Noel Park in north London is a planned community built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries consisting of 2,200 model dwellings, designed by Rowland Plumbe.

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.

Noel Park is a neighbourhood of Wood Green, 6.4 miles (10.3 km) north of Charing Cross, near the centre of the modern London Borough of Haringey, of which it is a ward.

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.

[2] The historic western boundary was the now-defunct Palace Gates Line of the Great Eastern Railway (GER), a short distance to the east of Wood Green High Road.

[9][10] 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.

Varying mixes of red and yellow bricks, and variations in window design and ornamental motifs, were used to give each street a distinct identity.

[27][28] 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".

Rowland Plumbe and Sir Richard Farrant, Deputy Chairman of the Artizans Company, visited the site to investigate the matter.

[30] The total overpaid by the company was calculated by Plumbe as £1,071.14s.3d (approximately £136,300 today); 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.

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.

[31] 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".

[33] 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".

[34][35] 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".

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 the GER's Liverpool Street station in the City of London and rehoused by the company).

[38] 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".

[42] 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.

[50] 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 Empire soon became one of London's leading entertainment venues, hosting acts such as Marie Lloyd, Frankie Vaughan and Shirley Bassey.

The Empire is best known as the theatre in which magician Chung Ling Soo (William Ellsworth Robinson) was fatally shot in the chest on 23 March 1918, when a theatrical pistol used in a bullet catch demonstration malfunctioned.

[54] This led to serious congestion at Finsbury Park as passengers from the expanding suburbs changed from buses and trams to the GN&CR and GNP&BR, and in June 1923 a petition of 30,000 signatures calling for the extension of one of the underground lines northwards was delivered to the Ministry of Transport.

[54] The London and North Eastern Railway (LNER), successor to the GNR, was compelled by the Ministry of Transport to waive the veto or proceed with its own electrification.

In 1929 the incoming Second Labour Government initiated a policy of direct subsidy for major infrastructure projects, and in 1930 the Underground Electric Railways Company of London began work on extending the GNP&BR, now the Piccadilly line.

Passenger numbers had fallen greatly since the opening of the Piccadilly line, while freight usage dropped throughout the 1950s as a result of improved road haulage and declining demand for coal.

In 1971 a report by the London Borough of Haringey found that half the properties on the estate were still lacking basic facilities such as baths, internal toilets and hot water.

Although some houses were demolished during construction works, it was intended at the time to divert Wood Green High Road around Shopping City, which would have necessitated the demolition of much of the western section of Noel Park.

[59] However, these measures have not been consistently enforced, and Noel Park has been cited in a report by English Heritage as a prominent example of the failure of conservation areas.

[62][63] Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, the estate was the home of a large squatter community, mostly made up of young punks from Ireland, Wales, Scotland and outside London, which greatly enlivened the area but also led to many legal and other conflicts with Haringey Council, who ironically had left so many of the properties empty in the first place.

In 2008 parts of Wood Green including Noel Park were declared a Controlled Drinking Zone, allowing police to confiscate alcohol from those engaged in anti-social behaviour.