Your HA8 postcode has been a through-route for two thousand years, and it's still built for people passing through rather than stopping.

Edgware

HA8's Tube terminus sits on a road line two thousand years old.

Edgware is first recorded in the 970s as 'Aegces wer', meaning 'Ecgi's weir'; the spelling had become 'Edggeware' by the Tudor period. Edgware Road follows the line of the Roman road Watling Street, later used by medieval pilgrims, and Roman pottery-making has been found nearby at Brockley Hill, a possible site of the Roman settlement of Sulloniacis. Edgware's ancient parish was abolished and merged with Hendon in 1931, and today the area covers parts of three London boroughs: Barnet, Harrow and Brent.

Edgware Underground station opened in 1924 as one of the Northern line's northern termini, and the effect on the town was immediate: the ancient parish, which had a population of 1,516 at the 1921 Census, recorded 58,619 residents at the 2011 Census. The Broadwalk Centre, originally the Mall Shopping Centre, opened in 1990, and St Margaret of Antioch on Station Road is the town's parish church. A railway line to Finsbury Park, built in 1867, carried passengers until 1939 and goods until 1964, evidence of just how much of Edgware's history has been about carrying people and goods through rather than settling them.

That history is exactly what a business here is up against: a customer arriving off the Northern line or driving in along Edgware Road doesn't automatically know which side of the station, or which stretch of the road, your business is actually on. A site that names the station, the Broadwalk Centre or St Margaret of Antioch as a fixed reference point does the work a passer-by would otherwise do.