Noel Park

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Noel Park
Middlesex

Houses in Darwin Road, Noel Park
Location
Grid reference: TQ315902
Location: 51°35’47"N, 0°6’8"W
Data
Population: 5,670
Post town: London
Postcode: N22
Dialling code: 020
Local Government
Council: Haringey
Parliamentary
constituency: 		Hornsey and Wood Green

Noel Park in planned community in northern Middlesex built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, consisting of 2,200 model dwellings, designed by Rowland Plumbe. It was developed as the Noel Park Estate on a tract of land on the edge of north of London as part of the fast growing development of Wood Green. It is one of four developments on what was the outskirts of the metropolis built by the Artizans, Labourers & General Dwellings Company (Artizans Company).

From 2003 to some time in 2009, the name of Noel Park spread to given to a small park near the southern edge of Noel Park. It was originally known as Russell Park and that name has been restored.

One of the earliest garden suburbs in the world, the Noel Park Estate was designed to provide affordable housing for working-class families wishing to leave the inner city; every property had both a front and back garden. It was planned from the outset as a self-contained community close enough to the rail network to allow its residents to commute to work. In line with the principles of the Artizans Company's founder, William Austin, no public houses were built within the estate, and there are still none today.

As a result of London's rapid expansion during the early 20th century, and particularly after the area was connected to the London Underground in 1932, Noel Park became completely surrounded by later developments. In 1966 the estate was bought by the local council.

Despite damage sustained during the Second World War and demolition work during the construction of Wood Green Shopping City in the 1970s, Noel Park today remains largely architecturally intact. In 1982, the majority of the area was granted Conservation Area and Article Four Direction status by the Secretary of State for the Environment, in recognition of its significance in the development of suburban and philanthropic housing and in the history of the modern housing estate.

Location

Noel Park is a neighbourhood of Wood Green. It forms a rough triangle, bordered by the A109 road (Lordship Lane) to the north, the A1080 road (Westbury Avenue) to the south-east, and A105 road (Wood Green High Road, formerly part of Green Lanes) to the west.

When construction began, the River Moselle, running parallel to Lordship Lane a short distance south of it, formed the de facto northern boundary of the area. During the development of the area in the 1880s the river was culverted and the land between the river and Lordship Lane built on.[1]

The historic western boundary was the now-defunct Palace Gates Line of the Great Eastern Railway, a short distance to the east of Wood Green High Road. Since the railway's closure in 1964, much of the area between the former railway line and Wood Green High Road has been occupied by the eastern section of the large The Mall, Wood Green shopping, cinema and residential complex (commonly known as Shopping City).[1]

History and development

Early history

Duckett's Manor and Wood Green in 1619 (south at the top)

Most of Wood Green, including the site of Noel Park, was sparsely populated up until the nineteenth century. The 1619 Earl of Dorset's Survey of Tottenham shows the area as forming the historic Duckett's Manor; as with the rest of the Moselle valley, the land consisted almost entirely of woodland and pasture, with the only building shown in the area which was to become Noel Park being Ducketts Farm. This building was the former manor house of Ducketts dating from 1254 and is the earliest recorded property in Wood Green.[2] The tiny settlements at Wood Green and Elses Green are shown a short distance to the north-east. The manor itself was situated on the ancient drovers' road known as Green Lanes. The last recorded occupancy of the manor was in 1881, shortly before the site was cleared for the construction of the Noel Park Estate.[3]

By 1880 the estate had been broken up into fifteen smaller farms. The rough northern meadows adjacent to the Moselle were used for beef farming, whilst the southern fields, known as Grainger's Farm, were used as grazing land.[2] The western edge of the estate was by this time occupied by the Great Eastern Railway's Palace Gates Line and Green Lanes railway station, opened in 1878.[4]

