Author: News Team

Affinity Water are to undertake essential maintenance works on Chapel Lane between the 8th and 14th of September and Chapel Lane will be closed to through traffic during this time.

A huge Thank You all the volunteers who helped us to put on our 2021 season of Summer Band Concerts in Pinner Memorial Park on the last four Sundays.  We carried on despite the weather and enjoyed four wonderful performances from the Harrow Steel Band, the Fats Rollini Jazz & Blues Band, the Stardust Big Band and today from Simply Gray.   Our audiences obviously enjoyed these free open air concerts in the lovely surroundings of the park, as the generous donations to the West House and Heath Robinson Museum Trust charity who were collecting at the last two concerts demonstrated.

There is one person without whom none of the concerts would have happened – from obtaining the necessary permission from Harrow Council to use the park and booking all the bands to picking up litter, putting up and taking down the equipment, and litter picking before and after each concert, Julie Waller, Chair of the Pinner Association has been indefatigable and managed to keep smiling come rain or shine – so a special “Thank You” Julie from us all.

The Cannon Lane Post Office will reopen in it’s previous location at 88 Cannon Lane at 1pm on the 8th July 2021.

The services offered will include bill payment, cash withdrawals and foreign currency, postage, and home shopping collections and returns.   The opening hours will be 8am to 5.30pm from Monday to Friday, and 8am to 12pm on Saturday.

The Pinner Association understands that, as last year and due to the current Covid-19 pandemic restrictions, Pinner Fair will not be held on 2nd June 2021.

However, contrary to the “urban myth” that by not holding the fair the charter granting the right to hold a fair would lapse, this is not the case and therefore Pinner Fair could be held again in 2022 (Covid permitting).

The article below is taken from our magazine The Villager (edition 249, March 2021) and explains why Pinner Fair will continue in future despite the effect of the pandemic curtailing the festivities in 2020 and 2021:

Pinner Fair

Pat Clarke’s scholarly article in The Villager (edition 247, July 2020) about the Royal Charter establishing Pinner Fair in 1336 posed the question whether legislation would be required to abolish it.  This set me thinking.

I remembered that when the Whitsun Bank Holiday was abolished in the 1960’s and replaced by the Spring Bank Holiday, Pinner Fair continued for some years to be held on the Wednesday following Whit Monday, which only occasionally fell on the Spring Bank Holiday.  Particularly since school half-terms invariably include the Bank Holiday, this meant that attendance at the Fair was usually much lower than before the change in the Bank Holiday.  I recalled that, some years later, the date of the Fair was changed to bring it in line with the Bank Holiday, although I could not remember when this happened.

Knowing that legal machinery existed to achieve this change, I was sure there would be a simple answer to Pat Clarke’s question and was prompted to re-read the late Jim Golland’s informative and entertaining book “Fair Enough”*.  Sure enough, this provided the answer.  Attempts to abolish the Fair have been made in the past but always without success.

The Fairs Act 1871 empowered the Home Secretary to abolish a fair if it was thought to be “unnecessary or injurious to the public” or that its abolition would be “for the convenience and advantage of the public”.  Representations accordingly had to be made by the local magistrates.  The passing of the Act precipitated the abolition in 1872 alone of some seventy fairs (including the one at neighbouring Harrow-on-the-Hill, which was alleged to be “to the detriment of the morals of the neighbourhood”).  From 1894, the Act was amended so that representations to the Home Secretary were to be made by local councils rather than by local magistrates.

It was the Fairs Act of 1873 that empowered the Home Secretary to change the date of a fair.  It was presumably pursuant to this Act that the Home Secretary of the day agreed, in 1972, to the change of the date of Pinner Fair from the Wednesday after Whitsun to the Wednesday after the Spring Bank Holiday.  (It had at some previous time been changed from the 24^th June and the Charter had originally provided for a three-day fair, from the 23rd to the 25^th June.)

The answer to Pat Clarke’s question thus appears to be that Harrow Council would need to persuade the Home Secretary (no doubt in the face of vehement counter-representations by interested groups) that the Fair was “unnecessary or injurious to the public” or that its abolition would be “for the convenience and advantage of the public”.  It could then be abolished pursuant to the Fairs Act 1871 (as amended).  Given the enthusiasm of most Pinner inhabitants for their fair, and its increasing popularity with the public over a much wider area, however, let us hope that this never comes to pass!

Michael Treisman,

Pinner Local History Society.

 

 

The Heath Robinson Museum in Pinner Memorial Park is to feature in Michael Portillo’s programme at 6.30pm on BBC Two tomorrow evening (Wednesday 28^th April) – even if the BBC seem to think it is in Hatch End rather than Pinner!

 

West Ruislip to Windsor

Great British Railway Journeys Series 12

Episode 3 of 15

Michael Portillo heads for leafy Hatch End, where he investigates an illustrator whose work was so popular in the 1920s and 30s that his name entered the English dictionary.  William Heath Robinson’s great-nephew talks Michael through some of the mad contraptions the artist used to satirise technology.

 

Pinner Association members living in some roads in the Pinner South ward will be aware that quite a number of street trees have been felled over the past few months on account of age or disease.  Cllr Richard Almond has been exploring with the Harrow Council Trees Officer the possibility of replacements for these trees.   The offers of trees don’t always turn into fact, but Cllr. Almond has been told that the aim is to replace all the street trees felled for those reasons within three years and he has been invited to suggest specific locations  so that they can be prioritised.

Cllr. Almond would welcome people to contact him via email to suggest potential sites in Pinner South for a replacement street tree where a street tree has been removed :

[email protected]

Cllr Almond will visit the sites put forward and compile a list, giving priority to the roads which now look the barest in general so that they can look forward to having some trees at least in the next planting season.  He asks those suggesting potential sites for a replacement street tree to bear in mind the timescale given.

Thank you to Harrow Council and their Highways Infrastructure Team for relaying the paths in Pinner Village Gardens and for now working on the paths in Pinner Memorial Park.

The paths in these parks had become very worn and uneven and as these parks have been heavily used since the first Covid lockdown in March the resurfaced paths will be welcomed by park users.