' in which wooden 'cheeses' rather than balls were rolled at the skittles. The bowlers in Prout's drawing below look like they might be using these disc-shaped missiles. The last surviving London skittles alley can still be visited in basement of the Freemasons Arms in Hampstead.  

8. An unnamed pub skittle room, (Image: Victor Prout in the Sphere, June 27, 1903).

9. Fish-eye view of the Victorian skittles alley in the now closed Jack 'O' Newbury pub in Binfield Berkshire. (Image: rich.tee on Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

Amongst the other games on offer was pub quoits. Normally played outside, it involved hefting weighty solid iron rings at a spike in the ground in an attempt get the ring over the spike.

10. 19th century cast iron pub quoits. A clay pit was often dug outside a pub with a large iron spike to play the game. (Image: Country Home Antiques).

Musical Entertainment

Whilst events were being run at the Nightingale from the earliest days, after Jones's new hall was completed, a wide and varied range of events was hosted there up until the First World War. Below are gathered a sample of the events run, mostly in the Masonic Hall. I add the collection both to offer a sense of the role the Nightingale played in the community, but also to give some sense of the range communal activity during the late Victorian and Edwardian eras.¹³

• 1869 - Concert for St Michaels Organ improvement Fund.
• 1869 - Tottenham Local Board of Health (the local government body at the time) Lighting committee meeting.
• 1871 - Public meeting to inform peeople about Alexandra Palace.
• 1871 - Readings by the Wood Green Literary Society's, including  those by Shakespeare, Dickens and Tennyson.
• 1874 - Illustrated lecture on "The martyrs of the reign of Mary."
• 1874 - Free emigration to New Zealand - Government Agent explaining the conditions respecting Free Passage to New Zealand.
• 1874 - Between December 1874 and October 1876, the Wood Green Baptist Church  held services in the Masonic Hall. On 4 November 1876, a new chapel was opened on Finsbury Road (now the St Barnabas Greek Orthodox Church).
• 1875 - 'Grand Vocal and Instrumental Concert'.
• 1876 - Public meeting about the 'recent interference with the rights of the ratepayers and the liberty of the Press by the Tottenham Local Board of Health'.
• 1876 - Spelling Bee by the Wood Green Literary and Discussion Society.
• 1877 - Bazaar in aid of the new St. James' Presbyterian Church.
• 1878 - Public meeting in connection with the Wood-green Band of Mercy,  a society aiming to prevent cruelty to animals. The event was attended by Thomas Bywater Smithies, the son of founder Mrs Smithies of Earlham Grove opposite the tavern.

• 1883 - 1900 - Wood Green Nightingales - a series of concerts by this popular local musical society. ln the later years they also gave illuminated al fresco concerts in the garden where "...the stage was erected in a tasteful manner, and the plants and various Chinese and other lamps gave effect to the scene."¹⁴. A concert on 12 December 1883 was reported as including recitations, artistic solos on the pianoforte, violin solos, tenor solos and "very droll songs ... most humorously rendered."¹⁵

• 1886 - Grand Concert - songs and musical pieces.
• 1888 - Noel Park Football Club smoking concert.

• 1889 - Smoking concert in aid of Metropolitan Police orphanage.¹⁶

• 1899 - Musical evening for the Wood Green Cycling Club.
• 1906 - Middlesex Canine Association Show.
• 1906 - Bohemian Concert for 20th Century Friendly Equitable Society.
• 1914 - Concert by local combination The Harmony Glee Singers.

11. High Road, Wood Green directly to the north of The Nightingale, c1903 showing numbers 351 - 365. The fence on the left borders the pub garden. I assume that the notice for a dancing event refers to one in the Nightingale. Number 353 looks to have been completely rebuilt, 355 seems to have been significantly changed, but the others survive largely unchanged. The shops shown are (from left to right),  351, Arthur Smith, dining rooms; 353, Edwin Johnson, tobacconist; 355, William Beddoes, coach builder; 357, Misses H. & G. Phillips, drapers; 359, Owen's Drug Stores; 361, William Gibson, stationer; 363, Callender & Hobson, greengrocers; 365, John Latcham, grocer. (Image: Private Collection)

Reports also show the Nightingale being used for activities as varied as billiard tournaments, coroner's inquests, property auctions (inculding for the Bowes Park Estate). From 1886 the Nightingale Hotel 'kennels', were used by the North London Harriers a their HQ.

