History
It is a small settlement located near to the junction of the M25 motorway with the A1(M) motorway and is perhaps more widely known because of the naming of the service station at that junction.
Potters Bar was originally a small settlement in the parish of South Mimms. Potters Bar became the location of the nearest railway station and eventually became much larger. Both Potters Bar and South Mimms were part of Middlesex until the creation of Greater London, which abolished the county of Middlesex in 1965. South Mimms was the northernmost village in Middlesex.
South Mimms parish was split in 1894 under the Local Government Act 1894 with the extreme southern tip forming South Mimms Urban parish in the Barnet Urban District and was transferred to Hertfordshire. This area now forms part of the London Borough of Barnet. The rest of the parish became the South Mimms Rural District, later renamed the Potters Bar Urban District.
South Mimms served as a home for Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands during her exile in World War II. A German air attack on South Mimms at this time narrowly missed her, killing two of her guards, an incident mentioned in her autobiography.
For many years Clare Hall Hospital was used as a tuberculosis sanatorium.
Read more about this topic: South Mimms
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it.”
—Lytton Strachey (1880–1932)
“To history therefore I must refer for answer, in which it would be an unhappy passage indeed, which should shew by what fatal indulgence of subordinate views and passions, a contest for an atom had defeated well founded prospects of giving liberty to half the globe.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)