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 Old-Age-Emporium(OAE) on
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"the type of revengeful thinking you'd expect in the third world".
Xavier, this is the type of generalised planetary racist expectation one might expect of someone who thinks himself a fully paid up representative of "the First World" - whatever or wherever the hell that may be.
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"...there are now likely more Turkish people specifically on the ladder and surrounding wards."
Are they Turkish, Kurds or Cypriots?
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Permalink Reply by Adrian Hackney on
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Permalink Reply by Hugh on
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But, be clear, this data is for the political unit of Harringay Ward, which is only the western part of Harringay neighbourhood.
It does not cover the whole of the neighbourhood. To get that you have to take the data from some of the 'output areas' in St Ann’s Ward and Seven Sisters.
Whilst the data for Harringay Ward is relatively uniform across the whole unit, the data within the other two wards is much less so. There is a marked difference in the demographics between eastern and western end of the wards. (This was one of the reasons that the local government boundary commission agreed to a revised proposals for the new ward arrangements).
For the best idea for data for the whole of Harringay neighbourhood, including Harringay Ward and the relevant parts of the other two wards, see the data I painstakingly calculated for Wikipedia using 20i1 census ... (I added note 25 to the article to explain and detail the calculation).
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Haringey has also published a commentary on the census
It contains this paragraph where 'other white' seems to be a subset of 'non-white'.
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It means non-White-British, where White British is what it's not. As in, 44.7% of the population is White British.
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It's not clear what it means. At best it's clumsily phrased. At worst, it's gobbledegook. I've sent feedback on it via the web page
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White British is an ethnic group that you might choose on the census for example. 65.3% of the Haringey population is classified as something other than White British. There are several other ethnic group categories, including White Irish and White Other, Black Caribbean, Black African, etc. The classifications in positions 2, 3 and 4, are the 3 listed above. The most populous ethnic grouping is White British, seemingly followed by White Other.
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The use of 'these' in the final sentence of the descriptive paragraph suggests a referral back to an earlier sentence. There are two to choose from. A referral to the immediately previous sentence doesn't make linguistic or logical sense. So, I can only assume that it refers back to the first sentence. In this case, it does infer, as Adrian has pointed out, that the three groups are presented as subgroups of the subject of that first sentence, i.e. non-white British Ethnic Groups.
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Whether correct or not, you cannot rely on this data. How many times when I get letters from Haringey the last page asks to tick the ethnic group. At the end it says Rather not say..I always tick this box as I’m a haringey resident and where my roots are from is irrelevant to the letter. How many others do the same? If they do the record’s therefore wouldn’t not be accurate.
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I don’t see what this has to do with Black boy Lane and the fact that Haringey hasn’t given all Haringey residents the chance to vote on this. I’m from an ethnic group and certainly object to this change. Secondly not all black residents of Haringey agree with it either. I have 4 carers of black origin who live in Haringey and on discussions they also believe it’s a waste of money and will not solve the issues of racism and disparity amongst different nationalities. Further I found a petition requesting the name BBL to be changed as the person who started it felt it was racist and only 60 people on checking at the time signed it. This to me shows that people are more concerned about the causes of this inequality rather than a name change and to me it’s a personal matter that the Council leader who started this and continuing this has his own agenda rather than the good of Haringey. Cllr Seema states on Twitter, we have tough times coming so why is thousands being spent on a name change? A waste of our tax money and time the Council Leader is removed
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I agree, I'm only putting this here as a discussion point as I believe:
A. it's a waste of money, and if the money should be spent on improving opportunities and giving racism the middle finger, renaming stuff is a massive distraction.
B. demographics are important, why rename Albert and Black Boy to names that aren't necessarily relevant to the population of the ward or Haringey as a whole? It's not just about white Vs non white residents, you can't lump everyone in one or the other category, it's a bit more complex than that.
C. It's dubious to me whether the names are specifically racist or not - which is open to debate and I'm happy for this debate to happen: will erasing names change the lived reality of Black residents.
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