At the crest of a hill on the lane stood an old, spacious Victorian farmhouse named Holbrook House. One day in January of that year a small noticeboard was erected in the hedge of the adjoining field. It announced:
|
By
the authority of the Bishop of London |
Thus, the history of John Keble Church began.
Deans Lane was not to remain a country by-way for many months longer. Already many of the wooded acres of Middlesex countryside were being rapidly devoured by new building and the tiny village settlements in the area were losing their identity beneath the tide of surburban development. Edgware had been first reached by rail as early as 1906 (on the old Great Northern steam line from Finchley, now closed altogether to passenger traffic). But it was not until the advent of the motor bus and the electric underground railway (which reached Edgware in 1927) that the Commuter Age was properly born in North-West Middlesex. The neat neo-Palladian stations of the Northern Line with the familiar red buses in their forecourts were sometimes optimistically placed among green fields at their opening, but the ease of the journey to London spawned great areas of estate development within twenty years.
The Diocese of London, not unaware of the problems in pastoral care that these new areas involved, planned to build forty-five new churches to deal with the changing pattern of settlement and they set up a fund to raise money for them. One of the new churches was to be midway between The Hale (a district which has become more familiarly known by the name of the erstwhile public house at its junction, “The Green Man”), Edgware and Mill Hill.
The first move was to buy the old Holbrook House and the paddock field adjoining it. It was rented to a retired businessman (who was to become one of the wardens) and in January 1932 the first Priestin-Charge of the parish moved in as a lodger there. This was the Rev. O. H. Gibbs-Smith, an able, young, bachelor priest, who was appointed by the Bishop of London in late 1931.
The first vicar Rev. O.H.Gibbs-Smith with the Queen Mother