Houses on the Ladder

By John Hinshelwood and Stephen Rigg

It is not clear when the roads between Wightman Road and Green Lanes became known as the ‘Ladder’, but the reason is that on the map they look like rungs of a ladder.

The Golden Jubilee edition of the Hornsey Journal in 1929 recalled the development as a great transformation; Harringay was the scene of the first big building operations in Hornsey involving mass production methods.

The developments by speculative builders started in the 1880s from Turnpike Lane and worked south on the Hornsey Station Estate (North Harringay), and from the other end working north on the Harringay Park Estate (South Harringay), so that all the ‘Ladder’ streets were complete by about 1900. Wightman Road was built at this time, probably, initially as an access road to the building operations on the side streets.

The entry for Harringay in Pevsner’s Buildings of England; London 4 North is rather dismissive: “Its only notable buildings are the churches and schools built to serve the ‘ladder’ of streets north of Finsbury Park, laid out unimaginatively by the British Land Company in 1880-1 over the site of Harringay House and its grounds.”

One of the distinctive characteristics of the housing on the ‘Ladder’ is the diversity of styles and appearances of the houses. Number 45 Warham Road is the most unusual house squeezed into a triangular site beside the New River as an after-thought by Mr Fox who added this house to the two he built next door in 1893. The houses from numbers 51 – 77 are more typical , which is hardly surprising as they were built by the Davis brothers John and William Henry, the largest developer of the ‘Ladder’.

Number 45 Warham Road, once described as the ‘back to front’ house. The porch is very similar to the ones on numbers 47 and 49 also built by Mr Fox.

John Hinshelwood & Stephen Rigg’s book Harringay A Century of Change is available to buy @ 523 Green Lanes