St Mary's Church has stood on this hill since the 13th century. Search for Hendon today and the results are far more likely to be about a shopping centre eight minutes away by car.

Hendon

Church End, Hendon Central and Middlesex University: a hilltop parish with a shopping centre's name attached to it by accident of geography.

Hendon became an urban district in 1894 and a Municipal Borough in 1932, absorbed into the London Borough of Barnet in 1965, but the name is far older than either: it is recorded as an ancient manor and parish of Middlesex, meaning 'at the highest hill'. St Mary's Church in Church End carries 13th-century fabric and a tower of around 1450, and holds the grave of Sir Stamford Raffles, founder of Singapore in 1819 - the kind of fact that gives Hendon a genuinely international footnote most NW4 postcodes do not have.

The Northern line reached here in 1923-24, and Hendon Central station was built specifically at the junction of the new Watford Way and the road linking Brent Street to the older Midland Railway station on the far side of the district. Middlesex University's Hendon campus traces back to the Hendon Technical Institute, which ran from 1937 to 1939 before becoming Hendon Polytechnic in 1973. Both the station and Middlesex University's Hendon campus sit around Hendon Central, a genuinely separate commercial point from the shopping centre eight minutes away by car that happens to share the older parish name.

That shared name is the whole problem for a business trying to be found here. A search for 'Hendon' returns two very different places to a customer who does not already know the difference, and a website that never says which one it means loses the customer looking for the church, the station or the campus to one looking for a shopping centre car park instead.