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The Enfield Society
Members of the Management Committee have legal responsibility as directors of the Society as a Company and as trustees of the Society as a Charity. All Committee members must be members of the Society. During the year ended 31st December 2012, the following served as members of the Management Committee:-
| David Cockle Graham Dalling (deceased December) John Davies Tony Dey Robert Fowler Stephen Gilburt David James (Hon. Treasurer) Joyce James |
Janet McQueen Stuart Mills Colin Pointer Monica Smith Richard Stones (Hon. Secretary) Moira Wilkie (co-opted September) Leonard Will |
The President, Dr Christopher Jephcott, has attended meetings regularly during the year.
The governing body of the Society, known as the Management Committee, consists of not less than six or more than eighteen members. The Honorary Secretary and the Honorary Treasurer are ex officio members and up to three members may be co-opted to serve on the Management Committee. At every annual general meeting one third of Committee members retire and may be re-elected. New members can be proposed by the Committee or by any member of the Society provided they have the support of nine other members. If necessary Committee members are given training and attend relevant courses and seminars as appropriate to their role within the Society.
The main aims of the Society are to:-
The Society has ended the year with a decrease in total funds of £8,970. Although total income went up by 7% (£1,800) this was mainly due to better interest on our deposit accounts. However our expenditure was up by 49% (£12,700). We allocated funds of £2,800 for the Enfield Museums and added this to the existing restricted funds bringing the total spent to £6,000. We also paid £2,500 as the first instalment of the three year sponsorship of the Forty Hall Education programme. A further £565 was donated to St Luke & St John Church and Edmonton Charity School for essential repairs.
The policy of the Society is to maintain unrestricted funds, which are the free reserves of the Charity, at a level which would allow the Society to contest actively any threat to its aims. The members of the Management Committee consider that the balance of the reserves, after deduction of the designated and restricted funds, is reasonable in view of the high legal costs that could be incurred in defending such threats.
There were few changes in the Management Committee this year. We are pleased to welcome Moira Wilkie who was co-opted this year having been an active member of the planning group for some time while Joyce James, who had been co-opted in 2011, was formally appointed to the management committee.
The loss of Graham Dalling, with his great knowledge of Enfield and ability to give most interesting talks on almost any subject, leaves the Society and Enfield with a gap that will be difficult to replace. Membership has continued at just below the 2000 mark. It is open to all and we hope the very low membership fee would not prevent anyone joining the Society. We have taken the step of announcing a proposed increase in membership fees to £5.00 which will be put to the members at the next AGM. Our award winning newsletter continues to be sent to all our members four times a year and with the increase in postal rates the old rate of £2.50 does not cover our costs. We encourage new members to join by advertising the Society in local public buildings, having a presence at local Festivals as well as using our very active social programme of walks and talks which are free of charge to all. We have continued to work closely with the Council, meeting both the Leader of the Council and Council officers regularly. A space for an Enfield Museum has been achieved- something we have been requesting for years -and there is now a permanent display on Enfield life in the Dugdale centre for which we released some funds the Society was holding in trust and gave a grant from the Society. Other grants include £5000 a year for three years to Forty Hall education programme in order to try and help maintain our premier historic building and a promise of £5000 to help maintain and improve the New River Loop in its 400th anniversary year of 2013.Other Society matters in 2012 are covered in the following reports.
The group now has six members and hopes to start monitoring planning applications in Edmonton in the future. Recent planning applications and government statements indicate that the Green Belt in general and edge lands in particular are under threat from developers.
Some ongoing issues have been decided - agreement on widening the original gateway as the access to Forty Hall, a revised residential redevelopment of Middlesex University’s Cat Hill Site, with improved conservation measures. Others, notably the future of the Trent Park Campus and the future of Broomfield House, remain unresolved. Further incremental applications have seen the Spurs Training Ground more and more resembling a suburban recreation ground. A vociferous campaign saw off the proposal to license Chase Green for entertainments. The Enfield Society drew up the 5 year revisions of the Character appraisals for the Turkey Street and Highlands Conservation Areas as requested, only to learn now that the work is again to be carried out by the Paul Drury McPherson Partnership.
The Enfield Town Study Group has been successfully re-established under the leadership of Caroline Carter.
