Haringey Uncovered: Hornsey

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HORNSEY Haringey’s revolting parish

ALL IN A NAME If you split Haringey in half along Green Lanes and Wood Green High Street, then almost everything to the west, including Stroud Green, Crouch End, and Muswell Hill, would be part of the old parish of Hornsey.

“Haringey and Hornsey are the same word,” says local councillor David Winskill, who has lived in the area his whole life. “Up to about about 150 years ago there was no formalised spelling in this country, so words would change an awful lot.”

It wasn’t until the 1960s, when the parishes of Hornsey and Tottenham were joined together, that the new Borough took Hornsey’s original name: Haringey.

DOWN WITH THE KING Hornsey Lodge, which was probably more like a castle, was once the residence of the Duke of Gloucester, a royal title often given to someone close to the King (who often wanted to be king themselves).

The first Duke of Gloucester was the leader of the Lords Appellant, a group of rich noblemen who in 1386 met up in Hornsey Park to ride into London and oppose King Edward II. They seized power in an armed rebellion in 1388.

In 1441, the second Duke of Gloucester’s wife Eleanor was part of a supernatural conspiracy to kill King Henry VI by sorcery so that her husband could take the thrown himself. At the Duke’s lodge in Hornsey, she met with a priest, a witch, and Robert Bolingbroke, ‘a most notorious evoker of demons’. There they ‘endeavoured to consume the king's person by necromantic art.’

It didn’t work, obviously. Bolingbroke was hanged; the priest died in prison; the witch was burned in Smithfield; and the Duchess was forced to walk the streets in a shameful state of undress and imprisoned for the rest of her life.

DID YOU KNOW...

The third Duke of Gloucester did manage to become King, and is thought to have murdered Henry VI and his two young nephews to do it.

DID YOU KNOW...

It is rumoured that the remains of William Wallace (the Scottish hero made famous by the film Braveheart) were hidden in Hornsey Lodge while being secretly returned to Scotland.

DID YOU KNOW...

Muswell Hill is named after the Mus well, a spring whose miraculous healing properties became the object of pilgrimages in the Middle Ages.

GOING WITH THE FLOW When the Great Northern Railway was built in 1850, the population of Hornsey grew from 6,000 people to 90,000 in just 50 years.

“The railway line is probably the most important thing that happened to Hornsey,” says David Winskill. “Hornsey was the first station out of Kings Cross and suddenly it became a possibility to commute. At that stage Hornsey was rural and central London - Camden, Islington, Westminster, the City, and Hackney - was an incredibly squalid, dirty place. People were dying of all sorts of diseases, and the population there was going through the roof. It was horrible to live in.”

Most houses had a cesspit under the floor where they threw absolutely everything. Whole families suffocated to death overnight in the poisonous fumes coming from the cesspit, and sometimes the fumes even exploded.

When the cesspits were full, they overflowed into the street and then into the Thames. In 1858, The Great Stink from the Thames caused thousands to flee the city and finally persuaded the Government to build some proper sewers.

Not that rural retreats like Highgate were much better. In 1868 there were open sewers in the street where sewage mixed with waste from slaughter houses, offal pits, and pigsties, and in one building 135 people were sharing six toilets that weren’t even connected to a water supply.

Even though the New River had been bringing fresh water into London since 1603, it wasn’t until 1902, almost 300 years later, that every home in Hornsey was finally connected. The fresh water didn’t just go into the taps, it diluted the sewage, helped flush it away and was even used in high pressure jets to clean years and years’ worth of dried-on sewage from the streets and housefronts.

DID YOU KNOW...

One of the first people to design a flush toilet was Sir Thomas Crapper.

DID YOU KNOW...

For years, South Hornsey's sewage was secretly pumped into the metropolitan sewers without payment, leading the Hornet newspaper to dub Hornsey the 'worst governed parish about London'.

DID YOU KNOW...

In 1950, 33,000 people a year still took baths in the public wash house on Hornsey High Street.

THE BOMB With Crouch End growing quickly, one man stopped it being swallowed up completely by the big dirty city: “Henry Reader Williams saw all the development around him, and the rural atmosphere of Hornsey disappearing, and managed to get some of the land put in trust so no one could build on it,” says David Winskill. “It was really farsighted because one of the attractions of living round here is we’ve got lots of green open space. So a grateful community erected the Crouch End clock tower in his name.”

The clock tower was unveiled in 1895.

With a new library, fire station and police station, shopping parades, churches, schools, Alexandra Palace, several new railway stations and open spaces like Priory Park and Highgate Wood preserved by Henry Williams, all that was missing was somewhere for the local authority to do all its talking.

Hornsey Town Hall opened in 1935.

“At its height there were about 100 people working there,” says David. “They had guys looking after the roads, the sewers, a primitive social services, the borough electricians who put the lighting up - in those days there might have been a gas lamp or something but basically this was completely and utterly dark. The stuff that we rely on just didn’t exist in those days, and it took the local authority to put it all together.”

And it was nearly taken apart by World War II. “Hornsey got hit by the V1, the doodlebug, the great grandfather of the cruise missile,” says David. “They were set off from France or Germany and they had a little gizmo in so they knew when they had travelled far enough.

The motor would cut out and they would just nosedive. You’d be sitting there having your tea and all of a sudden your whole world would disintegrate. It seems so far away but the things that are going on in Baghdad and all over the world, Hornsey went through.”

DID YOU KNOW...

The band Queen played their first ever concert in Hornsey Town Hall in 1971.

DID YOU KNOW...

Hornsey Town Hall won an award from the Royal Institute of British Architects as the best public building in London when it opened.

DID YOU KNOW...

Crouch End clock tower was paid for by the local residents, who raised £900 of the £1,200 it cost to build in just three weeks.

This booklet was produced by young people at Exposure, Haringey’s award-winning youth media charity, with help from BTCV, Hornsey Historical Society and Bruce Castle Library and Archive Service. It was paid for by the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Produced by

020 8883 0260

Riccardo Lettieri

Pippa Case

Nick May

Henrietta Morris

Gabreille Asare

David Morden

Amanuel Tewodros

Abbey Garrood

The following young people took part in this project: