Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Council Decides to Rename Black Boy Lane
Following my consideration on the origins of West Green's Black Boy name back in the summer, Haringey Council has decided to rename Black Boy Lane in West Green.
The Council have called the exercise a 'renaming consultation', but the online questionnaire offers only the ability to choose from a shortlist of two new names. So it appears that the decision to rename has already been taken with only the choice of name left to be decided.
They have issued the following press release.
The council has launched a renaming consultation with residents and businesses located on Black Boy Lane, as part of the wider Review on Monuments, Buildings, Place and Street Names in Haringey – which was launched on 12 June 2020, in response to the Black Lives Matter movement.
The council believes that the names of our monuments, buildings, places and streets must reflect the values and diversity that we are so proud of in the borough. One of the street names that has been identified as not being reflective of this is Black Boy Lane.
Meanings change over time, and the term “Black Boy” is now most commonly used as a derogatory name for African heritage men.
As part of the consultation, the council is asking residents to consider new alternative names that celebrate some of the borough’s most notable influencers, and truly reflect the borough’s rich heritage.
The two names that have been shortlisted for residents to consider are, ‘Jocelyn Barrow Lane’ and ‘La Rose Lane’. The consultation will launch today, Monday 28 September and will run for a period of 4 weeks to Monday 26 October 2020.
Letters will be arriving on Black Boy Lane residents' doorsteps this week, who can respond to the consultation using one of the following methods:
- Online: www.haringey.gov.uk/renaming-black-boy-lane.
- Email:
- bblconsultation@haringey.gov.uk
- Telephone: 020 8489 3797
- By post: Consultation Co-ordinator, The Communications Team, River Park House, 225 High Road, Wood Green, London, N22 8HQ
If Haringey residents have concerns or queries about place, street or building names in the borough, please get in touch. Send your views to Leader@haringey.gov.uk.
Bios:Dame Jocelyn Anita Barrow (15 April 1929 – 9 April 2020) was a Barbadian/Trinidadian British educator, community activist and politician, who was the Director for UK Development at Focus Consultancy Ltd. She was the first Black woman to be a governor of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and was founder and Deputy Chair of the Broadcasting Standards Council.
John La Rose was a publisher, poet and essayist. He founded the Caribbean Artists’ Movement and publishing company New Beacon Books which has a bookshop in Stroud Green. In 1975, he co-founded the Black Parents Movement from the core of the parents involved in the George Padmore Supplementary School incident in which a young Black schoolboy was beaten up by the police outside his school in Haringey.
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Tags for Forum Posts: blackboy lane name change, review on monuments, building place and street names
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton on
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That William, is indeed the theory of how it ought to work. You may also be right that maybe that's how it does operate - broadly speaking - in many other elected Councils across the UK. I wouldn't know. But we do know from Private Eye's Rotten Boroughs column that that's not always the case.
The fact that Haringey is regularly in Rotten Boroughs doesn't mean there aren't councillors trying to tackle these problems.
On your last point, I very much agree residents as citizens have a vital role in challenging the system. Many people try. If you know for example the Alexandra Palace & Firoka case you'll have seen such challenges succeed.
On the other hand, personally I wouldn't want to blame electors or residents for "creating" the system we actually have. Especially when it's malfunctioning as badly as Haringey is currently.
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Permalink Reply by JJ B on
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To be pedantic....
The Council is made up of elected councillors who are in charge of
- implementing nationally defined responsibilities, and
- making policy decisons within the existing budgetary and legislative constraints.
These are implemented by the staff of the council i.e trained professionals - technical, specialists, clerical and manual, etc.
Yes, the staff are in what can be called a bureaucracy but their job isn't easy given that they can be subjected to the changing whims of politicians and have been over the last years subjected to imposed, large scale, drastic central governent cost cuttting done without consideration for the real effects of these cuts on the ground.
We vote for both the coucnillors and the MPs who make the policy decisons so ultimartely we do have some influence.
I agree that people's complacency allows the councillors to get away with incompetence, ineptitude and in some instances plain old skulduggery. Such is the democracy that we have.
We Londoners (not me actaully) voted TWICE for an untrustworthy scoundrel to become our mayor and taht person now leads the country and has reached his plateau of (in)competence. People still preferreed to vote for him. In the US 74 million people voted for a Tramp to lead them into the water à la Pipied Piper!
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JJB - Pedantry is fine in the right place.
Councillors as a body are not "in charge" of anything very much. I was a councillor for sixteen years (1998-2014). Working with a few others, I was able to stop some stupid and - in my personal view some highly dubious - proposals going ahead.
That now appears far harder since we currently have a "strong leader" and cabinet system imposed on councils. If and when things go wrong all the necessary checks and balances are seriously weaker. Meanwhile the "strong leader" controls patronage and the publicity tools. From that point of view you are right to mention Trump.
