Hendon Central, like all stations north from Golders Green, is a surface station - the tracks enter twin tunnels a short distance further north on the way to Colindale. When it was built it stood in 'lonely glory amid fields', as one writer puts it, south of the old village of Hendon.

Hendon Central station is a Grade II listed building, designed in a neo-Georgian style by Stanley Heaps, who also designed Brent Cross tube station in a similar style, with a prominent portico featuring a Doric colonnade.

The fact that the area was largely undeveloped allowed a hitherto unusual degree of coordination between the station and the surrounding buildings that were constructed over the next few years. The station was intended to be the centre and a key architectural feature of a new suburban town; it faces a circus 73 metres in diameter that is intersected by four approach roads which provide access to all parts of Hendon and the surrounding areas beyond. For many years this was a roundabout known as ’Central Circus’; however it is now a very busy crossroads controlled by traffic signals.

Hendon Central Circus had been built on a bend on a tiny road once called Butcher's Lane. Butcher's Lane had been officially renamed Queen's Road for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1887 but the name change hadn't reached the mapmakers of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Ordnance Survey - the map did not yet reflect the new moniker.

The lane connected Brent Street to the Burroughs. The OS map shows that  two large houses - Brent Lodge and Foster House flanked the lane at the Brent Street end. From here, the lane ran due west, past a small farm called Stoney Farm to form a junction with Gutters Hedge Lane. Gutters Hedge Lane ran originally from the Edgware Road in the area of the Welsh Harp.

At the future site of Hendon Central, Butcher's Lane bent to the northwest and continued past Burroughs Farm towards the Burroughs itself and Hendon 'proper'.



Butchers Lane, looking south in the early 1900s (click image to enlarge)


This bucolic scene would remain largely untouched until the 1920s. In that decade, two transport developments were planned together.

In the 1830s, the Finchley Road had been built to bypass the steep hills and congestion of Hampstead. Nearly a century later, Finchley - or rather the Great North Road (A1) already needed its own bypass. Thus Hendon Way and Watford Way were planned.

A series of other arterial roads were laid out this part in north London. The North Circular Road was built along the as-yet undeveloped (due to its regular flooding) course of the River Brent, to complement the Hendon/Watford Way (A41) and the Great North Way (A1).

Further north, at Fiveways Circus, the new A41 and A1 combined for a while for a trip through Mill Hill, before dividing again at Apex Corner.

Meanwhile, finally the long planned northward extension of the Northern Line was finally constructed in the years up to and including 1923. From the old terminus at Golders Green, recently built houses there had to be demolished before the new line started to run across fields. The first station north was named Brent, serving the new Hendon greyhound stadium - itself later the site of Brent Cross Shopping Centre.

Next came Hendon Central  before the new line entered a tunnel immediately to the north of the new station, re-emerging before Colindale station and then Burnt Oak station before a new terminus at Edgware.

That bend in Butcher's Lane became the site of Hendon Central Circus, with the new station built on the circus itself. Queen's Road ran east towards Brent Street along the course of the land. Along the line of the rest of Butcher's Lane and Gutters Hedge Lane became Watford Way.

To get some 1900-era bearings, let's take a look at the area as mapped then:





 

The G.P. marker on the old map is more or less in the centre of the future Hendon Central Circus.

The next photo is a bit of a mystery. It is recorded as depicting the bend in Butcher's Lane and if correct it would date from 1921.

Possibly the following is true: It is as viewed from the west. Taken now, the photographer would be standing at the end of Vivian Avenue looking across the Circus and pointing the camera down Queen's Road.

Tracking down exactly what we are seeing, we have had to use a little bit of photographic forensics. This is because there is a building - the wooden one depicted - which is not there on the 1900-era map (nor on a 1914 map come to that). We have to look at other contemporary photographs - there is one in the London Transport Museum Collection
entitled "Future site of Hendon Central Underground station" and includes the same wooden building.

Additionally we are positioned at the end of a road emerging from behind us which also shouldn't be there, according to the old 1900 map. Vivian Avenue however preceded the 1920s development, built just before the First World War to link to Hendon (Midland) station, the 1890s Schweppes factory in West Hendon and to begin to exploit the land of Sir Audley Neeld.

If this is so, there is a large tree on the left of the photo which would roughly be on the site of the station. The signpost towards the centre-right of the photo marks the then end of Gutters Hedge Lane which leads from its junction, along modern Watford Way before a bend towards the Edgware Road where Gutters Hedge Lane becomes the modern Park Road. The sign in the photo at the end of this lane reads <something> Way, presumably Hendon.

But all this is conjecture since there are things which don't match up. "Bucolic scene" above should include the trees beside the signpost right at the bend which it doesn't - Vivian Avenue would have been driven through the scene however. Queen's Road snaking into the distance seems to bend too much, , there's a fence on the right in photo 1 but on the left in photo 2 and the first word in the sign does not seem long enough to say "Hendon". In favour of the conjecture, no other angles would match up.















Writing in 1932, William Passingham commended the integrated approach taken at Hendon Central as an outstanding example of the co-ordination of road-planning with passenger station requirements. He noted, only nine years after the station opened, that it had already become the centre of an ever-widening cluster of new houses.