This centre has traded under three different names before the one people use today. A windmill became an inn, and the inn was renamed twice before North Finchley took shape around it.

North End, the old name for this area, was first recorded in 1462; Thomas Rawson built a windmill and house here in 1627, which had become an inn known as the Windmill by 1722 and was renamed the Swan with Two Nicks in 1754. The Municipal Borough of Finchley, created in 1932, was abolished into the London Borough of Barnet in 1965. Around that shifting name grew Christ Church, built from 1864 and a separate parish by 1872, Finchley Lido, an Art Deco outdoor pool that opened in 1931 and hosted 1948 Olympic water polo before closing in 1992, Finchley Memorial Hospital, opened as an 18-bed cottage hospital in 1908, Coppetts Wood, a surviving remnant of the medieval Finchley Wood, and Woodhouse College, renamed from Woodhouse Grammar School in 1925. The comedian Spike Milligan lived on Holden Road, and Private John Parr, the first British soldier killed in the First World War, lived at 52 Lodge Lane. A business here is competing for attention inside a place whose own identity has already shifted several times, so we design, build, host and manage a website for £49.99 a month that names your actual street or building precisely, and we can work on your Google visibility once it is live.

Illustration: a customer in North Finchley types “physiotherapist north finchley lodge lane” into a search engine. No position or result is implied.