Artizans, Labourers & General Dwellings Company

The Artizans, Labourers & General Dwellings Company (Artizans Company) was established in 1867 by William Austin. Austin was an illiterate who had begun his working life on a farm as a scarecrow paid 1 penny per day,[5] and had worked his way up to become a drainage contractor.[6] The company was established as a for-profit joint stock company, with the objective of building new houses for the working classes "in consequence of the destruction of houses by railroads and other improvements".[6][7] The company aimed to fuse the designs of rural planned suburbs such as Bedford Park with the ethos of high-quality homes for the lower classes pioneered at Saltaire.[8] Whilst earlier philanthropic housing companies such as the Peabody Trust and the Improved Industrial Dwellings Company focused on multi-storey blocks of flats in the inner cities, the Artizans Company aimed to build low-rise housing in open countryside alongside existing railway lines to allow workers to live in the countryside and commute into the city.[9] The company attracted the attention of Lord Shaftesbury, who served as president until 1875.[6]

Insignia of the Artizans Company on shops in Noel Park

The company built and immediately sold a group of houses in Battersea, then still a rural village. The proceeds of the sale were used to purchase a plot of land in Salford in Lancashire for development, and by 1874 the company had developments in Liverpool, Birmingham, Gosport and Leeds.[6]

The first of the four large-scale estates built by the Artizans Company was Shaftesbury Park, a development of 1,200 two-storey houses covering 42½ acres built in 1872 on the site of a former pig farm in Battersea.[6][9] The success of Shaftesbury Park led to the construction of Queen's Park, built in 1874 on a far more ambitious scale on 76 acres of land to the west of London, adjacent to the newly opened Westbourne Park station, purchased from All Souls College, Oxford. A third London estate was planned at Cann Hall, and a site of 61 acres was purchased.[6]

However, the Queen's Park project suffered serious mismanagement and fraud; the company secretary William Swindlehurst and two others were found guilty in 1877 of defrauding £9,312 from the project.[10] The company was forced to raise rents, and tenants were no longer permitted to buy their houses; by 1880 the company's finances had recovered sufficiently to allow further expansion.[11]

Selection of the site

On 14 February 1881, Rowland Plumbe was appointed Consulting Architect to the Artizans Company, with a brief to prepare a third estate. A leading architect of the period, Plumbe had primarily been a designer of hospitals, such as the London Hospital,[11] and Poplar Hospital;[12] he had been President of the Architectural Association in 1871–72 and a Council Member of the Royal Institute of British Architects since 1876.[11]

In April 1881, the Artizans Company inspected sites at Fulham and "in the vicinity of Alexandra Park". The Fulham site was rejected as too prone to flooding, and the Wood Green site rejected as being too far from any centre of population.[2]

However, the next month, the decision was taken to bid for the site near Wood Green.[2] Despite its distance from London at the time, the area was well served by railways. The Palace Gates Line, opened in 1878 to serve nearby Alexandra Palace, had an intermediate station at Green Lanes, immediately adjacent to the site in question.[13] This provided direct service to the City of London from the outset; following the construction of a link with the Tottenham and Hampstead Junction Railway on 1 June 1880, direct services also ran to Blackwall and North Woolwich, providing direct links with the Port of London.[14] In addition, the Great Northern Railway's station at Wood Green (now Alexandra Palace station) was within walking distance. The company decided that the quality of transport links compensated for the distance from any significant centre of population, and in June 1881 a site of 100 acres was purchased by the company for £56,345.

Design

Plumbe's original designs

Plumbe designed the estate with five classes of houses. Although the houses were built to the same five basic designs, each street was given a distinct style of design and ornamentation. Varying mixes of red and yellow bricks, and variations in window design and ornamental motifs, were used to give each street a distinct identity.[15] All were designed with front and back gardens.[16] Corner houses were given distinctive designs and turrets.[17]

Small two-storey houses, with the front doors set in small outbuildings to open perpendicular to the front of the house
Fifth-class houses, Moselle Avenue: the front doors are angled to avoid opening adjacently to their neighbours.

