Norwood Green

Norwood Green is a Middlesex village that London swallowed and forgot to chew, so the green, the church and a listed pub pulling beer by hand came through intact. Brunel stacked a road on a canal on a railway at Three Bridges, and the rest of the place works on the same principle: village underneath, suburb on top, and the M4 and Heathrow close enough to hear about it. Since then the police station and the post office have shut and the bowling green has gone, which is how a village keeps its looks and loses its uses. Gordon Selfridge once lived in the Georgian house facing the green, and anyone hoping for his sort of shopping on the doorstep has turned up about a century late.