Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Sainsbury supermarket to open at Wards Corner, will this affect the demolition applciation
I have read in the local newspaper that a new Sainsbury supermarket is to open on the Wards Corner site in West Green Road, N15. Personally I am in two minds as to whether it is good or bad.
On one hand the council wants to destroy all the old Victorian and Edwardian buildings just so it can have a pre-recession model shopping mall with lots of chain stores as it believes in 1960's planning for Tottenham i.e. knock it down and build some concrete high rise to regenerate the area into Croydon and use council tax subsidies to do it. Chain stores buy into that model of thinking.
On the other hand it means the site has now reached all the planning departments goals in that TfL are improving the public realm, the fear of crime is going as all the bright new lighting makes the tube feel more welcoming and now the first chain store on site is due to arrive so the site has started to regenerated and it didn't cost anyone anything as those campaigners have always said. So maybe we get to keep all those jobs, little shops, the market and the subsidy money.
I don't pity all those councillors who supported the developer giving them 1.5 million of tax payer money whilst sacking teachers and now have to vote for demolition in order to final part with that money and for what?
The chain store they always wanted, when all a long they could have kept all that money to help the local schools. Still maybe the planning committee will stop the demolition stone dead now. Well it would be bad for the party career as how do you look your colleagues in face when sacking their kid’s teachers whilst letting a developer with billions have the school cash. Makes bankers look like nicer people.
Tags for Forum Posts: community, corner, green, housing, local, market, seven, shops, sisters, transport, More…
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton on
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My recollection is that the burned-out building was a hairdressers. It may have been called something like Simone or Anthony Kane. I don't remember it being owned by the Council.
Circle Anglia - previously Circle 33 - left their Tottenham offices and moved their HQ to Highbury.
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Permalink Reply by Peter L. Bailey on
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Shame about Fair Deal. Was good, more spices and massive saucepans than you could shake a stick at, reached a high point about a year ago when it tried serving coffee, but I never saw more than about 4 shoppers in there and that's the rub isn't it. Will I see more than 4 shoppers in a new Sainsbury's local on the same site? Probably!
More Sainsbury's: yes there's that new one further down West Green Road, near junction with Terront.
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And the one just north of 639 HighRd. The Tesco Metro at SAOuth Tottenham and teh Tesco at Seven Sisters. The New Sainsburys to come at THSpurs site, another at Lordship Lane.
The problem is they ALL sell a lot of convenience foods and the prices are NOT CHEAPER! These shops are not good fro our neighbourhoods.
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Permalink Reply by matthew cuthbert on
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Tesco's more worried about Aldi and other internal issues, as per usual they'll still put a planning objection in, if their team are on top of it.
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Permalink Reply by pamish on
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This post is now one for the archive (2012), as the Sainsbury's is now well established. So yes it does prove you don't need to demolish to attract the Brands. Costa added since then too.
If Tesco's don't want to lose all their customers, it would make sense for them to have more than two people working the tills in the huge shop in Seven Sisters. They now close all the tills except the one-basket one and the robots, at 9pm, thus saving a couple of jobs at £7-ish an hour, for those three hours till midnight closing. So there is a queue for the robots, that trails back past the ten ordinary tills. So I've stopped shopping there.
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Likewise Pam, I won't shop in Tesco in the evenings post 8.30pm. I didn't apply for a job in Tesco and stopped working there in 2002 so I don't really feel like doing a job they should be paying their staff to do and I'm sure their staff wouldn't object to the extra hours.
I have also noticed the general manners of the staff have also improved recently however this would not have been difficult as some of them (not all) on the tills have been the rudist people I have ever come into contact with and they are supposed to be in a customer 'relations' position.
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On green Lanes they stack up their delivery trolleys on the pavement making the cashpoint all that more hostile. Head office do what they want with deliveries, and staff deal with the fall out, anyone enquired about enforcement?
Pam's robot scenario sounds like this big store reverts to a 'Local' scenario in the evening, that's a drag for customers.
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But a local store would not have a line of thirty people queuing up to pay (and do the work themselves of scanning and packing). Yes I did count, I was so stunned the first time I saw this so early in the evening.
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Fuzzy little Costa's now owned by Whitbread's now, another way to keep the water table down I guess, breweries did it in the past.
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Fair deal IS on the Wards Corner site where every local independant shop faces eviction, demolition and replacement by a standard multilevel thing that you could find everywhere ....in the world now. The sense of place will disappear.