The distribution of houses followed the traditional Victorian model of town planning. The larger first- and second-class houses were built in the centre, close to the church and school, while the more numerous third-, fourth-, and fifth-class houses were built in the estate's outskirts.[18] Welch (2006) speculates that this segregation of housing was not Plumbe's intention;[18] Plumbe himself was quoted in 1896 as saying that "I regret that it is necessary to separate the richer and more cultured classes from the poorer, owing to the prejudices which exist; and these prejudices exist on the part of the poor as well as on the part of the other class".[19]

Except for the corner houses, the houses were built in pairs, each sharing a porch with its neighbour.[16] For many of the smaller fourth- and fifth-class houses, the doors were aligned at right angles to the façade of the house, so as not to open directly adjacently to their neighbours. All houses were designed with at least one parlour and with the kitchen, scullery, and toilet in separate rooms at the rear of the house; the first-class houses also had toilets upstairs.[20] In line with the design principles of the time, the downstairs toilets were accessible only from the back gardens, and the houses were not fitted with separate bathrooms; baths were taken in a moveable bath located in the kitchen.[20]

Floor plans of the five classes of house built at Noel Park

All houses were built with marble-mantelpieced fireplaces and flues. All houses were supplied with running water supplied from the New River, which flowed through Wood Green.[20] However, not all houses were supplied with gas or mains electricity from the outset, the remainder being lit by candles or oil or paraffin lamps.[20]

Houses at Noel Park were deliberately designed to be relatively small, both for cheapness and to discourage tenants from taking on lodgers.[21] Many of the larger houses at Shaftesbury Park had been sublet and split, and the practice went against the principles of the Artizans Company's founders.[16] To discourage the practice at Queen's Park and Noel Park, cottage flats were built; these maintained the terraced façade, but split the house into upper and lower flats, each flat having a separate front door onto the street.[16]

Construction

Plumbe-designed cottage flats

On 4 May 1883, the Artizans Company sold a parcel of land adjacent to the railway line to the Great Eastern Railway for construction of a goods yard, and a siding was built into the development site.[22][23] Although initially the company had considered making bricks on the site, the rail yard allowed raw materials to be purchased wholesale and transported cheaply to the site, with large warehouses and workshops constructed for the manufacture of doors, flooring and other necessary materials; in 1884 the Pall Mall Gazette reported that "in a shed 330ft long by 50ft broad are stored a million superficial feet of flooring boards".[23]

In early 1883 serious discrepancies were discovered between the amounts of building material apparently purchased and the actual amounts acquired. Rowland Plumbe and Sir Richard Farrant, Deputy Chairman of the Artizans Company, visited the site to investigate the matter. Mr Hunt, the foreman, advised that "in answer to questions as to the mode of measurement in use for Ballast heaps, that one third was added to the measurement for shrinkage".[24]

When summoned to appear before the "Hornsey Committee" of the Artizans Company the next day, Hunt instead sent his assistant, without the relevant ledgers and instead with a paper described in the Committee minutes as "a paper of measurements which were soon ascertained not to be the actual measurements but measurements falsified so as to work out cubically to about the measurements certified by Mr Hunt".[25] The total overpaid by the company was calculated by Plumbe as £1,071.14s.3d; Hunt was immediately dismissed and a gatekeeper to record all goods entering the site was put in place to avoid a repetition of the incident.[24]

First-class houses, Gladstone Avenue

In 1883, it was decided to name the estate "Noel Park", in honour of Ernest Noel (1831–1931), Liberal Member of Parliament for Dumfries Burghs and chairman of the Artizans Company since 1880.[26] The streets were laid out on a grid plan of broad avenues running on a south-west to north-east axis and narrower roads running north-west to south-east. Streets were named after prominent members of the Artizans Company and leading political figures of the time, with the exception of Darwin Avenue, named for Charles Darwin, prominent naturalist and an early investor in the Artizans Company, and Moselle Avenue, which was to follow the course of the culverted River Moselle.[27]

Opening

On 4 August 1883, with approximately 200 houses completed, Noel Park was formally opened. Noel gave a speech at the opening ceremony in which he described the development as:

... what, out of the metropolis, would be called a town, which would eventually ... be larger than the Royal Borough of Windsor and nearly as large as the old cathedral city of Canterbury. But this town would not contain various classes of population, but would be built for the express purpose of meeting the wants of the artisan classes, so that they whose resources are limited should be enabled to reside amid pleasant surroundings.[26]

