Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Haringey Council's Attempts to Change our Neighbourhood's Name have Serious Consequences
"Harringay" may not be the sexiest or the poshest name for a neighbourhood, but it's a good honest historical name for our area. And, used as it was till recently, it unifies a natural neighbourhood under a single "banner".
I got brought back to this issue yesterday, walking home from Manor House tube. Although I've walked past it a thousand times before, I'm sure, yesterday I noticed something new about the sign as you enter the Borough of Haringey from Hackney. In crossing that boundary, you also enter Harringay, but look at what the sign says:
"Welcome to Haringey, St Ann's". The sign is in Harringay Ward, Harringay. Fair enough that the Council wants to proclaim their borough territory, but to add St. Ann's (the ward to the east), just emphasises the way the Council ignores local sentiment and underlines what I was told is official Council policy of changing our area's name that started in earnest when the name of Harringay was stripped from the railway bridge. And this is no petty issue. It has serious social consequences.
Councillor Canver, the Chair of the Green Lanes Strategy group has told me that my notion of Harringay as a 'town neighbourhood' no longer exists. Whilst she accepts this was the case up till 1965 (when it was split between two boroughs), since the boroughs have been unified, she says we no longer have one neighbourhood, we have three. Gone, she says is Harringay; we now have St Ann's to the east, Green Lanes in the middle and Harringay to the west.
I understand what she's saying and I have no gripe with Nilgun, but the logic of that position escapes me. First there's the issue of what or whose benefit is served by artificially exacerbating divisions in the area. Surely the Council should be doing the opposite and helping us to forge bonds, build bridges, focus on commonalities. A common identity will not come without a sense of belonging to the same area. For me this is the big issue.
Then there's other perspectives like the logic of trying to call an area Green Lanes. Sure you can live on Green Lanes; it's a road. But can you live IN Green Lanes? Not for my money you can't.
Another issue is the contribution to building sense of place that comes from the historical context. We've a fantastically rich history over the last 100 to 200 years. For the most part, that is explicitly the history of Harringay. Why ditch it? Why the urge to move on? What's the agenda?
Then there's the issue of where is Green Lanes. As many people pointed out in the recent Harringay Online Street Festival survey, Green Lanes runs for miles from Stoke Newington and up to Palmers Green and beyond. The fact is that Green Lanes is everywhere in a huge swathe of north London. So if we're living in Green Lanes, what identity does that give us.
Speaking of the survey, it's probably the best proxy we have for a poll on local sentiment on what our area should be called. And, in that survey, 66% of residents said they'd like the festival to be called the Harringay festival rather than the Green Lanes festival.
Time for a volte-face on this nonsensical divisive Council policy of renaming our are? This is serious stuff. It's not just me on my hobby horse, trying to create an estate agents' dream or a posher address to impress, it's a fundamental part of building a stronger community and shaping a better......Harringay.
(See here for other posts on this issue on Harringay Online and here on the BBC's h2g2 site for an explanation of the different spellings of Harringay/Haringey)
Tags for Forum Posts: harringay name
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Hugh on
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Alison, TWO responses already from Haringey on this:
I have passed this onto the planning team who commissioned the website. They said they will get the map changed to the correct spelling.
Many thanks
Paul Barnett
Web Communications Officer
Communications Unit
Haringey Council
Email paul.barnett@haringey.gov.uk
Tel 020 8489 6951
Fax 020 8888 5484
Web www.haringey.gov.uk
AND............
Dear Hugh,
Thank you for the e-mail below. I am getting the correction done. Our sincerest apologies for this mistake.
Regards,
Jill
Jill Warren
Planning Policy Officer
Planning, Policy and Development
London Borough of Haringey,
639 High Road, Tottenham,
London. N17 8BD
Tel: (020) 8489 2741
Fax (020) 8489 5552
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Permalink Reply by Ruth on
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could be a worrying precedent here for the rest of the country. Watford could be renamed M1 Start. Anywhere near the M25 could be M25 East, West etc. Yes, just lets rename everywhere according to roads!!! would be much easier. get rid of these old quirky names....
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Alison - well done on spotting the UDP map. They've changed it. We now have a Haringey Council map officially showing our area as Harringay - hurrah!
