Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Finsbury Park 5 a side plans dropped
Very strange striptease style of consultation results communication, but it appears that the results are out and the plans have been dropped.
Thanks to Phil M for the update. He appears to be the first person outside the Council to get the news!
Thanks to Phil M for the update. He appears to be the first person outside the Council to get the news!
Tags for Forum Posts: finsbury, finsbury park 5 a side, parks
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Birdy_Too on
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Actually there is one behind Crouch End as well, just remembered : ) But these are few and far between and considering the participation rate of this sport it's shameful that football in any format is not catered for in FP considering it's size.
Quote:
Pitch provision: There are currently enough football pitches to meet existing demand in
Haringey, but the number of pitches per capita is well below regional and national averages. This suggests current provision is only adequate because local demand levels are suppressed, possibly as a result of the lack of pitch supply.
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Permalink Reply by Liz on
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I think there is a great deal done for football in the Borough looking at the work that Lucy has done - she'd hardly get an award for sweet FA (if you'll pardon the joke). I'm not sure what you want. In Finsbury Park, local Colombian teams pitch up every Sunday with a few nets and play. You can make your own space if you really don't want to be part of a formal team by the looks of it.
There are a number of local teams doing their best to provide space to play and if you look carefully at the aims in the DP there are plans for a lot more. I honestly don't think that not having a paid for facility in FP (aimed at a specific profitable demographic) is seriously going to damage this plan
I also note that of all the sports activities offered in the October half-term sports programme, 5 are football related
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I am not rubbishing her work. Would you expect tennis players and basketball payers to turn up with a few nets and play dodging dog turds in the roads in FP? Playing on decent pitches, with goals and markings does make the difference between a proper game and a knock about.
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Well, perhaps, however, the Colombians don't 'play in the road'. They take over pretty much all of the Seven Sisters side on grass and they didn't seem to be bothered by the lack of facilities (went to a couple of their parties, this is how I know btw).
Also I'm not sure the facilities you are comparing are all that great. There is considerable pressure on the amount of tennis courts we have (note I am most certainly not a tennis player so no suggestion of bias)- we do seem to produce the odd world class footie player despite the parlous nature of football provision, whereas tennis success continues to elude?
You also need to look at where the open/green space is in Haringey. There is much more in the west so if you are going to fence off a large area of land and deny people entry unless they pay to do a specific thing you need to look at prospective sites there. I'm also surprised that as part of the new development for Spurs there is not some pitch provision (unless there is- I haven't studied the plans that closely) which could be accessed cheaply or for nothing by the local community. - Attachments:
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map_of_parks_and_open_spaces.doc, 336 KB
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Well on that note, I am sure you wouldn't mind children playing on sub standard park equipment?
A kick around can be pretty much played anywhere, football played by the rules needs the correct provisions (full size or five a side) as do most pitch or court sports. I happen to know quite a few playing football folk from various teams in Haringey, most of them play at pitches far away from their homes, Power League at Colney Hatch, Enfield, Corum Fields, Westway to name a few off the top of my head. FP is a big old place and to have six or so five a side pitches (multi sport usage as well) would not intrude on anyone, considering many other 'lesser' sports are catered for their. Haringey has many green spaces, to facilitate football properly in one of their biggest spaces would not be an impossibility.
I was against the development because of the commercial nature of it and the parking, not because of the physical usage of the land.
And I strongly object to you saying that 'we' produce the odd good footballer, we don't : )
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Your first remark is beside the point, but lets look at it more closely. For many years, park equipment was sub-standard in local parks. It was improved by the concerted work of Friends Groups, central government grants and Haringey officers working together. The result of this work was not an enclosed, floodlit 'pay to play' space run by a commercial enterprise that would only be accessible at peak times to those who could afford it and which would exclude those who couldn't or give them cheap access at unpopular times, say at 10.00 at night while removing the nearby picnic area for families to park their 4x4s.
In other words, I don't disagree necessarily that better spaces could be found for football but to support a commercial venture of this sort (which I know you didn't) which would advantage those who can afford to pay and remove open land (which I know you would heartily disagree with given your strong libertarian principles) from the majority in the name of better football would be madness given that football is (supposedly) still the game of the people.
If you feel there is need to work on this, then it should be in the spririt of the Friends group: open, free access to all.
The pressure on land is great in the East because of the need for housing but if land can be identified, then it is up to Friends of Footie to claim and work to develop it, not to expect the council to just carve up bits of heavily used parks and hand them to commercial enterprises
Not sure what you mean by the last comment, I was using the universal parlance of the sports fan i.e. we = the entire nation, including people whose idea of sports participation is to shout at Sky Sports once a week to mean that the country does still manage to produce decent players from time to time whereas we are yet to see the tennis equivalent of a Rooney or a Beckham.
I, of course, have nothing to do with it, being the mother of a sporty daughter, who could maybe hope for a first team place at Fulham, a mention on Radio 4 at 8.30 am if she plays in a winning England team and probably won't be giving up the day job to go and live in a gated community in Cheshire with a gold plated swimming pool because she is being paid so much, always assuming she can get on a 'rare as hens teeth' training course that caters for girls and promotes them in footballing academies. -
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Permalink Reply by Clive Carter on
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not catered for in FP considering it's size
FP is a decent size and long may it remain so. The size is something to be proud of and cherished. One of London's strengths as a city is the number and size of its public parks: Paris is less well endowed for example.
Hampstead Heath is so big that in the middle of it, one could be forgiven for thinking that it was the middle of the countryside. This is a good thing, in Europe's largest city.
