Southgate,
Coming Home

Finsbury Park. Start here, properly.

This is your on-the-way stop, chosen because the assumed base is Finsbury Park and the Fullback sits between your bed and the Piccadilly line. If your base changes, this stop changes with it, so tell me where you are sleeping and I will pick a different warm-up.

The Faltering Fullback on Perth Road is an Irish family-run pub with one of London's best beer gardens: a rambling, rickety multi-level structure of wooden platforms and hanging plants that seems structurally impossible and completely perfect. It should not work. It works. There is a Thai kitchen inside, real ales on tap, sport on the screens and quiz nights.

The park itself is large and genuinely good, boating lake, proper open grass, the kind of Victorian city park London does better than anywhere. Walk through it toward the tube. A decent warm-up for the day.

Finsbury Park's boating lake · walk through the park toward the tube to start the day on grass, not pavement.

The most beautiful tube station in London. Few people know.

On the Piccadilly line heading north from Finsbury Park, sit on the left side of the carriage. The views through the above-ground sections, rooftops, back gardens, the gradual loosening of the city into suburb, are better on that side. It takes about 15 minutes. Watch it go past.

When you come out at Southgate, stop. Just stop and look at it. The station was designed by Charles Holden and opened in 1933, a perfect cylindrical drum topped with a flat concrete canopy and an illuminated lantern finial. It is Grade II* listed, regraded up from Grade II in 2009. It belongs to the great Holden set on this line: Arnos Grove, Oakwood, Cockfosters. Even the bus station was Holden-designed. Most people walk straight past it.

Give it ten minutes. Walk around the full drum. Look up at the canopy and the lantern. Notice how the whole thing reads as one unified object, no fussiness, just one clean idea executed without compromise. For a building that is, functionally, a staircase and a ticket hall, it is a remarkable thing to have made. This is also the station Antoine left from on his first journeys into the city.

Conway Road. This isn't a tourist stop.
This is the street.

There is nothing here that any travel guide would tell you to see. Which is exactly why you are here.

Antoine was born in Southgate. He grew up on Conway Road, off Chase Side near the station. He walked this pavement every day for the years that formed him, to school, to the park, to the corner shop, to the tube. Boyd, this is what that looked like. This is the ordinary geography of your son's childhood.

The grounding matters here. Southgate is an established North London suburb in N14 that grew up around the 1933 Piccadilly line extension, with Holden's station as its civic centrepiece. This stretch sits in the older, leafier Minchenden and Lakes Estate character: interwar and earlier suburban housing, tree-lined, quietly intact. It was built to be lived in, not looked at, and it still is.

Walk it slowly. Notice the rhythm of a North London residential street that has not been flattened by gentrification because it never needed to be. It was already good. Let Antoine point out what is his: the house, the route to school, the way the street meets the park. Some things do not need commentary. Antoine leads. You follow.

The history is genuinely good. The walled garden was first laid out in the early 17th century, and the south-east boundary walls are old brick, C16 to C18, listed Grade II. The park was once the site of James I's hunting lodge, Broomfield House, no longer standing, and it still holds the remnant of a rare 18th-century baroque water garden. The volunteer 'Friends of Broomfield Park' revived the conservatory, the herbaceous borders and the lakes, and there is a community orchard on a former bowling green.

The thing worth finding is that walled garden. Go through the gate, spend some time. It is peaceful in the way that only places with no agenda can be. The park cafe is a reasonable coffee stop before you continue, though hours are seasonal, so check on arrival rather than counting on it.

London's best-kept food corridor. You don't need to go anywhere else tonight.

Green Lanes, running through Harringay and Palmers Green, is one of the most significant Turkish and Kurdish dining areas in the country. The word to know is ocakbasi, the charcoal-grill restaurants set up by Turkish and Kurdish immigrants from the 1970s and 80s. This is not a curated food market. It is a genuine community food corridor that has fed people well for decades and stays stubbornly uncommercialised.

What to order: start with hot mezze, hummus, sucuk, halloumi, with bread straight from the clay oven. Then either the lamb shish at Selale or a mixed grill at Gokyuzu. Ayran to drink. Come hungry, this is a proper meal.

Green Lanes at street level · Turkish-owned shops and grills shoulder to shoulder. This is what an uncommercialised food corridor looks like.