Yesterday, I had the misfortune to find myself in the shopping mall. Walking out the big automatic doors and into the crowd of Star Wars pub extras who were smoking, spitting and squabbling on the footpath I witnessed what for me sums up the whole carbuncle on the arse of Haringey that is Wood Green High Road. One of the characters stormed through the crowd with his status dog in tow. I was reflecting on the fact that ‘status’ dogs don't seem to work (as the people who have them only ever seem to be what everyone else in society would consider low status). Everything suddenly went quiet except the ever present sirens. The status dog had stopped and released its copious bowels all over the footpath. It was like turning on the light in an HMO; the cockroaches screamed and scattered. The dog owner laughed and walked on. It was probably one of the most disgusting things I have seen or smelt in London. Eventually the crowd returned and watched the next horde trample the mess up and down the road. There was no-one to turn to, no-one to clean up and more importantly no-one with the authority to challenge and/or shoot the dog owner. Things just returned to normal.
The whole experience made me think how the council, local police and traders believe that we're all animals if they are happy for us to have to deal with this every time we go to the High Road. It's easy enough for me to hop on a bus and head off to Crouch End or Islington or even Enfield to shop but if you're older or disabled and have trouble getting around or not enough money for the bus it must be pretty grim to face it every day. Imagine how the standard little old lady dreads heading out into the crowds, litter, phlegm, smoke and anti-social behaviour of Wood Green every morning to get the milk.
Short of manning water cannons at each end of the High Road and employing some mercenaries with batons to control the crowds, I don’t know what can be done. Are there any clever ‘nudges’ or interventions that could improve Wood Green? Is it a matter of tarting the place up and hoping that the crowds respect their new surroundings? Is it signage to remind, and in many instances educate, people that spitting, littering and barging into other people is just not the done thing? Or do we just give up, bulldoze the lot and install a waterhole in the middle and let the law of the jungle and the status dog owners prevail?
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But towards specific behaviour, not towards "low status people", whatever that means.
Sharon, the next comment is not specifically aimed at you, it's an observation of something that has happened a lot on this thread
When someone takes that comment about behaviour and interprets it as being about particular social group, that tells us a lot about the way that they think - either that they hold that prejudice personally or that they hold other prejudices (eg about the "middle class") which leads them to incorrect assumptions about the opinions and motivations of others.
My apologies, you are right. Osbawn did use the term low status in the original post, about the man with the status dog.
On close reading it was specifically about the "status" of people who choose to have "status" dogs. I don't think he/she meant to extend that label to everyone in Wood Green, or even to all the badly behaved of Wood Green.
I was wrong about who first used the term, but I stand by my point that no one has said the problem with Wood Green is "low status people" other than as an accusation leveled at others.
(I also don't agree with Osbawn on that particular point)
Four reasons to find the psychogeography of Wood Green Shopping City vaguely unsettling (Stephen King wrote a short horror story called "Crouch End" positing that around here the crust between the surface of civilization and Hell is particularly thin):
Well, it does flow gently through Lordship Rec, which is also Haringey.
What's the problem with the railway line, though? I live in a block of flats built on the same former railway line. Am I closer to hell by doing so?
THIS history is helpful and interesting Straw Cat.
It puts "regeneration" within the Borough into a longer-run, historical perspective. Some of the chronic difficulties seem to stem from the forced amalgamation of three Boroughs into a single entity in 1965. From that point forward, for some reason, ambition seemed to vault ahead of ability.
I note the further evidence of a common thread between the Shopping City and the rebuilding of AP after the 1980 fire. In today's money, both were multi-ten-million pound projects.
The wonderful-sounding Village in the Sky could have appeared in a forerunner of Haringey People magazine. Such vision would now be said to 'secure the future'.
Our best guide to the future is the past. The ingredients are in place. Now its time for Tottenham's turn for regeneration (via Cannes).
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am a prospective councillor candidate
Highgate Ward | Liberal Democrat Party
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