Pinner was just a name until the other week when I caught a glimpse of its high street from the H13 bus I was on travelling from Ruislip lido (see my post at https://longoio3.com/2020/06/15/londons-best-beach/). I was amazed at how a Greater London suburb could produce something so much like a rural village scene with its half-timbered buildings and church tower at the top of the hilly street.

We returned to Pinner for the mundane but exceedingly necessary task of collecting a toaster from its Argos store nestled within a Sainsbury conveniently close to the station on the Metropolitan line so eloquently hymned by the heritage writer John Betjeman.

Pinner dates back to the tenth century when it was first recorded as a hamlet called Pinnora after the river Pinn which runs through the town and which can be glimpsed in a handerchief of a garden on the main road.

The parish church of St John the Baptist dates back to the fourteenth century and there are domestic dwellings surviving from the sixteenth century.

However, it was with the coming of the Metropolitan railway that Pinner expanded rapidly, especially during the inter-war period when a number of significant art-deco flats and houses were built. Here’s one I spotted, the grade II listed Elm Court with its graceful entrance arch.

Pinner is a traditional home of retired colonels and stockbrokers and it’s clearly an affluent part of London with leafy avenues and large houses but I didn’t find it particularly snooty or pretentious unlike other ‘affluent ‘areas such as Hampstead or Belgravia.

Strangely Pinner has no Waitrose, an iconic sign of gentility if there ever was one, but surprisingly it possesses a very well stocked Lidl discount store at the top of its high street instead.

We came across a fine fish and chip shop and, with one of the largest cods we’ve seen in a long time, headed to the delightful Pinner memorial park nearby.

Formerly the garden of a large house known as West House, once owned by Horatia, the daughter of Horatio Nelson and Lady Hamilton, the park is small but perfectly formed.

It has a fine collection of tall pines and other more exotic trees harking back to the park’s history,

a sweet duck pond,

a cafe (now open for take-aways) and a museum dedicated to Pinner’s best known past inhabitant Heath Robinson, the cartoonist who drew those wonderfully devised machines with such complex pulleys and wheels to perform the simplest of tasks like the one for an easier way of conveying green peas to the mouth,

the tabby silencer, which automatically throws water at serenading cats

and the one for testing artificial teeth.

Unfortunately the museum, which also hosts contemporary art exhibitions still remained closed at the time of our visit – a good reason to return.

The Memorial garden are so called because they also contain within West House a memorial to all those killed in the two wars.

With its annual street market, one of the few places left in the UK that still holds one, the lowest crime record in all London, its good schools, its Carluccio Italian restaurant, its balanced ethnic mix, its wide variety of individual shops, its high life-expectancy rate and its healthy climate Pinner is clearly an attractive place to investigate.

Next time I think I’ll explore some of the town’s art deco treasures and also take in the expansive Pinner country park…and, of course, have another delicious fish ‘n chips from the five-star rated ‘Ideal Fish Bar’.