History of Harringay (prehistory–1750)

About 60 million years ago the area lay in a sea bed of clay, 180 metres deep in water.

Once Britain's land mass emerged from beneath the water, the area was part of the hinterland of the swamps and marshes of the Thames.

Plenty of fossil evidence has been discovered that shows mammoths, hippos, hyenas and rhinoceros once roamed thereabouts.

[1] In the Ice Age, Harringay was at the edge of a huge glacial mass that reached as far south as Muswell Hill.

[2] Prior to the Romans' arrival, Harringay was part of a large area covering Essex and Middlesex which was home to a Celtic tribe called Trinobantes.

[1] The Roman invasion of Britain started in the middle of the 1st century BC and drew Harringay into the wider world.

[2] The 5th and 6th centuries saw the Saxon invasions and, it is likely, the arrival of Haering, the chieftain whose name still lives on today in local placenames.

Haering's settlement at Harringay can be visualised as “a clearing which he made, protected by a hedge in a wild and wooded undulating district, part of the forest in the province of Middlesex”.

At the dawn of the post-Conquest period, Harringay was very probably still mostly thickly wooded, part of a huge forest that still covered most of Middlesex.

The land to the west of Harringay bordered on the Bishop of London's hunting grounds of Great Hornsey Park and retained their natural state well into the middle of this period.

To the east of the Great Park the forests were gradually pushed back through the Middle Ages and the land was being put to agricultural use.

[7] By the fifteenth century the landscape of Harringay was dominated by pasture, but there were some fields given over to cereal crops and a little woodland remained.

An inspection of Hornsey Manor by the King's reeve in 1283 notes wages for herdsmen and ploughmen and recorded activities including ploughing, sowing winnowing chaff and spreading clay.

His maps show that most of the lands in the west of modern-day Harringay were given over to pasture; those in the east, with the exception of a strip along Green Lanes, were in arable use.

The southern portion was fringed with yet more pasture, but beyond on most of the land of East Harringay that lay cultivated fields, probably sown with oats.

Beyond, on a knoll to the southwest, in the southern part of today's Finsbury Park, stood one of the last remnants of the forests, Hornsey Wood which survived throughout the period.

The predominance of pasture rather than arable farming in this area of Middlesex kept it thinly populated, with settlement mainly confined to a few villages and hamlets.

On the site where Harringay House was to be built in 1792 (at the top of the hill between present-day Hewitt and Allison Roads) a fine Tudor mansion reputedly stood[11] The last owner of the land, Ida Cozens, sold it in 1789 to Edward Gray, a linen draper of Cornhill.

Evidence suggests that it stood just to the South of the site of today's Sainsbury's; the name of Hermitage Road echoing its past purpose.

In its early form, some of the stretch which snaked through Harringay was constructed in wooden aqueducts lined with lead and supported by strong timbers and brick piers.

At the beginning of the period the land on both sides of Green Lanes was owned by a Lord of the Manor under the system of Manorialism.

Seized from Waltheof II by William the Conqueror, the Manor was held for about for 150 years to the end of the 13th century by the Kings of Scotland.

The three parts of Tottenham were reunited by John Gedney in the early 15th century but were still often referred to by the names they took on during the period of manorial division.

For the next 27 years this was the only tollgate on Green Lanes, at which time the Manor House toll gate was set up, along with others outside of the Harringay area.

Beyond the clearance of the forests, few infringements were made into Harringay lands save for the New River, the building of which presaged the more drastic developments to come.