The 1914 event in the list above was the last one to appear in available newspaper reports. Whilst it is unlikely that activities stopped altogether in Jones's hall, by the middle of the century, it was in use by the Maurice Jay School of Modern Ballroom Dancing.

The New Landlords and the Cycling Connection

In 1874 Jones put the property up for auction. In the sale details it was described as having,

"a large assembly room adjoining, on the one hand having a separate entrance from the road, and a splendidly designed billiard room, with embellishments of the most elegant description, on the other, together with extensive stabling, bowling green, &c., the whole premises being well built, possessing a noble exterior, and occupying an area of nearly half an acre."¹⁷

The tavern-hotel then went through a number of proprietors before the Fowlers arrived.

The Fowlers

In March 1895, pickle merchant's son William Fowler and his wife, carman's daughter Mary arrived in Wood Green and took on the Nightingale.¹⁸ Sadly, William died just under four years after his arrival. Mary took over the business and ran it until about 1910 when she moved around the corner to 89 Trinity Road, to live with her married oldest daughter. Mary Keziah Fowler's relationship with a championship cyclist linked the Nightingale's story with another institution of the late Victorian and early Edwardian period, The Wood Green Cycle Track.

Mary and the Cyclist

In 1895, a short walk from the Nightingale, just across the Bounds Green Road, the North London Cycling and Athletics Ground Company¹⁹ acquired from the Nightingale Hall estate ten acres of ground (where Northcott and Cornwall Avenues would soon be built) and built the short-lived Wood Green Cycle Track. Attracting crowds as large as 10,000.²⁰ it quickly became one of the country's leading temples of Edwardian cycling,  

Soon after the track opened, 21 year old professional cyclist Charley Barden moved to number 98 Truro Road, just a few minutes walk away. ²¹ Within a year or so of his arrival, Barden, whose fame and looks apparently led to his 'being mobbed wherever he went', had met and married the Fowler's eldest daughter Mary Keziah.

Barden was at the height of his career over this period and twice came second in the world professional sprint championship. He also held the English title and several records. His success seemed assured.

12. Wood Green Cycle Track, August 1896. Start of the 'Professional Race'. The grandstand seated 1,500. Further seating and terracing around the eight-foot banking at each end of the track meant the site could accommodate up to 15,000 spectators. (Image: Private Collection).

Despite his success and the adulation in which he bathed, things were soon to go badly wrong for both Mary and Charley. The cyclist's career in Britain was ruined by the fallout of an incident where another cyclist was killed during a race. Barden created something of  scandal by accusing other competitors of riding dangerously and hs support quickly fell away. He was also caught up in a scandal that erupted in 1895 involving accusations of  riders being doped with performance-enhancing drugs. With his reputation tarnished by thd scandals, he found it almost impossible to get work as a cyclist in Britain. Although he found occasional work in Europe, his performance tailed off dramatically and his glory days were soon over.

Barden's professional problems seemed to lead to a general breakdown in his life and to much heartbreak and hardship for landlord's daughter Mary. In August of 1910, he cleared out the family bank account and disappeared completely, leaving Mary and the children to fend for themselves. His whereabouts was only found when an advertisement in a local Midlands newspaper which included his photo led to his discovery. He was subsequently taken to court for desertion and ordered to pay his wife maintenance. Like her mother, Mary Keziah became a pub landlady and took on the Phoenix pub on North Street near Lisson Grove, Marylebone (now Frampton Street). She stayed at the pub until the war until in 1940 it was damaged by a bomb beyond repair.