And good news number two, I've had an email from Dasos telling me that Councillor Canver has asked him to change the awful Harringay and St Ann;s entry by the end of the week and even asking fro a contribution.
Thank you Councillor Canver. We recognise and applaud your action on this.
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Oh dear, no change to our neighbourhood page and we're at the week's end.
I even sent them a script - not marvellous I'm sure, but better than what's there:
The Harringay & St Ann’s wards make up a vibrant area of the borough with a bustling centre at Green Lanes. Well known for its Mediterranean cafes, the east side of Green Lanes in Harringay is almost entirely filled by the magnificent half kilometre long terrace of Edwardian shops and flats called Grand Parade. Less prominent is the thriving local arts scene and an unusually strong digital presence in the community.
The area is well served with Green space and includes Finsbury Park and Chestnuts Park. Smaller green community spaces like Railway Fields and the Community Garden off Stanhope Gardens are mainly used by locals.
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Permalink Reply by alistairj on
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Thanks for this, Hugh. A nice summary (but almost anything is better than what is there currently!).
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Thank you fro picking me up on that - gives me the chance to get on my soap-box. You probably don't realise it John, but Harringay is buzzing with digital activity. I'm not just bigging up HoL, there are a host of other digital arts and media based in Harringay. We should recognise it, be proud of it and use it as another way to get profile fro a richer more exciting hood.
(P.S. Knowing my mail would be going into a den of sceptics, I did take the trouble to pre-defend (what a great non-word) this point in my mail to Haringey Council)
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Permalink Reply by John D on
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I'm sure it is Hugh, I just didn't know what you meant by the phrase.
Pre-defend is getting your retaliation in first ? :-)
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this is so nonsensical to change the name, apart from expensive because so many signs and letter heads etc would have to be changed. Hugh is right, this is Harringay, not Green lanes or St Anns. Havent the council got better things to do than to go fiddling around with the identity of long established communities? are they going to change the railway station names next? It makes me despair.
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Permalink Reply by Old-Age-Emporium(OAE) on
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Unfortunately, centralising institutions with imperial yearnings and no feel for, or knowledge of the history and culture of local places have a long track record in this regard. The needs of the 1830's Ordnance Survey for standardisation and 'tidiness' in mapping outlying provinces of the (then) United Kingdom allowed young army sappers to impose their own approximate anglicisations on local names with a millennium of history and geographical significance. (See Brian Friel's play, 'Translations'.)
Forty years ago the POST OFFICE completed this process of alienation in my own neck of the woods on the South Armagh border (as in thousands of other places across these islands). No longer could letters be delivered to our ancient 12th century townland of Glas-Dhrom an Achaidh (='the Green Ridge in the Plain'), despite all its historical and topographical authenticity even in its anglicised form of 'Glassdrumonaghy'. From the early 1970s my parents' address became '110 Concession Road' etc. Of course 'Concession Road' itself was a barbarous coinage concocted by some civil servant in The Boundary Commission of 1923-25, granting concession to Irish Free State traffic to pass through a two-mile indent of Northern Ireland without stopping! The result is that, courtesy of Post Office need for bureaucratic tidiness and local people's tendency to bow eventually to officialdom, most people under 45 have no great awareness of living in an ancient townland whose name had a meaning.
Which meandering incursion into my own parochialism is just a roundabout way of saying, 'Stand up for HARRINGAY. Use it in your address, especially in any correspondence with HARINGEY. Otherwise, we'll all end up living on a concession road stretching from Islington Green to Winchmore Hill.'
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Permalink Reply by Nilgun Canver on
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Hi I was talking about the electrol boundries. The council does not determine that. I take the point regarding the St. Ann's entry on the sign. I'll raise it with officers.
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Of course you're right about electoral boundaries Nilgun and I fully appreciate that the Council is not the decision-maker on those. But, I think those need not impinge overly on our sense of identity.
This sounds like a possible case of misunderstanding. Can I therefore take it, that, electoral boundaries notwithstanding, you support something like the area outlined on the map at the top of the main page being commonly referred to as Harringay? Super news if that's the case.
And I'll say again that your contributions to this discussion are most welcome.
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