Harringay House Gatehouse or its Ghost?

idling away at a few old maps and Google Earth the other day (as history nerds are wont too often to do), I noticed a buiding that was slightly out of alignment with all the others around it - only slightly, but enough to raise a metaphorcial eyebrow. It's that wee little building, just beyond the Church at the bottom of Alison Road, behind the Turkish Bank.

Looking at my 1869 map, I saw that the building was close to where a pair of gatehouses for Harringay House used to stand (and yes they've spelt 'Haringey' House the Council way. No idea why. All other mentions and maps in this period used our spelling). 

Next I took an 1893 map that's been overlaid on Google Maps. The overlay shows how very accurate the old map was. Where old buildings have survived, there's almost an exact match between the 1893 map and Google Earth.

The 1893 map seems to show the northern gatehouse surviving and what I assume are the gates and gateposts next to it. The southern gatehouse doesn't appear, but the little building I noted on Google Earth appears to be in the exact same place as the gatehouse would have been. Its slight misalignmemt then makes sense as it would have aligned with the older structures.

So the small building that still stands today is in the exact same postion as the southern gatehouse would have been, but it wasn't shown on the 1893 map - the one that had been drawn with such care and accuracy. Does that mean there's no chance that the gatehouse could have survived?  Could a late 18th Century gatehouse from Harringay House really have survived? I couldn't believe it.

Even if the structure itself wasn't the eighteenth century one, it seems at the very least to have been built on the footprint of the gatehouse and so gives us pinpoint accuracy of where the old entrance to Harringay House was.  Walk in though the passageway to Cafe Ora, and when you reach the end of the passage you're about at the gates to the old house.

I wanted more than just a ghost however. So, I popped down today to have a mosey around. A big thank you to Rev'd Adedayo Ige who was enormmously helpful in enabling me to get a look around the outside of, let's call it the "gatehouse" building. I was also able to get a view of it from Cafe Ora.

My initial thoughts were that what is there now is Victorian, but I'd like to be convinced otherwise. There's clearly an older building, the "gatehouse" and joined to it to the north is another building. The bricks of the "gatehouse" building are finer than the one attached to it and it looks like they've either been painted or rendered at some point in their past. Here are the iPhone snaps I took.

The eastern face of the "gatehouse" building from Ora. Has that entire central section been replaced with yellow stock?

The northern face of the northern building from Cafe Ora.

Where the "gatehouse" building to the right, joins a second building to the left. If a utility building had been erected during the Victorian development of the suburb, woudn't they just have thrown it up? Would it really have been built in two halves? Notice the creamier brick to the right vs. the coarser London Stock to the left.

The coarser London stock brick used for the building to the north of the "gatehouse".

The "gatehouse" bricks have been painted or rendered at some point in their past. Would anyone have bothered to paint or render an old outhouse?

So, nothing here that enables me to claim a eureka moment. I'm still highly sceptical, but you can also hear me grasping at what may be straws, but I don't want to discount what may be a posiibility. 

I also wonderd at the fact that the building was two-storey. When I think of a Georgian gatehouse, I think of single-storey buidlings a bit more like these:

But then I looked around and saw that they came in all shapes and sizes. In fact the shape of the gable ends on this one look very simillar to what's shown in Picture 2 of the "gatehouse":

Ach, I don't know. It would be fun if, but the chances seem slim........ At the very least, now when I walk past Ora, I can look up to where the big house was up there at the top of the hill between Hewitt and Allison roads and, through the exceptionally fine gardens, just make out the classical facade and wonder whether any of the oranges, peaches or pineapples growing in the glasshouses are ripe.