Lakeside Nature Reserve is a small Site of Local Importance for Nature Conservation in Church End, Finchley in the London Borough of Barnet. Its main feature is a pond which was constructed in the late 1890s by Peter Edmund Kay as a reservoir to store rainwater for commercial greenhouses in the Claigmar Vineyard, a large market garden in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.[1][2][3] The pond has a fountain and plants fringing the shore include water mint, gypsywort and purple-loosestrife. Waterfowl nest on a small island, and dragonflies are present in the summer.[4]
There is no public access but it can be viewed from a footpath off Strathmore Gardens.
References
[edit]- ^ Miles, Dudley (February 2024). "Claigmar Vineyard in Finchley: Commercial Grape Growing in the Ninetheenth and early Twentieth Centuries". The Local Historian: 34, 36.
- ^ Financial Times, 29 January 1904, p. 8
- ^ Ordnance Survey 26 inches to a mile Mid-Finchley Map, 1911
- ^ Hewlett, Jan; et al. (1997). Nature Conservation in Barnet. London Ecology Unit. p. 94. ISBN 1-871045-27-4.