The year began with a well attended and interesting meeting on Charles and Mary Lamb while later in the year at the Edmonton Carnival publications were sold and new members signed up.
The Group was concerned about the future of several historic buildings in Edmonton - the Charity School Hall, a Grade ll listed building which was placed on the At Risk register and Salisbury House and Cemetery House which are on the Council's list for disposal. The improvements to The Crescent, recently designated as a conservation area, were welcomed.During the year we continued our regular activities, co-ordinating production and circulation of four quarterly issues of TES News, evening meetings, updating community notice boards at Frog’s Bottom and at Enfield Chase and other stations and arranging the AGM. Our column continued to appear regularly in The Enfield Echo.
We published a revised version of the Enfield Town Heritage Walk leaflet and the annual Christmas card. We organised three Heritage Walks and two coach outings. We attended the Edmonton Show and Capel Manor exhibition, organised the New Members Evening and held our usual Christmas open morning at Jubilee Hall, all of which made sales of TES publications and resulted in signing up some new members.During the year there were illustrated talks to Society members and articles in TES News on a variety of historical subjects. There was a visit to the Royal Small arms factory and an evening of talks and tours at Forty Hall to celebrate the reopening following its restoration.
In October 2012 Enfield Society members and local residents were shocked to see the Council’s premises licence application for Chase Green, which would have allowed public entertainment on the Green all day, every day, throughout the year. Fortunately, this application produced such an over-whelming response of opposition in the form of over 300 written objections from local residents and from more than 1200 Society members, that the Council were forced to surrender the licence after it had been in existence for only one day in December. However, despite the pleasing end result, it remains unacceptable for a local authority to assume it can ride rough-shod over land legally designated as a Village Green. The Society is reviewing other designated and potential Village Greens and/or Commons within the Borough.
Turning to footpaths and rights of way, during 2012 various routes in the Whitewebbs/Bulls Cross area were formally placed on the definitive rights of way map for Enfield and the Society has agreed to assist/support the Council in upgrading currently permissive paths to definitive status. Also, revised plans for the bridge on the long-outstanding Stagg Hill footpath have been agreed, together with a proposed works timetable. The Society would again wish to thank those members who volunteer to lead walks and/or visits. Without these leaders the Group’s regular programme would not exist. During 2012 there were 57 events, of which 26 were within the London area (including Enfield), with the remainder to the Lea Valley, Hertfordshire, Essex, Epping Forest, the Chilterns, Bedfordshire, Kent and Surrey. Almost all of our walks/visits start from points convenient for public transport and 12 walks were only for the morning or afternoon. Many others had the option of a shorter route. In total, these activities were attended by well over 1100 people.The Group has continued to work through the material from the estate of the late Stanley Smith, which was increased during the year by the deposit of further boxes of slides, prints and negatives. Other members of the Society have continued to help by selecting and listing those slides which are most interesting and significant. These are being digitised and made available on our web site, where there are now over 1000 images, searchable by location and subject. Photographic prints have been sorted by area and stored in archival boxes.
We have continued to liaise closely with the Enfield Local Studies Library and Archives, transferring some material which is more appropriately held in their collections and passing on appropriate enquiries. We have provided information from our own resources in response to several enquiries, on topics such as industries, pubs and other buildings, some of them from people who have seen our photograph collections on the internet.
The Society’s web site has been augmented by an e-commerce function, allowing people to view, order and pay for the full range of publications we have available for sale, and this has generated several orders. The Society’s discussion list on “Yahoo! Groups” continues to provide a useful forum for discussion between members and other interested people, including those in distant parts of the world, and it has been supplemented by an active presence on the “social media” sites Facebook and Twitter, thanks to the initiatives of Emma Halstead and Barbara Gare respectively.
Some of the trees on the allotment tree nursery have reached the size for planting out as planned. We have arranged for around 30 trees and shrubs, mixed species, to be planted on the Woodcroft Wildspace during its Tree planting Day on 16th March to assist with bringing this ambitious project to fruition. Enfield Homes have said that the replacement cherries for Lyndhurst Gardens should finally be planted out this year.
The short financial review part of the annual report was circulated to members with the Summer 2013 issue of TES news. The full Report and Financial Statements for the Year Ended 31 December 2012 will be available for inspection at the AGM.
| Last updated 2013-05-21 13:08 |
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