London Borough of Barnet

This collection consists of a large number of planning applications relating to buildings in north Middlesex. They were submitted over nearly a century and kept by the planning departments of Finchley, Friern Barnet and Hendon, and after 1965, by the London Borough of Barnet.

Whenever someone wished to build a new property or make alterations to an existing building they had to submit copies of plans of the scheme to the relevant local authority for approval. This collection is made up entirely of these plans and any other documents that were submitted at the time.

The period covered by the applications, the end of the nineteenth century to the 1980s was one that saw huge changes in the areas around London. Middlesex, to the north of the capital, had been a largely rural county with few small towns during the reign of Queen Victoria, but it developed over a short period in the first decades of the new century into a sprawling suburban environment. Farms and isolated villas had, by the 1930s, given way to new roads, housing and light industry.