Which is why I mentioned Ece Temelkuran and her book "How to Lose a Country" about the "pattern" - of the rise of authoritarian leaders with their friends and family regimes.
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To be fair, I don’t think budget cuts have anything to do with the matter at hand. The renaming of streets and areas of grass result in costs being incurred (and would seem to be in opposition to the policy trends set out by the current government).
I agree that budget cuts from central government have been unwelcome and have impacted some of the poorest communities very hard. But, in spite of that, Haringey Council (and the elected Councillors) have taken it upon themselves to spend what little money they do have on virtue signalling projects. I’m sure the poorest hit will be eternally grateful.
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The other consideration is that the council is currently run by a hard left faction of the Labour Party. The Marxist agenda is to ferment cultural and systemic change to our way of life and ultimately bring about revolution. They couldn't give a fig about the people who live on Black Boy Lane if it means they can execute a bit of transparent virtue signalling even if it has no resonance outside of their own echo chamber.
They use their control of the council as a platform to achieve their wider societal and economic system changes and have little interest in the local issues which should be focusing their minds and which really effect local services. That's why you'll see them wasting time trying to manufacture division around place names and complaining about the more centrist members of the Labour Party and the Tory government than trying to fix Haringey. Where is the job creation agenda? Where are the local vocational training opportunities? Where is the action against fly tipping, drug use/dealing and related violence? Where is the governance to address persistent underperformance within council services (eg. Communication, service standards, competence)? Etc etc etc
We need a proper authentic centrist Labour run council with councillors committed to the improvement of peoples lives through efficient and empathetic service delivery informed by data, evidence and just thinking things through. When will it change?
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Remember the rebranding exercise & all the monies and other resouces spent on a new logo?
We are all better of for it now aren't we?
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Yes, and that was only £80,000 if I remember correctly.
Renaming our Black Boy Lane would be multiples of that. If you consider that there are about 50 houses (many divided into flats) and a handful of businesses and that there's probably an average of 4 people in each house and the council pays a few hundred each in compensation for the inconvenience of changing all those aspects of their lives linked to their address, we're looking at an amount in excess of £100,000. And that's not counting the fees the council might have to pay to various organisations to implement the name changes, flow on costs to other public sector funded organisations (eg. Emergency services, Chestnuts school) or more crucially the opportunity cost of dedicating council staff to manage the administrative issues. What other work would they have to postpone or not do at all in order to manage the name change (or would they have to hire consultants and agency staff to do both)? Then there's the cost of fighting legal challenges etc etc etc.
Now if the council has that kind of money to spare why are they not spending it on care workers, school staff, sports/community activities to give young black (and other) boys something constructive to do and keep them away from drugs, gangs and from stabbing each other. £100,000 would fund a few community workers or initiatives to actually do something to improve the life chances of young people.
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I couldn’t agree more. Apparently, a significant proportion of children in the borough don’t have access to a laptop and are therefore disadvantaged when it comes to learning remotely.
People bash central government for not providing funding, but there are serious questions to be answered about Councils wasting the funding they do have on vanity projects (and, in particular, vanity projects that don’t even have the support of the local people)!
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"... the council is currently run by a hard left faction of the Labour Party. The [...] Marxist agenda ..."
I dunno where you heard this stuff, Stav. You really think Joe and his wife & her brother-in-law and their close allies Charles & Gideon are all Hard Left Marxist councillors?
Whatever anyone's view of the Black Boy Lane streetname it's as plain as day that the whole process has been mismanaged from the start. Hardly a sign of fermenting or fomenting or effective implementing. Or indeed any sort of menting whatever.
Marxist? I doubt that bunch are even "Tendence Groucho"? I wouldn't insult the Marx brothers.
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Lots of 'ments' there and perhaps mental is a good assessment of the decision to rename our Black Boy Lane. Ejiofor is part of the now disgraced Momentum Marxist movement. Emina Ibrahim is as well as are Seema Chandwani and Noah Tucker as just a few examples. They're all linked Mr Stanton. But you already know that. However, I suspect you're simply saying that you don't see them as genuine Marxists and that you have a different interpretation of what a good Marxist is which is fine by me. Richard was my favourite.
Regardless of all that, I do agree. The renaming process has been mismanaged and will be expensive in many ways.
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Permalink Reply by Christina Davis on
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I thought this was quite interesting in the context. A different case and a different council but still interesting. The council put forward a set of name changes - with the preferred one being Beryl Gilroy - but parents voted otherwise.
I will be fascinated to see how Black Boy Lane residents vote.
Beckford Primary School renamed West Hampstead after Beryl Gilroy v...
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I'll be keen to see if every resident along Black Boy Lane gets the chance to vote and have their vote counted. And then if the vote is respected.
But even more, I hope to find out what property deals with developers and other stuff, are going on to demolish residents' homes. While other people are distracted by discussing the naming of names.
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