13. Charley Barden early 1890s (Image: Online Bicycle Museum)

Mid-20th Century

Though the pub carried on until the early years of the current century, it had apparently for the most part lost its mojo. Jones's grand hall was leased or sold off and was in use by the Maurice Jay School of Modern Ballroom Dancing. Meanwhile for a short while the pub shared in the London pub music boom. Just down the road, The Fishmongers Arms had been a well known jazz then rock venue. Rather late in the day the Nightingale followed suit and began to stage live music in the 1970s. Bands to play there included Roxy Music, Manfred Mann, Judas Priest, Vinegar Joe featuring Elkie Brooks on vocals, and the Alex Harvey Band.

Although, to the best of my knowledge, the pub escaped the war unscathed, in the decades that followed its edifice seems to have been gradually whittled away. First it was stripped of its architectural embellishments. Subsequently, in the 1990s the top floor was removed and it survived for a decade as a single storey rump of the original building.

14. Wood Green police station (foreground) with the Nightingale beyond. (Photo: Alex Georgiou).

15. An undignified end, The Nightingale, c2000. I feel fairly certain that what remained was the ground floor of the original building plus a later nineteenth century single-storey extension added to the north with its two conical glass lightwells visible in Fig 1). (Image: Private Collection).

In 2004, the building was, perhaps mercifully demolished and a block of flats was built in its place.

16. Portree Close, completed in 2006 on the site of the Nightingale 2022. On the left of the photo is the edge of the former Wood Green Police Station. (Image: Google Maps.Street View).

NOTES

1. From when it first opened newspaper reports and official documents used either of the Hotel or Tavern epithets, apparently at their discretion: there seemed to be no rule. The earliest advertisement I located for the establishment dates from 1866 under the first proprietor. He chose to refer to his business as the Nightingale Tavern, but that choice appeared not to set a precedent.

2. There is no trace of any under business under William Jones's name or at his known addresses.

3. G. W. Hemming, Ed., The Law Reports Vol IX, William Clowes, 1870.

4. The Finsbury Freehold Land Society was founded in Clerkenwell in 1850 and apparently ceased operation after 1866. Various writers have indicated that the estate was 92 acres. However, all the statements by the Society in the contemporary press give a figure of 60 acres. For more on the freehold land movement in the Haringey area, see Chapter 2, Hugh Flouch, Abyssinia: Hornsey's Lost Village.

5. In this period Green Lanes was also referred to as both the High Street and as Southgate Road. The Bounds Green Road was called Colney Hatch Road.

6. See Note 3.

7. Censuses of 1861, 1871 and Electoral Register 1863. Later records suggest that Hawthorn Lodge may have subsequently been renamed as Bahia Lodge.

8. Accounts and Papers of Friendly Societies Vol 81 1912-13, Commonwealth Shipping Committee.

9. The Era, 2 April 1865. In the official notice, the business was 'denominated the Nightingale Tavern'.

10. London Daily Chronicle, 12 October 1867.)

11. North Londoner, 12 June 1869.

12. Val Czerny, Peelers: The Police Force under the reign of Queen Victoria, The Ragged Victorians Living History Society, 2017.

13. The events listed were identified in a range of contemporary newspapers including Era, Hampstead and Highgate Express, Hornsey and Finsbury Park Journal, Islington Gazette, London City Press, Morning Advertiser, North Londoner, North Middlesex Chronicle, Sporting Life, Tottenham and Edmonton Weekly Herald.

14. Era 13 jul 1901.

15. Sporting Life, 12 December 1883.

16. Smoking concerts were originally supposedly concerts where one could smoke but were implicitly men only events at which they could relax the rules of decorum.

17. North Middlesex Chronicle, 7 March 1874.

18. A carman was the nineteenth century equivalent of a van or lorry driver.

19. The company directors included Arthur Walter Gamage who owned Gamage's famous Holborn store and was vice-president of Finsbury Park Cycling Club.

20. Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 18 May 1896.

21. The Online Bicycle Museum. Charley Barden's father James was the manager of the Kensal Rise cycle track. During his time there he is credited with having invented the use of cement for bicycle tracks and the banked track.