The Pinner Association
– The Voice of our Community
Harrow Council Electoral Services are currently conducting the Annual Canvass. As part of the Annual Canvass, we will be emailing certain properties where we hold an email address this Monday 6 September 2021.
This email will be sent from [email protected]
This is a genuine email sent out on behalf of the Council and is not spam.
Any resident who receives this email sand has further queries they can email [email protected]
Applications are now open to Harrow businesses to apply for a free stall to trade at the Pinner Welcome Back Market on Saturday 9th and Sunday 10th October.
Further details can be found on the council’s website via the link below:
Affinity Water are to undertake essential maintenance works on Chapel Lane between the 8th and 14th of September and Chapel Lane will be closed to through traffic during this time.
A huge Thank You all the volunteers who helped us to put on our 2021 season of Summer Band Concerts in Pinner Memorial Park on the last four Sundays. We carried on despite the weather and enjoyed four wonderful performances from the Harrow Steel Band, the Fats Rollini Jazz & Blues Band, the Stardust Big Band and today from Simply Gray. Our audiences obviously enjoyed these free open air concerts in the lovely surroundings of the park, as the generous donations to the West House and Heath Robinson Museum Trust charity who were collecting at the last two concerts demonstrated.
There is one person without whom none of the concerts would have happened – from obtaining the necessary permission from Harrow Council to use the park and booking all the bands to picking up litter, putting up and taking down the equipment, and litter picking before and after each concert, Julie Waller, Chair of the Pinner Association has been indefatigable and managed to keep smiling come rain or shine – so a special “Thank You” Julie from us all.
The Cannon Lane Post Office will reopen in it’s previous location at 88 Cannon Lane at 1pm on the 8th July 2021.
The services offered will include bill payment, cash withdrawals and foreign currency, postage, and home shopping collections and returns. The opening hours will be 8am to 5.30pm from Monday to Friday, and 8am to 12pm on Saturday.
Harrow Council Covid-19 Volunteers Meeting – Wednesday 2 June 6-7pm
Harrow Council’s Public Health team is organising a meeting for those who have signed up to be Covid-19 volunteers or those would like to do so. This is the second in a series of meetings for community members and residents who would like to be part of the effort in getting Harrow vaccinated by providing up to date information and resources to your family, friends and neighbours. If you are leading a community group, please be aware that this is for your members who are linked in to your group.
We are interested in calling upon even more people from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic backgrounds (including Eastern Europeans) to join us as volunteers. Covid-19 volunteers will be invited to regular monthly meetings with the Public Health team, receive priority up-to-date Covid-19 data, as well as relevant resources to help you communicate with your friends and family.
If you have already signed up to be a volunteer, you will receive an invite for this. Community members who would like to newly sign up as volunteers, please register at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdmjqGbYF4hw-Km3hOWvflHrpWTxK9Dfy3J4h_-EEnAN4dVzw/viewform
Harrow Council Covid Community Webinar – Wednesday 26 May 6.30pm to 7.30pm
This webinar is open to everyone who lives and works in Harrow and will be an opportunity to hear first-hand about the latest position around Covid cases – including the variant originating from India – in Harrow and how we are responding.
Our panellists will answer any questions you may have about the vaccine rollout, second doses of the vaccines, the protection they offer and the safety of vaccines for young people. There will be a Covid-19 update from Director of Public Health Carole Furlong and addresses from celebrated scientist Dr Donald Palmer, Associate Professor of Immunology at the University of London, and from Dr Genevieve Small, Chair of NHS Harrow Clinical Commissioning Group.
Join the webinar here or phone +44 203 481 5237 or +44 203 481 5240 (Webinar ID: 954 6361 2320, Passcode: 113983)
The Pinner Association understands that, as last year and due to the current Covid-19 pandemic restrictions, Pinner Fair will not be held on 2nd June 2021.
However, contrary to the “urban myth” that by not holding the fair the charter granting the right to hold a fair would lapse, this is not the case and therefore Pinner Fair could be held again in 2022 (Covid permitting).
