Over a century and a quarter of butcher history on Broadway Parade - will the shop-front be saved?

Fig. 1: 23 Broadway Parade in December 2023

In the Summer of 2022, Crouch End lost Morley's Butcher. There had been a butcher's shop in the premises at 23 Broadway Parade since the building was first erected an occupied in 1896. Since I've known it, the shop has boasted what I've always assumed is a fine mid-century shop facade along with the original door and door frame. I hope since Crouch End is a preservation area that the facade is protected even though it is not the original. I do hope so and that we don't have to go through the same rigmarole as when a shop-front at the bottom of Crouch Hill was recently illegally modified.

Before the 1890s, Tottenham Lane was a very different to the place created in the last decade of the nineteenth century. In the part of the Lane between the clocktower and Elder Road where now stand two parades of late Victorian shop-houses, there used to be large villas, some with immense gardens.

In the 1890s, on the north-west side of the road, in the gardens of Topsfield Hall, James Edmondson¹ built Topsfield Parade incorporating the Queen's Opera House. On the opposite side of the road in the same decade John C. Hill demolished the old houses and built Broadway Parade. Numbers 23-25 were built on the site of Tottenham Villa, described in 1883 as "an old fashioned residence with a good garden".²

Hill had no trouble letting the shops of Broadway Parade when it was completed in 1896 and by the end of the summer that year, twenty-five year old welshman William James Edwards had taken a lease of number 23 and had moved into the first floor flat with his wife and two children. Three years after Edwards set up shop. Just to north of Edwards' shop Hill demolished Felix House³ and started work on the Queen's, a late Victorian pub-hotel.

Fig. 2: Advert for Edwards Butchers, Holloway and Hornsey Press, 2 October, 1896.

Sausage was clearly their thing!

Fig. 3: Edwards advert, Hornsey and FInsbury Park Journal, 30 Journal 1899.

Fig. 4: Edwards advert, Holloway and Hornsey Press, 14 March 1902.

Edwards carried on running his shop till the end of the Second World War by which point he was almost 75. Although he, his wife and son carried on living above the shop until 1953 or 54, by 1947, the business had been taken over by F. W. Morley. It was then run under the Morley name for 65 years until the business was closed in the summer 2022.

Not only did the business survive as a butcher for just over 125 years, it only ever traded under two names. It would be a shame to lose sight of that altogether. It would also be a real shame if the next occupant were to be allowed to destroy the existing shop-front. Most of it doesn't look like a Victorian frontage. I wonder if Morley modernised the shop when he took over. I don't know what the conservation area rules are. My fear is that only original features are given protection. Even if the frontage is protected, it would be worth making sure than the nest owner or leaseholder understand this and the outcome if he/she fails to observe the rules. I'll flag the issue to the Hornsey Historical Society's conservation officer and see what can be done.

NOTES

1. I. Edmondson & Sons was a building firm established by Cumberland-born carpenter Isaac Edmonson. He was one of the many men in the building-related trades who poured into London during the late Victorian building boom. Like many others, Edmonds developed a building-related trade into operating as a general builder and by the 1880s he was styling himself as a builder. By the time of the firm's involvement in Crouch End's development, the better-known face of the business was Isaac's son, James. To set up operations on Tottenham Lane, the firm had taken on Iffley House on the east side of Tottenham Lane on the northern corner of Elder Avenue. Along with the neighbouring Felix House, this was demolished in the last years of the 1890s when the building of Broadway Parade was continued to the north of Elder Avenue.

2. The Ordnance Survey Drawing of 1807 shows that Tottenham House house dated from at least the start of the nineteenth century. How much further back it went is not known, but it may have dated from as far back as the seventeenth century.

3. Felix House bequeathed its name to Felix Avenue, a short street of 27 houses laid out by Hill behind Broadway Parade. Possibly at the time the avenue was laid out, but certainly by 1909, a small factory had been fitted in at the end of the terrace, at number 29. In 1909, it was operating as the "Hygienic Mattress and Bedding Works" with retail premises at 12 Broadway Parade. By 1930, it was being run as a branch of Walkling's Bakery.