“Most of the people who sleep inside the bounds of the ancient and extensive manor of Roxeth call it South Harrow. They know next to nothing of its boundaries, its traditions, and its history. To them it is not a heritage but a characterless extension of London's dormitory with the usual complement of shops, buses, a cinema and a station. The station is blatantly but wrongly named South Harrow. I was therefore an ill day for Roxeth and its good name...”

T.L. Bartlett was born and bred in the locality when Roxeth was a peaceful agricultural village nourishing a very real community life and spirit. He had seen the district grow into a vast dormitory suburb of Greater London with nearly all the fields and water meadows (where once he and his friends used to wander watching the birds), covered by houses and criss-crossed by concrete roads until little is left of open space for the children of the present.

This is a history, as far back as the evidence of records can inform, of a small rural corner of the old county of Middlesex which in time would be absorbed without fuss into the concept of Metro-land expansion and, officially, the suburban Greater London Borough of Harrow. It is a local story but one which could be repeated for many parts of the world subsumed by progress and urban expansion.