Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
HARINGEY Council’s £6.1m old factory—a video tour inside
'Shaftesbury House 22 April 2026 ~ photo credit: Martin Ball
- In 2020, Haringey Council bought a derelict factory in Enfield Borough for £6,100,000
- Last year our council sold it for a capital loss of £1,900,000
- The running costs over 4.5 years were c. £500,000
- The new owner is now trying to demolish it
Haringey Council bought Shaftesbury House against the advice of the supposed users, the Peacock light industrial estate.
The £6,100,000 purchase was one of nine irregular council deals considered by external investigator Chris Buss in a version of the Report commissioned by the council itself. The "full" version of the Report was sent to the Metropolitan Police.
The tired old building was once described as a sh*thole, but the council's regeneration team considered it was good enough in which to decant Tottenham businesses.
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The council's rolling regeneration fiasco has many features
- By working with their-then HDV partner (Lendlease) Haringey Council's intention was—and likely still is—to force thriving businesses out of our Borough. The council wants to exact this by Compulsory Purchase … and then demolish the freehold-owned premises of the Peacock Estate
- Peacock were right to reject the council's invitation. It is an irony that the new owners of Haringey's old Enfield factory now want to demolish. Our council may have overpaid by about a fifth for the building, which was worth only a little more than the value of the land alone
- It is a further irony that the current demolition in Enfield is itself also running into problems—photos below
- This is an example and a case study of how Haringey Council can and does waste taxpayers' cash
- The cumulative losses on the Shaftesbury deal are around £2,500,000, which is a small fraction of the total losses that the Council made on many property deals transacted in the 36 months between May 2018 and May 2021
- In the linked video below, the mention of the council leader and the council member for regeneration, refers to the Admin prior to the current Administration. It is of course, the same Majority Group Party that continued to be in charge
- The misguided and mishandled Decision to buy the factory was made in late 2019 and the losses on this single deal began to accrue from the date of purchase on 2 July 2020
- After allowing for inflation and the loss of interest, those huge losses on council property wheeling & dealing began to be generated several years ago and make the council's financial position today much worse
- We may never know the total extent of the monies wasted and the real benefit lost to Haringey residents. Or in economic terms, the Opportunity Cost
- Today, Haringey Council has millions of pounds of public money less for public benefit, than it otherwise would have. Public losses were other's private gains.
Video tour link: Haringey Council's factory
Muti makes a pitch for using the building as a community arts centre, Studio 101.
Was this a missed opportunity by London's Borough of Culture 2027 ?
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Enfield Council's enforcement letters (below) are dated 17 March and are posted on the front. There seem to be compliance issues relating to The Building Act 1984 (Sections 81– 83):
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Tags for Forum Posts: Enfield, Haringey Council, Regen, Regeneration, Shaftesbury, demolition, empty, factory, loss
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton on
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We can't always undo past mistakes.
But we can try to learn lessons from them.
As Clive Carter explains in his video commentary and here, the losses on 3 Shaftesbury Road. Enfield are part of several dubious past property dealings within Haringey around the same time period.
Were lessons learned? I don't know. I hope I'm wrong, but I very much doubt it.
One obvious question for the future is whether sufficient changes were made which would prevent similar serious mistakes and misjudgements being made again.
Clive Carter deserves Haringey's thanks for shooting and editing this video, on his own personal equipment.
He also undertook the major part of the work digging out information. Several other people contributed to the project. I am proud to have been one of them.
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Permalink Reply by Clive Carter on
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Thanks Alan!
I was first alerted to the purchase of the factory when resident-activist Martin Ball drew attention to it on Twitter. The original purchase of a derelict factory in another Borough seemed odd and the council's recording of the deal ("non-key") looked suspicious.
By buying a building that was in a run-down state, the council appears to have done a favour to the previous owner, who had had the factory on the market for more than a year. And apparently over-paying, too.
The council considered the Buss Report in an entirely administrative-bureaucratic way, which was to hold no one to account, except possibly the referral to the Police. The municipal response included such shocking moves as … reminding council employees of their responsibilities. Was fraud ever dealt with more robustly?
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