Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
The Hell that is Wood Green
Yesterday, I had the misfortune to find myself in the shopping mall. Walking out the big automatic doors and into the crowd of Star Wars pub extras who were smoking, spitting and squabbling on the footpath I witnessed what for me sums up the whole carbuncle on the arse of Haringey that is Wood Green High Road. One of the characters stormed through the crowd with his status dog in tow. I was reflecting on the fact that ‘status’ dogs don't seem to work (as the people who have them only ever seem to be what everyone else in society would consider low status). Everything suddenly went quiet except the ever present sirens. The status dog had stopped and released its copious bowels all over the footpath. It was like turning on the light in an HMO; the cockroaches screamed and scattered. The dog owner laughed and walked on. It was probably one of the most disgusting things I have seen or smelt in London. Eventually the crowd returned and watched the next horde trample the mess up and down the road. There was no-one to turn to, no-one to clean up and more importantly no-one with the authority to challenge and/or shoot the dog owner. Things just returned to normal.
The whole experience made me think how the council, local police and traders believe that we're all animals if they are happy for us to have to deal with this every time we go to the High Road. It's easy enough for me to hop on a bus and head off to Crouch End or Islington or even Enfield to shop but if you're older or disabled and have trouble getting around or not enough money for the bus it must be pretty grim to face it every day. Imagine how the standard little old lady dreads heading out into the crowds, litter, phlegm, smoke and anti-social behaviour of Wood Green every morning to get the milk.
Short of manning water cannons at each end of the High Road and employing some mercenaries with batons to control the crowds, I don’t know what can be done. Are there any clever ‘nudges’ or interventions that could improve Wood Green? Is it a matter of tarting the place up and hoping that the crowds respect their new surroundings? Is it signage to remind, and in many instances educate, people that spitting, littering and barging into other people is just not the done thing? Or do we just give up, bulldoze the lot and install a waterhole in the middle and let the law of the jungle and the status dog owners prevail?
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Gordon T on
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Well, everyone their own urban planner, but I'd offer that The Brunswick, recent investment apart, has the advantages that it's pedestrianized, light and airy. The Shopping City area of Wood Green is arguably none of these, nor can it be made so, short of a rebuild.
Everyone their own alternative historian, too: I wonder how Wood Green would have developed if Shopping City had not been built. Would it be similar to Tottenham High Road in retail and socio-economic terms, with (to my eye) no focal point? Would the current chain stores (e.g. M&S, BHS) have drifted away long ago?
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Permalink Reply by Michael Anderson on
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It was too many decades ago that WG High Road had a branch of Habitat.
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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton on
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Michael, pondering your posts here, Zena and I went for another stroll in Marchmont Street and spent a while among the Brunswick shops.
I am not contradicting your statistics - which I haven't had time to look up - nor am I challenging your many years experience working in the area. But with our outsiders' eyes and ears, it seems improbable, to say the least, to choose this as the model or "end-state" for Wood Green. (Assuming there was broad consensus among Wood Greenians that this was desirable.)
But since you've posed the question, can I suggest that based on your personal knowledge and up-to-date information, you could come up with an informed, detailed and very persuasive list of factors about why "The Brunswick" may not be an entirely helpful or feasible model.
Not least because of the proximity of a number of upscale commercial businesses. major institutions (including London University colleges and the British Museum) and beautiful Georgian houses and squares. All within easy walking distance of this central Bloomsbury location.
I'm not insisting you're wrong. Simply suggesting that your argument is open to some heavy balancing factors which point another way.
(Almost but not quite ending my stint as Tottenham Hale ward councillor)
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Permalink Reply by Finsbury Park Ranger on
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Brunswick have got a waitrose, that shows how 'upmarket' many of the clientele are, it's a different demographic completely.
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FPR, please re-read what Michael Anderson wrote about "the demographic" and his own working experience in that area.
I recommend trying a more anthropological approach. Personally I find it leads to interesting and helpful surprises.
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I think Alan it's about looking at the area 10 years ago and now. The area was depressed with, at one point, 70% of the shop units empty. The area may well be the home to some big institutions but they didn't spend their money there. They jumped on the tube and headed to Oxford Circus.
The redevelopment did take advantage of the fact the these institutions and tourists were already in the area but surely a Wood Green plan can take advantage of the fact that it is the second busiest shopping street after Oxford Street. The business is there and ready to build on.
As a footnote, some of the posts on this thread have expressed the concern that Wood Green moving up market mean that local people lose out. The Brunswick centre effect has brought more people than ever to Marchmont Street and revitalised the shops there. I think that almost every one of them is an independent and not part of a chain. -
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Holloway Road has a Waitrose, Sainbury, Argos and had a branch a Peacock until it went bust. Mixed retail can work. The worst outcome would be a Westfield where people are sealed into a shopping centre the moment they come out of the station. Locals don't benefit at all.
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Permalink Reply by Sharon on
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im not sure the locals in a lower socio economic group around the brunswick benefit that much from the shooping area, yes, its pleasant but from my experience, i visit regularly, its shoppers are proffesionals from the universities and hospitals nearby and tourists. the locals living in he flats are not shopping in waitrose or in whistles
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A few hundred people living in a council estate near the Brunswick centre is nothing like the dynamic that is wood green. Completely different, poor people travel for miles for a cheap shop at wood green, that's not the case at all with the Brunswick centre. Brunswick just made shopping unaffordable for the poor so they didn't hang out there as much.
The trick to making wood green happening is to make the middle classes enjoy the experience of wood green, which requires pavement culture, art, music, showcasing exciting new products, pop up happenings, less road dominating everything, more tree's, less rubbish more community officers busting litter lout balls and less posters declaring that any minute you might get robbed.
If done well, every penny will be made back as you can then gentrify the high street with better shops and higher rates etc. -
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Permalink Reply by Clive Carter on
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Thanks for the links Robert, interesting. I think Otto Saumarez Smith (20CS) got it in one when he described the (overall) feeling of passing through a canyon.
Much of the Shopping City building is attractive, but the basic problem surely, is the heavily trafficked road that runs smack through the middle.
Like much other massed brutalist architecture, it lacks a human scale.
Compare the off-the-peg development proposed for Wards Corner, by the council's development partner Graingers, with the more modest but human-scale, sympathetic and community-friendly proposal by the Wards Corner Community Coalition. The council's approach to Tottenham regeneration is worrying on several levels.
Shopping City is here to stay and its hard to see how the built-environment could be improved without an unjustified tear-down. Meanwhile, surely the anti-social behaviour referred to at the top of this thread could be addressed by the expedient known as policing and enforcement?
How many prosecutions have been made for littering, for example?
It's the most basic stuff that needs improving. The impression given, is that of a lack of care.
We don't have to look far to see a local success of improving the built (Victorian) environment. Green Lanes is being transformed and I was pleased to see the trees go in last week, four per intersection. What a difference. The thing that needs to happen now is for the council to do the basic, boring thing that so often it falls down on: maintenance, especially on litter (I don't like to see all the chewing gum on the new pavements, but that's another matter).
Disclosure:
am a prospective councillor candidate
Highgate Ward | Liberal Democrat Party
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You're right Clive, it's often the boring stuff that makes a difference. Litter free streets discourage littering. Also some of the minor tweaks that have been mentioned by others, like moving bus stops away from ATMs to stop overcrowding. The expensive stuff is sexier of course but will fail if the basics aren't sorted out.
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