Lord Shaftesbury then laid the memorial stone, praising Noel Park as "the furtherance of a plan which has proved to be most beneficial, and would, if carried out to its full extent, completely alter for the better the domiciliary habits of the people of the metropolis".[28] Edward White Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury, sent a note which was read to the crowd in which he stated that "no one who cares for our labouring population can doubt that this is one of the first, perhaps the most, necessary of all steps for their good".[29][30]

A newspaper report of the event included the following, "the Noel Park Estate, Green Lanes, Wood Green, London — quite a town of artisans' and labourers' dwellings — was opened by Lord Shaftesbury....All the streets are wide, and the architecture houses and the agreeable surroundings of trees and fields give them a singularly comfortable and pleasant appearance".[31]

Financial difficulties

Noel Park was heavily marketed as a "Suburban Workman's Colony", with promotional material playing heavily on the area's transport links. The Great Eastern Railway was persuaded in 1884 to rename Green Lanes railway station to "Green Lanes (Noel Park)" (shown on some signs and maps as "Green Lanes & Noel Park");[13] the area was also less than half a mile from Wood Green railway station]] (now Alexandra Palace station) on the Great Northern Railway]]. By 1886 Noel Park had over 7,000 residents.[32]

A brightly painted red house with a tall pointed tower, situated on a crossroads
A corner house

However, the poor workers at whom the Noel Park development was aimed found themselves unable to afford railway tickets. The issuing of cheap early morning workman's fares on the Great Eastern Railway's lines further east in Tottenham, Stamford Hill and Walthamstow had led to overcrowding on trains and large numbers of poor workers moving to the areas (many of them displaced by the construction of Liverpool Street station in the City of London and rehoused by the company).[33] William Birt, General Manager of the GER, was strongly against extending the policy of workmen's fares, stating that "to issue them from Green Lanes would do us a very large amount of injury, and would cause the same public annoyance and inconvenience as exists already upon the Stamford Hill and Walthamstow lines" and that "no one living in Noel Park could desire to possess the same class of neighbours as the residents of Stamford Hill have in the neighbourhood of St Ann's Road".[34]

In 1884, a deputation led by Lord Shaftesbury was made to the Great Eastern Railway and Great Northern Railway, proposing that for trains due to arrive in central London prior to 8 am, third class tickets should be sold at a fare of 3d providing the return journey was not made before 4 pm. By May 1885 both railways had adopted this policy. However, the delays and uncertainty caused by the fares dispute had discouraged prospective tenants, leaving large numbers of properties vacant and causing further building work to slow considerably.[35] In 1887, construction work was temporarily suspended altogether, in response to the large backlog of un-let properties.[32]

By the time of the 1894 Ordnance Survey, roughly 50% of the estate was complete.[35] The entire southern half of the estate between Gladstone Avenue and Westbury Avenue at this point remained open fields.[32]

Due to the temperance views of the Artizans Company's directors, no public houses were built in Noel Park, a situation which remains the case today.[36]

In 1905, G. J. Earle, the Artizans Company's Surveyor, drew up plans for the remainder of the site based on the experiences learned from the completed northern half of the estate. Buildings were designed to a modified version of Plumbe's third-class house plan in the Arts and Crafts style, with white-rendered brickwork, regular low gables, and curved ground floor windows. The toilets were now designed with connecting doors to the sculleries, and in some cases the staircases repositioned to the front of the house. They were no longer described or marketed as "third-class" houses.[37]

By October 1906, 1,999 properties were let, including 88 shops and 4 stables. Although the estate was nearing completion by this point, construction work was not entirely completed until 1929.[37]

Postwar replacements for bombed houses

Although of little strategic value and undamaged during the early stages of the Second World War, in the final stages of the war a number of V-1 flying bombs and V-2 ballistic missiles struck the area. The worst attack occurred in February 1945, when a V-2 struck Westbeech Road, killing 17 and injuring 68. The bombsites were redeveloped with housing in then-current styles, rather than to Plumbe and Earle's designs.[1]

In 1952, the Artizans, Labourers & General Dwellings Company was renamed the Artizans and General Properties Company Ltd.[6] The combination of a taxation system biased against private property developments and legal restrictions on raising rents made the company's traditional model unprofitable, and it began to divest itself of its original low-rent developments and instead to sell vacant houses on the estates and to reinvest in non low-rent housing and commercial property, especially in the United States and Canada where depreciation before tax was permitted.[6] In 1966, ownership of the four original Middlesex estates (Shaftesbury Park, Queen's Park, Noel Park and Leigham Court) was transferred to the respective local authorities.

