Look who's come to Pinner

Posted by IMR on 15 November 2009

CONTRARY TO LONDON’S stereotype as a grey Limbo of wailing sirens, many of the city’s inhabitants live the suburban life in the twenty outer boroughs, serenaded by birdsong, ice cream vans and jet airliners.

Pinner is an attractive and prosperous suburb in north-west London. The bells of St John the Baptist were summoning a respectable-sized congregation at eleven o’clock this morning, but I wasn’t near enough to record them well. Here they are striking noon:

The Roman Catholic church nearby also set its single bell tolling, whilst all was silent at the Christian Science reading room on Elm Park Road. Inside the Queen’s Head pub on the High Street, there was a busy hubbub from men chatting at the bar and families eating their Sunday dinner:

The six foot-wide River Pinn has to sneak through and under the centre of Pinner, its tawny, guttural water boxed into a concrete culvert. In the fields to the east it flows as a clear stream over gravel: