The battle that gave a nearby town its name was actually fought on this green, and almost nobody searching for either place knows it.

Monken Hadley

Hadley Green, Hadley Common, Hadley Wood, and the church built in 1494.

“Hadley” comes from Old English for a woodland clearing covered in heather; “Monken” records the parish's historic ownership by the monks of Walden Abbey. The Battle of Barnet, fought on 14 April 1471, had its decisive fighting within this parish rather than in the town a mile south that later took the battle's name: action ran north into Hadley Wood and west across Hadley Green, and it was here that Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, was killed. St Mary the Virgin, Monken Hadley, was built in its present perpendicular Gothic form in 1494, with two transept chapels dedicated to St Anne and St Catherine, and almshouses founded by Sir Roger Wilbraham in 1616 still stand in the village for six “decayed housekeepers”.

Hadley Common includes a cricket field, home to Monken Hadley Cricket Club, and appears in the novels of Anthony Trollope, who lived in the parish. What Monken Hadley does not have, anywhere in its own sourced history, is a shopping parade, a market or a high street of any kind: the parish transferred to Hertfordshire in 1889, was split between Barnet and East Barnet Urban Districts in 1894, and was abolished into Greater London in 1965, and at every point of that history it remained a village of listed houses around a green and a common, not a trading centre.

That makes Monken Hadley the one place in this part of Barnet where a website is not competing with a shopfront at all: it is the shopfront. The decorators, gardeners, tutors and consultants who work this ground do it entirely from home addresses, on ground with genuine historic weight and no passing trade to lean on, so a plain, accurately named site with real photographs of finished work is doing every job a shop window would do anywhere else.