Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Why is Crouch End high street so much cleaner than Green Lanes?
I recently noted that people queue for buses in Crouch End but not Green Lanes and wondered why.
On my most recent excursion I noticed how markedly cleaner Crouch End is on a Saturday morning compared to Green Lanes and again wondered why?
Both are very busy on a Saturday morning (Crouch End arguably more so). Both have lots of cafes and restaurants. Both have bus stops.
But Green Lanes is littered with rubbish.
Why is it so?
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton
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For many years as an elected councillor I took photos and reported them to the Council. A lot were of litter and rubbish. but they also included graffiti and posters stuck or painted on walls; or broken pavements; broken tree branches; etc etc etc. Very often I also took photos of ettractive parks; green spaces; interesting buildings; and lively people etc etc.
As a citizen who was an elected councillor on foot in the borough I had several aims other than improving my admittedly poor photography skills. A main aim was to encourage other residents not to litter and dump. Another bigger aim was to encourage other people to buy cheap cameras - which were getting cheaper - and use email to report stuff. Tottenham as one of the early areas to get email cables. Yet another motive: To put pressure on Veolia to raise their perfomance.
Incidentally We - my wife and I, not the council - paid for the email and cameras. Also for my Flickr account on which I posted my photos and reports.
This was before mobile phones. (Which I loathed and still dothe.) Although I admit they do make it easier to snap and send reports of rubbish etc.So Brian I'm wondering if you have a mobile and snapped and reported the dumping problems you saw. Easy when it takes a few short minutes.
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Permalink Reply by adamvietnam
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Further to that Fix My Street seems to work very well and the council generally respond quickly to reports of rubbish.
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Permalink Reply by Michael Anderson
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I have a friend who lives in Muswell Hill and we discussed this some time ago. It’s not that Muswell Hill (and I assume also Crouch End) has less littering but more reporting. In MH people have organised telephone trees so a single incident has multiple reports. I assume this moves it higher up the priority list. A big difference though between Crouch End, Muswell Hill and Green Lanes are the number of fruit and veg stops that spill on to the pavement, though I would have thought that this would prompt a more frequent street cleaning regime.
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Permalink Reply by Mark Williams
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The drive-through McDonald's doesn't help. Most of the branded litter in the area must be from that one location. I'm sure there are several social and economic factors as well.
I recently had to explain to overseas visitors that this is normal for the area to be this dirty, and that people are instructed to leave loose bin bags on the pavement. They had assumed there was some sort of problem, like a bin strike or something. They thought I was joking when I said the local government asks people to put their rubbish out on the street in bags.
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Permalink Reply by Oli Brown
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Yes, social and economic factors are key.
Crouch End has a more settled population. Harringay, and the surrounding eastern parts of the Borough, are more transient. People tend to not mess in their own nest and, conversely, care less about messing up someone else's.
The populations are different too. The residents of Crouch End are more likely of indigenous stock and whilst a lot of foreigners also live there, they tend to be from other more stable and ordered countries in North and Western Europe and Australia, New Zealand, the US and Canada (acknowledging that the US might not seem stable at the moment). People from those countries are generally accustomed to clean and orderly societies where communal environments and social obligations are respected.
To the east of the tracks there are more people from countries where this is not the case. If you come from a place without a culture of civic responsibility or an expectation that communal spaces are managed for the benefit of all, you are less likely to be aware of or interested in the need to use a bin.
Also, there are a lot of drug users/substance abusers/mentally ill who roam around Harringay. Readers will know and recognise the most persistent and will no doubt have observed their willingness to litter, spit and defecate in communal spaces. That tends to not happen so much in Crouch End and Muswell Hill.
So, if you have the same number of bins per capita and the same frequency of rubbish collection, Crouch End will still be cleaner.
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Blimey Oli! You'll keep Alan and Clive going for weeks with that one.
There will be calls for data sets, peer reviewed papers and calls to define "stable and ordered countries" not to mention the use of the words 'indigenous' and 'foreign'.
I suggest you save time and fall back on the old reliable justifications of 'observed behaviour' or even better 'lived experience'!
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Luckily for me, Oli, when my Highbury Highbury landlady died, I moved up-market to Tottenham, meeting - as the luckiest man I know - a marvelous woman. People over here in the far East near the Roman's road have been good neighbours ever since. And they know how communal spaces are managed.
I imagine too there are drugs and substance users in other places. One of my late brothers who I loved brought a serious hashish habit back from Israel. The second one, an alcoholic, ran a successful business and lived in a beautiful house.I'm not sure but I think "the wrong side of the track" may be an Americanism.
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P.S, Sorry Oli I left out your reference to "indigenous stock". I am a grandson of immigrants and doubt very much - as you remarked - if they used to spit and defecate in communal spaces. But one of my aunts did tell a story about how, after World War II she saw the girl-next-door running out to use the outside lavatory at the bottom of their garden while starting to pull down her underwear. Plainly though this made an impression on that aunt, who recalled it decades later, but after the War she left London, emigrating at first to France. Then married an American serviceman. And migrated to California.
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Mark, There are flats above shops where - so I'm told, there isn't enough room for bins, so oeople are asked to leave out sealed bin bags. Having bags on the street doesn't by its nature make an area "dirty". .If this is not what you meant then please take a couple of photos and use the Fix My Street website to report these. It's free. There's a map.
You can also report potholes and a lot more besides.
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