The article below is taken from our magazine The Villager (edition 249, March 2021) and explains why Pinner Fair will continue in future despite the effect of the pandemic curtailing the festivities in 2020 and 2021:
Pinner Fair
Pat Clarke’s scholarly article in The Villager (edition 247, July 2020) about the Royal Charter establishing Pinner Fair in 1336 posed the question whether legislation would be required to abolish it. This set me thinking.
I remembered that when the Whitsun Bank Holiday was abolished in the 1960’s and replaced by the Spring Bank Holiday, Pinner Fair continued for some years to be held on the Wednesday following Whit Monday, which only occasionally fell on the Spring Bank Holiday. Particularly since school half-terms invariably include the Bank Holiday, this meant that attendance at the Fair was usually much lower than before the change in the Bank Holiday. I recalled that, some years later, the date of the Fair was changed to bring it in line with the Bank Holiday, although I could not remember when this happened.
Knowing that legal machinery existed to achieve this change, I was sure there would be a simple answer to Pat Clarke’s question and was prompted to re-read the late Jim Golland’s informative and entertaining book “Fair Enough”*. Sure enough, this provided the answer. Attempts to abolish the Fair have been made in the past but always without success.
The Fairs Act 1871 empowered the Home Secretary to abolish a fair if it was thought to be “unnecessary or injurious to the public” or that its abolition would be “for the convenience and advantage of the public”. Representations accordingly had to be made by the local magistrates. The passing of the Act precipitated the abolition in 1872 alone of some seventy fairs (including the one at neighbouring Harrow-on-the-Hill, which was alleged to be “to the detriment of the morals of the neighbourhood”). From 1894, the Act was amended so that representations to the Home Secretary were to be made by local councils rather than by local magistrates.
It was the Fairs Act of 1873 that empowered the Home Secretary to change the date of a fair. It was presumably pursuant to this Act that the Home Secretary of the day agreed, in 1972, to the change of the date of Pinner Fair from the Wednesday after Whitsun to the Wednesday after the Spring Bank Holiday. (It had at some previous time been changed from the 24th June and the Charter had originally provided for a three-day fair, from the 23rd to the 25th June.)
The answer to Pat Clarke’s question thus appears to be that Harrow Council would need to persuade the Home Secretary (no doubt in the face of vehement counter-representations by interested groups) that the Fair was “unnecessary or injurious to the public” or that its abolition would be “for the convenience and advantage of the public”. It could then be abolished pursuant to the Fairs Act 1871 (as amended). Given the enthusiasm of most Pinner inhabitants for their fair, and its increasing popularity with the public over a much wider area, however, let us hope that this never comes to pass!
Michael Treisman,
Pinner Local History Society.
The Heath Robinson Museum in Pinner Memorial Park is to feature in Michael Portillo’s programme at 6.30pm on BBC Two tomorrow evening (Wednesday 28th April) – even if the BBC seem to think it is in Hatch End rather than Pinner!
West Ruislip to Windsor
Great British Railway Journeys Series 12
Episode 3 of 15
Michael Portillo heads for leafy Hatch End, where he investigates an illustrator whose work was so popular in the 1920s and 30s that his name entered the English dictionary. William Heath Robinson’s great-nephew talks Michael through some of the mad contraptions the artist used to satirise technology.
Pinner Association members living in some roads in the Pinner South ward will be aware that quite a number of street trees have been felled over the past few months on account of age or disease. Cllr Richard Almond has been exploring with the Harrow Council Trees Officer the possibility of replacements for these trees. The offers of trees don’t always turn into fact, but Cllr. Almond has been told that the aim is to replace all the street trees felled for those reasons within three years and he has been invited to suggest specific locations so that they can be prioritised.
Cllr. Almond would welcome people to contact him via email to suggest potential sites in Pinner South for a replacement street tree where a street tree has been removed :
Cllr Almond will visit the sites put forward and compile a list, giving priority to the roads which now look the barest in general so that they can look forward to having some trees at least in the next planting season. He asks those suggesting potential sites for a replacement street tree to bear in mind the timescale given.