The building of the large mansion of Harringay House in 1792 at the top of the hill between present-day Hewitt and Allison Roads saw the divergence of meaning of the names.
[2] Pupils in local schools at the time were taught that the new borough's name should be pronounced with the same ending as Finchley, Hackney and Hornsey.
[3] In the Ice Age, Harringay was at the edge of a huge glacial mass that reached as far south as Muswell Hill.
Beyond the clearance of the forests, few incursions were made into Harringay lands save for the New River, the building of which presaged the more drastic developments to come.
The last 20 years of the nineteenth century saw the disappearance of Harringay House with the surrounding parkland and farmland under the advance of late Victorian urbanisation.
In the second half of the eighteenth century Hornsey Wood House was developed as a private leisure park and became one of the most popular places for Londoners to escape from the city at the weekends.
Relying on agriculture for most of its recorded history, Harringay had a busy tile kiln, pottery and brickfields from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century.
It also acted as the rough dividing line for land ownership, identifying Harringay's position on the edge of manorial and subsequently borough boundaries.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the arrival of the Great Northern Railway (GNR) cleaved Harringay from the rest of its ancient borough.
Harringay's development in the late nineteenth century was of a markedly different nature from what occurred to the west of the GNR and to the south of the THJR.