| These three maps, taken
from The Village Atlas of London, show clearer than any words how, in the space
of eighty years, Tottenham was transformed from a village to teeming suburb larger
than many provincial towns. The scale is approximately 2” to the mile (i.e.,
a 100% enlargement of the originals). |
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| Hard to credit, isn’t
it? The actual date of this map is uncertain. It was published in 1822, but the
survey on which it is based would have been made several years earlier. Tottenham
is |
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Forty or so years later,
Tottenham on the cusp of irrevocable change. This survey was taken 1862–1871
(in fact, it can be dated to before 1869, as the Drapers’ Almshouses at the
top of Bruce Grove, built in that year, are not shown) and published in 1877,
by which time it was completely out of date, overtaken by the spectacular expansion
generated by the building of the Great Eastern Railway’s Enfield branch.
There is now more or less completely unbroken building the whole length of the
High Road; among the other changes, Northumberland Park, with its fine villas,
has been built, curving to meet a straightened Park Lane opposite Northumberland
Park Station. There is new housing along Philip Lane (just south of Downhills),
and down at the Hale and Page’s Green. However, there is a swathe of open
fields to the west, and Wood Green is barely touched, whilst there is very little
in the way of building on the far southern end of the High Road. Tottenham remains
very much a leafy middle-class suburb, and this map has far more in common with
the 1820s map than the one below. |
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| This map is the 1902 revision
of the 1863–1876 survey, published in 1904. Tottenham utterly transformed.
Yet there are still acres of green fields between the church and Wood Green, and
in fact there may be a very few people still alive who remember them. Note the
expansion of the reservoirs at bottom right. |
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