Why is the Apex Corner roundabout called Apex Corner?

Northway Circus is the notoriously busy roundabout in north London that you have never heard of because you’ll know it by its nickname, Apex Corner.

But why is Northway Circus better known as Apex Corner?

Quite a few businesses around it use the Apex name, but they’re all named after the roundabout, not the other way around. There’s nothing locally called Apex, and old maps show the area as Gibbs Green, so there’s nothing to explain how Northway Circus gained its nickname.

It’s all down to a chap named John Mortimer Drysdale, who was born in 1886 and, when called up during WWI, joined the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) – the precursor of the Royal Air Force – rising to the rank of Major.

He was awarded the OBE in June 1918 for “services with the British Expeditionary Force in France”.

After the war, he stayed in the RAF, but once he left military service, having evidently gained a taste for the mechanical world and having some inheritance from the family, he looked to set up a car service station somewhere around his home in Golders Green.

That brings us to the newish Northway Circus, which had been built with shops and housing around it.

Spotting the business opportunity, John Drysdale secured an empty corner plot next to the roundabout for a service station. It’s not entirely clear whether he took over Daws Garage, which had been set up just down the road in 1924 and moved it to the new location, or whether they merged. Anyway, a new garage was built next to the roundabout in 1931.

He called it the Apex Garage & Filling Station – in this case, Apex means peak, as in the best locally.

For motorists, unsurprisingly, in an area with little else of note for motorists, the service station was the landmark they looked for, so the road junction/roundabout quickly became far better known as Apex Corner.

The nickname caught on quickly — the earliest written reference I can find is in The Times on 8th April 1936 and also in local news from August 1936 — when the still empty plot of land next to the garage was sold for development as housing.

You can see the garage as the low flat building next to the original roundabout in this 1952 photo.

The garage was probably rebuilt in the 1960s when the roundabout was massively enlarged to its current size, and the sunken pedestrian underpass was added. Frustratingly, every photo I have found of the roundabout’s rebuilding – and there are a lot of them – seems to have been taken from the garage roof, so we can’t see the garage itself.

Which is exceptionally annoying.

Sadly, John died in Barnet in 1970, and that might have been when the family decided to sell up. The last occupant of the site was the Esso Mill Hill Petrol Station.

You can see the Esso petrol station as the flat roof building between the roundabout and the motorway in this photo Google Earth photo from 1999.

The petrol station closed in 2005 or 2006 and was quickly demolished, leaving an empty plot of land that stood empty for many years. An attempt to build a hotel was blocked, and an initial application for a self-storage building was rejected but approved on appeal.

So today, where there was once the Apex Garage, there is now The Self Storage Company, and any vestige of the Drysdale family, who inadvertently gave this part of London its nickname, has been wiped away.

But if you ever wonder how Apex Corner got its name, it’s because a former WWI military pilot decided this was a good spot for a car garage.