Ponders End is the southeasternmost part of Enfield, north London, England, around Hertford Road west of the River Lee Navigation.

As of 2021[update] the area was experiencing large-scale regeneration, with the high-rise Alma Road Estate undergoing demolition and redevelopment.

Two north-south railway lines enclose the residential parts of the area, bounded east and west by estates of warehousing, industrial and commercial use Its northern and southern limits are along Hertford Road at The Ride and The Boundary pubs (north to south).

[3] Ponders End once was rural Middlesex, but in 1840 the Northern and Eastern Railway (Now part of Greater Anglia National Rail) Station opened, bringing the area gradually alive.

All but a southern belt of the district was in Enfield, as the south lay in Edmonton, the parishes becoming a civil and ecclesiastical after a split of functions in the 1860s, which saw the final secularisation of government, the disestablishment of the vestries following the increase in Poor Law Unions in the hundred years before.

In 1866 the London Jute Works Company established a factory on the Navigation in a desolate area known locally as Spike Island.

[5] During World War I, a huge munitions factory, the Ponders End Shell Works was built in Wharf Road.

[9] In Spring 2017, Camden Town Brewery completed a new facility in Ponders End on the western bank of the Lee Navigation.

[12] Musician Jah Wobble was inspired to write his (2005) album Mu by his experiences in the Lea Valley and Ponders End.

It's got a wonderful, dislocated, alienated feelingPonders End Allotments Club is a track from the (1975) Chas and Dave album One Fing 'n' Annuver.