By the start of the seventeenth century, the eight buildings that then stood in West Green formed the only hamlet in the central area of the manor of Tottenham.

Nineteenth-century local author, Charlotte Riddell described the changes vividly in her 1874 book Above Suspicion: Sixteen years ago no more rural village could have been found within five miles of the General Post Office than West Green.

The various lanes leading to it from Stamford Hill, Tottenham, Hornsey, and Southgate were rural, which they certainly are not now…As for Hanger Lane, no one had yet dreamed of the evil days to come, when mushroom villas should be built upon the ground that not long before was regarded as an irreclaimable morass—when at first a tavern and then a church (the two invariable pioneers of that which, for some unknown reason, we call civilisation) appeared on the scene, and brought London following at their heels .

when, in a word, Hanger Lane should be improved off the face of the earth and in the interest of speculative builders... called, as it is at present, St. Ann’s Road, it has only taken sixteen years to change West Green from an extremely pretty village to an eminently undesirable suburb.

The neighbouring wards are Noel Park, White Hart Lane, Bruce Castle, Tottenham Central, St Ann's, and Harringay.