🛠️INSIDE Barnes2050: Where does Barnes begin and end?
Story 238: Trying to keep things real and simple
You can blame the politicians and the politically adjacent for this one.
Whenever she or he hears ‘Barnes’, they ask: which one? Barnes or Mortlake and Barnes Common? Wards.
Neither, actually.
Barnes in Barnes2050 usually means .. well, what I suspect most people who live here think it means.
Barnes.
The easiest explanation is the SW13 postcode boundary map, shown below.
Welcome to Barnes2050, a place-based futures project asking: how do we make sure Barnes - the place and its people - is thriving and climate-ready by 2050?
SW13 and WW1
Barnes2050 arrived at this geographic focus in two stages, first narrowing the geographic focus and then narrowing it again.
There’s something ironic about all this twisting and turning. Barnes2050 has ended up settling on a boundary that is more than a century old.
That longevity may be one reason SW13 feels so instinctively like Barnes. The boundary has been remarkably stable. SW13 is older than almost everyone who lives in it.
It dates back to March 1917. The General Post Office subdivided London’s existing lettered postal districts into numbered districts during the First World War. Barnes became SW13, with neighbouring Mortlake SW14 and Putney SW15.
(Postcode minutiae are a thing online. Geograph is a good example. Be warned: rabbit hole ahead.)
SW13 was then carried into the modern postcode system. The Post Office later introduced the full alphanumeric postcode — SW13 0xx, SW13 8xx, SW13 9xx etc. — as part of the national postcode programme rolled out during the 1960s and completed by 1974. It retained SW13 within the outward code.
Royal Mail assigns and maintains postcodes for postal addresses that belong to SW13. It does not officially define a legal district boundary in the same way that a borough or ward boundary does.
Boundary clarity .. or maybe not?
Barnes SW13 as a label has other advantages.
Many commercial and public datasets are available at postcode level, making research and comparisons easier.
And it excludes most of the edge cases around East Sheen, Mortlake and Putney.
Going forward, to avoid confusion, the first mention of Barnes in an article will be labelled as Barnes SW13. Every mention after that will simply be Barnes.
If the discussion relates to the political wards, that four letter word will appear: ward.
One other thing.
Where does Barnes end and Mortlake begin?
I thought I knew.
Then I saw this, behind Sainsbury’s on White Hart Lane.
In Barnes.
Or is it?
