Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!

last greek cafe / club on our Green Lanes is closed

This one opposite Tesco has shut permanently now.

I think that's the last of them ?

Time are a changing.

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Permalink Reply by StephenBln on September 11, 2017 at 9:41

My first memories of Green Lanes/ Grand Parade go back to 1958/59.

There already was a 'Greek' community in Harringay at that time. They weren't really Greeks, they were 95% Cypriots who spoke Greek and there was also a Turkish Cypriot community too, although much smaller. I can remember in the summer of 1960, taking a letter from my teacher to a Greek cypriot family on Oakdale Road, whose child was starting at Woodlands Park school in the September.

It's well known that the Greek Cypriots moved ever outwards from Camden Town/Marylebone along the then 29 Bus Route through to Southgate (the 20 went to Cockfosters and Hadley Wood via Southgate at the time), leaving their first London homes behind them. That's just part of the integration process that most of us support. Just like the Easten European Jews in Whitechapel or the Chinese at Limehouse, they've integrated and mostly moved on.

I guess it's harder for the Turks to integrate because of their religious beliefs and intolerance, occasionally also seen here on HoL. Most find it impossible to find employment and therefore follow the well trodden immigrant trail of self-employment.

Does anyone know, if a history of the post-war North London Cypriot immigrants has been written? I had many Cypriot friends at school. In the early, middle 1960s, they were largest group of immigrants at the school (in Harringay), with many fewer of a Carribean background and an occasional Indian or Parkistani.