The biggest park in Haringey, Alexandra Park, used to be significantly bigger (to the north). If the argument is used repeatedly that there's plenty of room to allow activities that would reduce the freely available space, then eventually FP wouldn't be a decent size.
Throughout this discussion I keep hearing Joni Mitchell's Big Yellow Taxi with the lines,
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
.
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@ Will. As I said, I don't pretend to know anymore than Google throws up to me about facilities. I'm guessing if you were to contact people whose job it is to know, they could find you more. My point is that is not true to say that Haringey are not looking to tackle this problem, but going down the route of commercial facilities in parks is the wrong way to handle it and as Clive say, sets a precedent which could justify further encroachment. (btw The Colombian teams don't use jumpers, they erect proper nets and they run their own league but I take what you say about the state of the grass).
There is nothing to stop a smaller pitch only development on the other bit of tarmac that the council were so keen for everyone to move all the non payers onto by the tennis courts, provided a committed group were prepared to put the time in to work with officers, get funding and do all the organising stuff that people like the Friends of Lordship Rec do. Most of these things have to be worked at; footie fans need get themselves organised and put together a proposal that would work for all.
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Most people who play tennis are older and do so to keep fit. Football is instilled from an early age and usually played by those from the lower end of the economic social groups, therefore even more important to create decent sporting facilities for those who can't afford it. Sometimes, it's all some youngsters look forward to and aspire to. It's great how the educated elite poke fun at (footballers and those who watch it) who have succeeded, despite in the main failing at a social and educational level. Unfortunately most footballers never came through private or grammar schools, or succeeded at any level of education. So lets slam them for it!
There are many people who look down their noses at football, would you make the same remark about those watching Wimbledon? I also find it odd that you are against multi use, free sporting facilities of which football could be facilitated. Putting free tennis courts up is fine but football and multi purpose facilities is not? Crazy, I would support anything that encourages free sporting and recreational facilities and of course usage by all ages in our society.
Anyway I need to give my fingers a rest and stretch them, work to do..............
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I think the assumptions you make about tennis players are way off and probably reveal your own prejudices, nor do I understand why you have it in for a few tennis players in the Borough but, that aside, your assertions fail to take into account that youngsters=boys; that the highest paid sportsmen in the country are footballers; that no member of the 'educated elite' would be seen dead making fun of football as it is so damned fashionable to pretend you have supported some club since they invented football stickers, indeed they are the only ones who can afford the tickets to premiership games and Sky Sports subscriptions; that any football game that men play no matter how dull is considered worth screening on TV but cup winning ladies teams are utterly IGNORED by the football community, fans, media and players, oh and that for every lad who has been brought up by his bootstraps to play professional football there are thousands more who spend their hard earned cash keeping them in their luxury lifestyles and who would never get a sniff at the kind of lifestyle,still keeps 'em in line eh? just in case that Man U scout comes by. You effectively serve up an indictment of a society where aspiring to those jobs "is all they can hope for"...and you really think that putting a paying 5 a side facility aimed at those who can afford to pay and excluding those who can't is going to make that okay.
If your remarks are addressed to me personally, I am surprised. You know that my background is of the lower socio-economic variety, that I grew up listening to the losing Ipswich scores on Grandstand, that my father and brother are still (despairing) footie fans and that my school was a comprehensive for whom being in the first eleven guaranteed you girlfriends, although as you may imagine there was no girls team. I really don't know where you get the idea I 'look down' on football, simply because I merely show a passing interest in it and not a fanatical devotion and tend to save my football watching for internationals where I can often be found with my daughter being as furious over poor playing as anyone.
You may not know that I can barely lift a tennis racquet, let alone hit a ball over a net, it would be my idea of hell of earth to go to Wimbledon and generally try to go on holiday when it is on (half terms permitting) but I don't really give a stuff if a few people while away an unemployed afternoon knocking a ball over a net, after all it only takes two to have a game, for free.
If you had troubled to read my comments instead of writing a series of ill founded jibes, you would have seen that my proposal is not that people don't get football facilities but that groups of dedicated people could make the kind of proposal and divert the kind of cash they currently spend on buying the latest merchandise into something that would benefit your lads (and just maybe your lasses) from the poorer parts of Tottenham (and just who do you imagine uses the tarmac area at the moment, the champagne swilling Wimbledon loving toff?) for football, in the same way as those who wanted better play areas did. Indeed, I even pointed an area in Finsbury Park where it could be done. I also felt that we should be fair to the council and point out the work that is being done by a very hard working young woman to address some of the problems, instead of blanket statements about how rubbish football provision in in the Borough, based on little more than gut feeling and a weird prejudice against tennis and basketball players.
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All Ipswich fans are long suffering, I gave up that particular area of pain a while ago. If I wanted credibility as a football fan, I would have mentioned attending games as a young girl in the heady years of Paul Mariner, Roger Osborne, Mick Mills and Terry Butcher and collecting those ruddy stickers every year plus being hunched over the telly enduring the agony of the 1978 cup final and the pro-London prejudice of the commentators as we battled Arsenal, but I didn't because, remember, I don't like football because I opposed a 5 a side facility in Finsbury Park
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Don't worry, not cross, just entering into the spirit of things. I should have added a virtual sigh to the end of my post to indicate that there is no connection between my personal relationship with football (which has been one of highs and lows) and my opposition to the commercialisation of public land and even if the lack of a decent venue for miles around had meant they offered to build a paid entry concert hall where Sufjan Stevens, Nick Cave and John Shuttleworth were booked to perform nightly I would have been as equally opposed.
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