The other day a new user was asking questions about mapping the new development of the former Royal Engineers Barracks opposite Mill Hill East tube station. I’ll write about their problems with postcodes another time.

However, this prompted me to look at the OSM map of the area, which I knew well in the 1980s. I was a PhD student in Central London (UCL), but a close friend was doing his doctorate at (NIMR](National Institute for Medical Research), and I visited fairly frequently. Over time I got to know other scientists & staff at NIMR, not least because I became an active member of the walking group which was part of the staff club (NIMROD, which still leaves a trace on OSM), but also because of scientific collaborations.

NIMR has been subsumed into the new Crick Institute behind the British Library, and the imposing buildings have been knocked down & are now being re-developed for housing. I presume fairly high-end housing because the location is on a ridge with wide views across NW London and still some remnants of farmland in the small valley to the NE. Three roads have been named:

• Medawar Drive: Sir Peter Medawar was a Nobel laureate in Physiology, and director of NIMR until he had a stroke, when he move his research lab to another MRC institute, the CRC at Northwick Park. A friend was his chief technician, and he collaborated extensively with the head of my unit.
• Cornforth Lane: Sir John Cornforth was another Nobel laureate (Chemistry 1975), who also spent part of his career at NIMR
• Rosalind Close: we see the pattern, distinguished scientists associated with the institute. So why a female given name, rather than another surname? Well, there is one very well known woman scientist with this given name Rosalind Franklin, who if she had lived certainly deserved the Nobel Prize. I don’t think she had any direct association with Mill Hill having spent her career in France and then at King’s and Birkbeck Colleges.

Of course there may be an innocent explanation for these choices, but on the surface the above seems the only reasonable interpretation. It’s a shame the developers could not have marked some of the remarkable women scientists who worked at Mill Hill, people like Brigitte Askonas or Rosa Beddington.