Okay, we all agree that Seven Sisters needs "cleanig up". But "regeneration" should be about making people develop and that cannot be done by bringing in Costa Cafe and Pasta Expresses everywhere. Just look at the people who occupy the jobs in those shops - I do not want to deniigrate them but the jobs are part time, low paid shift work. These businesses have their place and we have several that are in our Bororugh. But they don't replace local entrepreneurial talent that you find in the small independants.
Also the Council -Grainger certainly hasn't- hasn't taken into full consideration the extent to which the businesses on the WC site DO SERVE the sourrounding community. The Grainger scheme will drive quite a few people, shoppers, out of their local area to do their shopping. There are also many people from nearby areas and even further afield that come to buy specific goods found on this site. Seven Sisters "regeneration" should put locall people before new buildings, see what their needs are and then work from there. Unless the intention is precisely to rid the area of a certain type of resident. If thsi is the case then by all means the Grainger pan should proceed.
If you destroy local indepedant entrepreneurship that has withstood the tests of hardtimes and replace it with these multi-unit stores, the moment they (multiunit stores) see hardship they move oout leaving gaping holes in the High Street and the decline sets in. It is a story we are living at present. the evidence is there. Why areour our Borough so called leaders pushiing this plan through?
Questions need to be asked of the council as to where they have been all these years? They haven''t been enforcing the Conservation Area rules for the area that these buildings stand in. Neither have they been doing a very good job with the rest of the C Area which includes W Corner. Regenration should start with the Council maybe!
All this begs the question what is next for demolition? Are we going to see the parade of lovely smalls buildings north of the "lovely" Tesco building be replaced by more new insipid buildings? Do they want to make this area around Seven Sisters tube a Major Town centre? My guess is yes. But the problem is that that model no longer works. High streets need to attract people by their uniqueness with a few anchor shops. Major national clone chains are flocking to the large Westfield type malls streets that have a very large concentration of national multiples. The High Rd at Seven Sisters cannot do this even with major redevelpment. Just atke a walk down the High Rd all the way to Shoreditch and see where the gentrification is taing place - precisely in those areas where the small quirky, independants are leading the "regenration".
So if you take away the uniquenes of a shopping street then there is no reason for people to stay in the street to shop or for "outsiders" to come to shop. You lose the unique selling point of your product (to use marketing speak). Give up your competitive advantage and you give in to the commpetition.
At a time when Haringey is doing all in its power to restore 639 High Rd and that it has now granted planning permission to have the Carpet Right building rebuilt to previous plans, how ironic it is to seethat another iconic building in need of TLC is to be destroyed. The double speak attitude of our Council seems very cynical. The buildings at Seven Sisters coould have some very imaginative architectural plans developed to make them into such a statment for the start of the Heritate Corridor. Instead, the Council, who is Grainger's development partner, is bound up in a mess it can't seem to extricate itself from.
How cynical to call this scheme Seven Sisters Regeneration and send around glossy flyers that don't even mention the name Grainger anywhere. How cynical to call eviction of people from their homes "regeneration". How cynical to say that they'll start the "regeneration" of Tottenham by destroying the area's long standing small independant shops and businesses.
If there is one thing people should do, it is to go see their Councillor and ask where he/she stands on this issue. Use that to inform yourself about what your Council is all about.
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Spot on JJ. And as for the mini-Westfield - Tottenham Hale does that, two minutes on the tube or eight minutes walk away.
Many on the council are against the Grainger plan, including, thankfully, those who voted it out the last time it went to the planning committee. Some though are a bit stuck in the past, we need to enable a gracious way for them to come round without losing face. I guess we have to write off the £1.5million.
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Why should people write off the 1.5 million or accept the eviction of council tenants so their homes can be sold off with out any real consultation? This is the property of the people not the council or planning department. Why are the councillors not doing anything to make this process fair?
I wanted to ask questions at yet another token planning development forum over Wards Corner but quickly decided what the point was? Paul Smith of planning was bias for the developer from the start just didn't bother to answer the questions and the developer could even answer basic question about job creation. The planning office report said about 60 but the developer said 600. I wanted Paul Smith to explain to me why his own figures were not being used.
That question about why did is this application fro demolition getting rushed through when other applications takes weeks and weeks longer was not answered in fact it was just dismissed with a smirk. I was shocked at their behaviour and then is something very odd about rushing through a plan which no one wants.
I sat with lots of people I have never met before and they all hated the development proposal yet knew nothing about the secret funding arrangements.
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