Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
What Harringay's Road were made of in 1906
Looking for something quite different recently, I came across this interesting map showing what our roads were made of 120 years ago.
Bartholomew's road surface map of London and neighbourhood, John Bartholomew & Co, 1906.
There were four road surface types in our neighbourhood:
- Creosoted deal wood (fir or pine) blocks (coloured yellow on the map)
- Macadam (pink)
- Cobblestone (blue) (Link to photo of a cobbled Green Lanes by Northumberland House)
- unsurfaced (white).
The roads fringed in red were "Recommended approaches and main routes".
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by John Liffen on
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The map is fascinating, and it reminded me of a passage in C H Rolph’s autobiography London Particulars (Oxford, 1980). ‘C H Rolph’ was the pseudonym of Cecil Rolph Hewitt (1901-1994), first a policeman in the City of London force and later, for many years, one of the regular team of journalists on the New Statesman. Hewitt’s family lived in Corbyn Street, Stroud Green, between 1903 and 1910 when they moved to Fulham. Hewitt’s recollections of his childhood in Stroud Green are clear and detailed, and it is probable that his description of the surface of Corbyn Street of about 1908 matched those shown as ‘unsurfaced’ in the extract from Bartholomew's’s map.
"I can’t remember what our street was made of, but although it was certainly a dusty street and liberally manured by horse traffic, it couldn’t have been a mere dirt road by 1908. However, it was far from smooth, and if you fell down on it while running it tore your hands and knees open … And whatever the surface of the roadway in Corbyn Street, it was always possible at that time to bang cricket stumps into it; and the same was true, a year or two later, of Gowan Avenue in Fulham. It says much for the infrequency and the slowness of the traffic along those London suburban roads, in the years before the 1914 war, that you could play cricket on the crown of the road with sufficient confidence to warrant the banging-in of stumps."
Hewitt later wrote a second volume of London reminiscences, Further Particulars (Oxford, 1987). Both are well worth seeking out.
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Permalink Reply by Hugh on
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Thanks for that interesting snippet, John. Here's an extract of the map showing Corbyn Street.
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I know Endymion road has featured previously on HoL but I was surprised to see the carriageway through Finsbury Park edged in red as a main route. Was this the case from the time the park was first laid out?
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Yes, I see what you mean. A few of observations to add to yours. Firstly, it's worth noting that the map legend says "Recommended approaches and main routes". I wonder exactly what meaning that conveyed.
Secondly there was a lot less traffic in this part of the world back in 1906. Central London may have had traffic jams in the nineteenth century, but in the absence of many personally owned vehicles, I suspect that the job a main route did then was very different to the one it does now.
Third, during the changes I outlined in my article this year, gates were added to the road through the park and it was closed at night. That must have impacted the extent to which it could be considered a main road.
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