Wide view of Noel Park in 2009 from the western edge, looking north-east

Outside links

 ("Wikimedia Commons" has material
about Noel Park)

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Welch, p. 48
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Welch, p. 11
  3. ↑ Baker, T. F. T.; Pugh, R. B., eds (1976). "Tottenham: Manors". A History of the County of Middlesex (London) 5: 324–330. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=26987. Retrieved 2009-02-15. 
  4. ↑ Connor, p. VIII
  5. ↑ Long, p. 3
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 "Sun Life Properties Ltd". IV/122. The National Archives. http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/a2a/records.aspx?cat=088-iv122&cid=0#0. Retrieved 2009-02-14. 
  7. ↑ Welch, p. 8
  8. ↑ Welch, p. 7
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Welch, p. 9
  10. ↑ Template:Old Bailey
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 Welch, p. 10
  12. ↑ @Hobhouse, Hermione (ed) (1994). "East India Dock Road, North side". Survey of London 43–44: 147–153. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=46480. Retrieved 2009-02-14. 
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 Connor, § 109
  14. ↑ Lake, p. 23
  15. ↑ Welch, p. 25
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 16.2 16.3 Welch, p. 30
  17. ↑ Welch, p. 27
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 Welch, p. 32
  19. ↑ London newspaper, 1896-05-28, quoted in Welch, p. 35
  20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 20.2 20.3 Welch, p. 28
  21. ↑ Tarn, p. 58
  22. ↑ Connor, § 108
  23. ↑ 23.0 23.1 Welch, p. 15
  24. ↑ 24.0 24.1 Welch, p. 17
  25. ↑ Minutes of the Hornsey Committee of the Artizans Company, 8 January 1883, quoted Pegram, p17
  26. ↑ 26.0 26.1 Welch, p. 18
  27. ↑ Welch, p. 23
  28. ↑ Welch, p. 19
  29. ↑ "I assure you of my sympathy with the work which the Artizans Dwelling Company is attempting in the important direction of improving the houses of the working men. No one who cares for our labouring population can doubt that this is one of the first, perhaps the most, necessary of all steps for their good."
  30. ↑ Welch, p. 20
  31. ↑ Tamworth Herald, Saturday 11 August 1883.
  32. ↑ 32.0 32.1 32.2 Baker, T. F. T.; Pugh, R. B., eds (1976). "Tottenham: Growth after 1850". A History of the County of Middlesex (London) 5: 317–324. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=26986. Retrieved 2009-02-15. 
  33. ↑ Connor, p. V
  34. ↑ Olsen, p. 290
  35. ↑ 35.0 35.1 Welch, p. 21
  36. ↑ Brian Harrison, Pubs, Dyos and Wolff, p. 183
  37. ↑ 37.0 37.1 Welch, p. 35

Bibliography

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  • Jim Dyos & Michael Wolff, ed (1999). The Victorian City. 1. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-19323-0. 
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  • Long, Helen (2002). Victorian Houses and Their Details: The Role of Publications in Their Building and Decoration. Architectural Press. ISBN 0-7506-4848-1. 
  • Olsen, Donald J. (1976). The Growth of Victorian London. London: Batsford. ISBN 0-7134-3229-2. OCLC 185749148. 
  • Tarn, John Nelson (1973). Five Per Cent Philanthropy: An account of housing in urban areas between 1840 and 1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-08506-3. OCLC 875501. 
  • Welch, Caroline (2006). Noel Park: A Social and Architectural History. London: Haringey Council Libraries, Archives & Museum Services. OCLC 123373636. 
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