Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
"Tottenham is exemplar of public health inequality" - from The Times
This article from The Times, interviews local residents following the report last week which said that life expectancy in certain parts of Tottenham is 17 years less than in the most affluent parts of London (Kensington and Chelsea). Full story here
Tags for Forum Posts: Tottenham, health, health inequalties, life expectancy, public health
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Liz on
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In this post, I was referring to Tottenham High Road but we shouldn't be blind to the fact that deprivation exists here too. Houses may cost a lot, but not all of them are single households. Besides, my exact words were where people may be poorer.
There must be a market for the betting shops here in Harringay, (else why are they not saturating Muswell Hill Broadway with them) and may be you are suggesting more complex reasons as to why they are popular on GL, but on Tottenham High Road it is about poverty.
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Permalink Reply by Hugh on
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I was picking up on this sentence, Liz:
It strikes me that our fight on Green Lanes against this invasion is a part of a bigger assault on East Haringey in general or even on poorer areas across the country
I agree that we have poorer households here as there are Crouch End and Muswell Hill too. I just wanted to check whether it was your view that you see this as a poorer area.
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Permalink Reply by Birdy_Too on
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Walking down Green Lanes in Harringay would suggest it is a poor area, yet where do all the relatively affluent folk of Harringay shop? The people walking down GL do not seem to represent those who live off it. When I was shopping down there yesterday I couldn't spot anyone who 'looked' affluent, where are they all, they cannot all be in Tuscany for half term? Just an ongoing observation of mine over the last few years.
I would suggest that some of the residents of Harringay are not poor but tend to shop (and socialise) across the tracks.
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Permalink Reply by John McMullan on
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Tuscany at this time of year? You peasant. They are in Val d'Isere.
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Permalink Reply by John D on
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We'll have to bring in a law to stop that. During rationing, people had to register with a specific butcher, etc...
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Completely agree that your observation is true as a tendency. I'd welcome seeing a little more connection between Harringay and her high street. I'm no sociologist so it's not clear to me how this very different development by residential area and high street has come about. I wonder is it a development pattern that's been seen elsewhere?
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The trouble with nice Victorian houses is that they make poverty and deprivation much harder to spot. This is an unusually mixed area as far as rich and poor go. I hate to deal in absolutes, though. There are clearly enough poorer folk on GL to make it worth siting 8 betting shops on. As Dickens observes, these places don't cause people to get poor in the first place, but they cluster where they think the less affluent will be.
Harringay is, in fact, probably much closer to the 'ideal' of a mixed neighbourhood then somewhere like Crouch End where the poor get pushed out to make way for the wealthy (I was talking to a woman born and bred in Crouch End to whom this has happened - landlord wants her out so he can sell up, "the rich push us around here" were her words) but I tend to agree with Birdy. The affluent households have a tendancy not to invest time in the neighbourhood, preferring to go elsewhere to shop and play, ignoring the High Street.
This pattern was not true in the area's infancy as we know, Grand Parade was built to serve the well heeled of Harringay Park and as we see from old photos until the 70s there was a variety of shops and services.
Somewhere along the line, the street began to go into decline, we know that organised crime was allowed to take root in the High Street until relatively recently. Its removal has left a hole. We know that the flats above the shops can become the new 'rookeries' with people crammed into small flats, dangerously wired and insanitary and as we have seen, a danger to their lives. Landlords are absent or uncaring or both. HMOs need to be tackled and proper housing needs to be found for those in overcrowded conditions.
Part of what the charter is about is resurrecting that 'High street' spirit on GL but it needs to reclaim its heritage as Grand Parade and Harringay High Street , and time and money needs to be invested in giving the area a proper makeover - not to gentrify (as I know some will suggest) but to restore her to her former glory. As a neighbourhood we have to pledge to make it the heart of our area not the traffic heavy line that separates us and becomes a sort of no mans land in the middle.
So, no I wouldn't say Harringay is a poor area as such but there is a lot more to it than house prices and having a few wealthy folk live here. We stand between the two worlds of west and east Haringey and there is a fair bit of overlap. Perhaps what I meant in my quote above, was not so much 'poorer' high streets but high streets that have been allowed to decline and lose their sense of purpose, as people get in their cars to drive to big supermarkets and stop using their local shops and services.
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There are two things I think governments and organisations miss when they look at problems like this. One is that how long you live has a lot to do with how long you want to live. The other is that why we want to live is more complicated, at least at a local level, than how we feel we're getting along personally in life. I'd hate to think that they're aware of this and just accept it.
The local Catholic boys secondary school where I grew up boasted that they had no suicides compared to the other two secondary schools in the town, which had up to four a year. The school was situated next to one of the worst railway crossings in the country for pedestrian deaths though. Do we really think that living next to a disgusting looking high street full of litter and ugly advertising with crap shops is going to make us happy and want to live a long time? Our grandchildren would need to be doing pretty bloody well at school to counter that. Living another day is pointless if it's going to be shit.
The irony is that as far as I can see a lot of our hard working councillors do want us to be happy and live a long time. The trouble is that they're constantly solving problems in the short term with limited resources. Tottenham needs more money from central government but it's not going to get it while the appaling local deprivation is statistically hidden by some of the wealthiest parts of London. It is not a problem for solely the chattering classes of Harringay that our streets are full of traffic, ridiculous sign posts, constrictve railings, ugly advertising and shit shops. This is killing people.
If the government poured as much money into Tottenham as they have into Islington then we might be in business. The trouble is that it is impossible to do that without having a lot of it spent on Crouch End (which was up and coming but still a shit hole no better that Upper Street in 1997). Haringey itself is the problem. Split it in half.
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Perhaps Tottenham needs to break free from being the poor relation. They now have the right to set up a 'local council'. Would this help?
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Nope. Help for Tottenham needs to come from central government and "Europe". These kinds of things, while good for us who may be capable of it, are not good for Tottenham. I think they're more directed at villages in Devon full of people agitating to become local rulers rather than les miserable of north east London. It's not the actual figures (life expectancy and disposable income) that are so wrong, it's their proximity to significantly higher figures within the remit of the same organisation. What kind of mountains would you move to have your children live another ten years in health and relative comfort?
I'd love to hear the views of a (presumably) conservative councillor from the wonderfully successful Kensington & Chelsea but I suspect they have had a bit of luck.
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Permalink Reply by pamish on
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Don't rely on anything from this council, they are fighting like rats in a sack.
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Permalink Reply by Tammy Palmer on
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I agree it would be good to see more money being spent on the 'poorer' areas of the borough - if Tottenham were cleaned up for starters it might make the area more desirable to live in and encourage people to open up businesses there - it actually has some great facilities and green spaces but that all gets lost with its awful reputation. This is probably just a pipe dream as I can't see the council wanting to make any investment in the area.
Practically I would love to see something useful like community cooking classes - kind of like the Jamie Oliver thought of teaching people to cook on a budget without the millionaire chef telling them how to do it. All too often those living on very low incomes feel that they have little choice around healthy eating often having to choose between paying the bills or buying food or have a lack of knowledge as to how to cook on a budget, buying cheap junk food or frozen meals, it can even be something as simple as not owning pots and pans, many older people living alone don't find it cost effective to cook a meal for one as it uses gas or electricity - I discovered my elderly neighbour survives on a diet mainly consisting of pot noodles and toast - I do take food over if I have cooked extra or I try to make a bit extra but don't think he would accept all the time and why should he! Anyway back to my point, Tottenham is a hugely diverse community it would be brilliant to run community classes where people could learn to cook a variety of cheap healthy meals from scratch - it woul be great to make inter-generational so kids can be encouraged to try food they may have never experienced!
I appreciate I may being a bit idealistic here and cookery classes won't atomatically mean that the life expectancy of a tottenham resident will increase but it is a very small step in the right direction!
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