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A classic station and its immediate vicinity, keeping New Southgate at arm’s length from Southgate. In the 14th century
this area was Armholt Wood, and later Arnolds. When City banker James Colebrook bought the estate in 1719 he built a mansion
called Arnolds in Cannon Hill, Southgate. Locals called the estate Arno’s and subsequent owner Sir William Mayne, later
Lord Newhaven, adopted this convention by renaming the house and estate Arnos Grove, which is now pronounced as though it
never had an apostrophe – unlike, for example, Arno’s Vale in Bristol. From 1777 until 1918 the estate belonged
to the Walker brewing family, who increased their landholding to over 300 acres by buying neighbouring Minchenden. In 1928
Lord Inverforth, who had bought the estate from the last of the Walker brothers, sold the southernmost 44 acres to Southgate
council, the mansion to the North Metropolitan Electricity Supply Company for use as offices and the rest to builders. Northmet
enlarged the mansion and encased it in red brick; it is now an upmarket residential care home called Southgate Beaumont (see
image below). Arnos Grove station opened on the far south side of the estate in 1932. Designed by Charles Holden, the station
was for its first year the northern terminus of the Piccadilly line and ranks among London’s best railway structures.
Guardian architecture critic Jonathan Glancey has gone farther, calling it ‘this king, queen and all princes of a metro
station... one of the finest of all 20th-century buildings.’ There was some debate over its name; Arnos Park was considered
and might have been more appropriate, since this was the name the council had given to the neighbouring open space, which
has meadowland, a railway viaduct, a stretch of Pymmes Brook and traces of a former loop of the New River. The area north
of the park was built up as the classy Minchenden estate by 1939, with Arnos Grove as its central avenue. More recently, privately
built flats have been added near the park in Walker Close.
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