It was one of the more Jewish of London’s suburbs for decades. But while physically Southgate is largely unchanged – it’s still street after street of semis interspersed with parks – its Jewish population has seemingly disappeared.
When we first moved from inner to outer London, 25 years ago as new parents, we were conscious that we were coming to what we perceived as a significantly Jewish neighbourhood. Perhaps not one as overtly so as Stamford Hill, where I’d also previously lived, or Hendon, Golders Green or Ilford, but not far off. And admittedly even then Southgate’s Jews were outnumbered by Greek Cypriot and English native families, though not by a huge amount. And still it had that image.
There had long been famous Jewish children of Southgate, pin-ups to make the point to wider London about the area’s social make-up: Alan Coren, Ron Moody and David – later Lord – Puttnam, who had been a school acquaintance of my father-in-law many years earlier.
But my father-in-law’s best friend in school days was another Jewish son of Southgate who also had a successful showbusiness career, if not one quite so stellar, a young man called Keith Gold.
They were classmates together at the long-vanished Minchenden Boys Grammar near Southgate Green in the early Fifties before, by now under the working name Leonard, Keith wrote what would be an enormously successful Eighties TV sitcom, Me and My Girl, about the struggles of a single dad, played by the recently deceased Richard O’Sullivan. It ran for six series.
I moved to the area myself in the summer of 2000. Initially we were adjacent to Southgate rather than in it, living in neighbouring Palmers Green, but all three of our children went to both primary and secondary school there so it was always a daily part of our lives – and then nine years ago we finally moved there proper.
I was charmed on arrival to find our new house was just a few doors down from Amy Winehouse’s childhood home. I had always known she had been local but not this local. And I recalled the day of her funeral in 2011 – when, doing the afternoon school run, I witnessed the incongruous spectacle of numbers of journalists, many of whom I knew, congregating outside Southgate Progressive Synagogue, which is just up the hill from our children’s primary school.
Amy was one of a younger generation of Southgate Jews who would also find fame, along with Rob Rinder, and fellow pop star Rachel Stevens. All three went to the same primary school also just up the road from us, Osidge.
Southgate’s Jewishness was, of course, to us non-Jews, particularly noticeable on Saturdays when formally dressed older family groups would be out walking to or from synagogue. Now this has almost completely disappeared. It only really lingers as a visual spectacle in neighbouring Cockfosters these days.
Yet as recently as 2017, when we moved into our current place, one of our nearest shops, among a cluster on Hampden Square, was Permutters, selling smoked salmon, matzot, pickles and so on. But it closed for good within months. During shop renovations on that same corner later a ghost sign briefly emerged from an old business that older locals recalled as a purveyor of Jewish ladies’ schmutter. A journalist colleague who grew up near to where I now live, in the Seventies and Eighties, recalled the place 50 years ago as thriving: “I would go to Davis, the lovely deli on Hampden Square, which is now a Tesco, with my mum as a kid. The lovely shopkeeper would give me slices of wurst – or voosht in Yiddish.
“There also used to be kosher butchers on Ashfield Parade behind Southgate station and another on Bowes Road. Both now long gone.
“I had my barmitzvah at the shul known as Southgate and Palmers Green Synagogue in Brownlow Road. Of course, the importance of having two shuls is for one that you go to – and one that you wouldn’t be seen dead in. Cockfosters and North Southgate shul in Old Farm Avenue performed the latter role for us – and for everyone else at Brownlow Road.”
The shop closures occurred as other social groups came to the area – particularly Poles, Romanians, Bulgarians and, most recently, Albanians. The Jewish population, meanwhile, seems to have correspondingly thinned out. I’m not sure we have any Jewish neighbours left on Amy’s old street now.
What seems to have happened is that older Jews, after raising their families, moved further out still – to Borehamwood, Bushey or Radlett, while their by now-adult children moved back into more central London (where their grandparents had lived) or further afield altogether.
Take Keith Gold’s family history: he was born in the East End – Stepney – and moved to Southgate as a boy when his upwardly mobile parents wanted somewhere nicer. Now, like his boyhood friend, my father-in-law, he is deceased and his daughter – the model for that character in his TV show Me and My Girl – lives not in a semi in Southgate but in an apartment in Zone 1.
It’s almost as if Southgate was, in the end, simply a staging post for half a century of ongoing Jewish migration. And, apart from those now presumably quieter shuls and Wolfson Hillel Primary School, little now remains except memories and ghost signs. For me it’s a shame as the Jewish aspect had always been a big draw: the culture, the history, the food, the jokes. All cities are fluid like this, of course, with populations swelling and receding, becoming prominent or fading. But the diminishing of the Jewishness of Southgate has left a sadness behind for me.
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