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Muswell Hill used to be where you lived if you couldn't afford a large enough house in Hampstead or Highgate - a solidly respectable but hardly trendy area and a long walk from the nearest station.

Now, this attractive, Edwardian hilltop suburb is one of the most fashionable parts of north London, thanks partly to successive property booms which have jacked up prices in Hampstead and Highgate. Muswell Hill is now a more-than-acceptable alternative, both for middle-class families, who love the handsome period houses, nearby parks and good schools, and for younger working people who buy flats in converted houses and spend their evenings in the pubs and bars along the Broadway.

Media, film and TV types are thick on the ground - the soprano Lesley Garrett, the journalist and author Andrew Motion, and Radio 4 World Tonight broadcaster Robin Lustig, are just a few of the people you may bump into in Sainsbury's in Fortis Green Road.

But Muswell Hill isn't just any old place, as loyal residents will tell you. This is an area with a real community, almost certainly the result of being physically isolated at the top of a steep hill with no train or Tube station. People know each other to speak to in the street and they know the shopkeepers. The shops, fortunately, are still real shops like butchers, greengrocers and bookshops, rather than chains. (When you do get chains, people log onto Muswell Hill's community website www.muswell-hill.com to complain - the arrival of a new Woolworths was the signal for a flood of invective in the chat room.) Once people move in, they don't move out, they just trade up or down, a couple of roads away.

For many long-standing residents, the strong community is one of the area's biggest attractions. It may not be as rich as Hampstead but it's much friendlier, they say. "Muswell Hill has become more middle class," says 34-year-old Marcus Zentner, who was brought up there and who now runs his own local property search company, Zentner Property Search. "But it's still got a good mix of people. I've got an office in my parents' house and our neighbours have been there for 20 years. Muswell Hill is real and unpretentious."

Not everyone agrees. Kate Nicholls, who also grew up in Muswell Hill and now works as an estate agent nearby, says: "I loved growing up in Muswell Hill because of the villagey atmosphere and everyone knowing each other. But there are a lot more trendy shops now and it's got a lot more pretentious." And one long-established estate agent, who prefers to remain anonymous, accuses residents of being "self-congratulatory champagne socialists who complain bitterly about the council but vote labour and object in principle to any development".

History and architecture

Muswell Hill's main claim to fame before the end of the 19th century was as a spa, with a well which was supposed to contain healing properties.

It was popular as a rural retreat, with the well-off building themselves elegant country villas as bolt holes from the polluted city. But attempts to capitalise on the extension of the railway from Highgate to Muswell Hill to serve Alexandra Palace by developing the roads round Alexandra Park were unsuccessful. That is, until James Edmundson, of Highbury, bought up The Limes estate, previously owned by CE Mudie, famous for creating travelling libraries. Edmundson and a fellow developer, WJ Collins, then bought up other estates and proceeded to lay out most of Muswell Hill as we know it today, between 1897 and 1914.

Unlike many other parts of London, Muswell Hill has survived, architecturally, almost intact, which is part of its appeal.

The buildings of the main shopping street, The Broadway, boast an almost unbroken line of late 19th/early 20th century gables and the streets off the Broadway are lined with large Edwardian houses, built of red brick with contrasting facings and ornate wooden balconies and porches. Muswell Hill is a conservation area, which has helped keep the double glazing salesmen at bay.

Where to look

The best parts of Muswell Hill are in streets nearest The Broadway and down towards Highgate station and Highgate Woods. The three most sought-after enclaves are the square of streets just north of the Broadway running towards Alexandra Park, the grid south of Fortis Green Road and the steep roads between Cranley Gardens and Onslow Gardens, running down towards Highgate and Crouch End, with great views towards central London. In these areas, you'd be lucky to pick up a four-bedroom family house for between £500,000 to £600,000. Less fashionable, but on the up, according to Chris Stone, of agents Prickett and Ellis (020 8883 9797), is the far side of Alexandra Park Road, where some of the roads are named after lakes in the Lake District.

Prickett and Ellis is selling a five-bedroom Edwardian semi-detached house in Cranbourne Road for £575,000. A seven-bedroom house in Alexandra Park Road is selling for £429,000. You can get a two-bedroom flat for as little as £120,000, but a decent flat will cost between £180,000 and £240,000. Prickett and Ellis has a conversion flat in an attractive Edwardian house in Queen's Avenue, off The Broadway, for £194,950.

The local historian

Carola Zentner has lived in Muswell Hill for 36 years, quite long enough to know that a little book called The Insider's Guide to Muswell Hill,Crouch End, Highgate and East Finchley would go down a storm with her fellow residents. And so it proved. The book, now in its third edition, is every hard pressed middle class family's dream, full of helpful information on everything from where to find the best local nannies, prep schools and home tutors to recommendations for a good plumber or restaurant. "It started when someone mentioned a shop in Muswell Hill to me which was within a mile of where we'd been living for the last 25 years.

And I thought, how extraordinary: what else is there around here which I know nothing about?" says Carola. "So I set out to find what else was of interest. I decided to please only myself and write about places which were unusual or offered value. Every place is known to me or recommended. And it went down a treat." But an attempt to produce a similar guide for Hampstead, where the Zentners had lived before moving to Muswell Hill, failed. "Hampstead doesn't have a community like Muswell Hill. Muswell Hill has everything you need for daily life."

 

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