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. It was developed as the Noel Park Estate on a tract of land on the edge of north London as part of the fast growing development of Wood Green. It is one of four developments on the outskirts of London built by the Artizans, Labourers & General Dwellings Company (Artizans Company). From 2003 to sometime in 2009, the name was also given to a small park near the southern edge of Noel Park, formerly known – and now known again – as Russell Park.
One of the earliest garden suburbs in the world, the Noel Park Estate was designed to provide affordable housing for working-class families wishing to leave the inner city; every property had both a front and back garden. It was planned from the outset as a self-contained community close enough to the rail network to allow its residents to commute to work. In line with the principles of the Artizans Company's founder, William Austin, no public houses were built within the estate, and there are still none today.
As a result of London's rapid expansion during the early 20th century, and particularly after the area was connected to the London Underground in 1932, Noel Park became completely surrounded by later developments. In 1965 it was incorporated into the newly created London Borough of Haringey, and in 1966 it was bought by the local authority and taken into public ownership.
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. In 1982, the majority of the area was granted Conservation Area and Article Four Direction status by the Secretary of State for the Environment, in recognition of its significance in the development of suburban and philanthropic housing and in the history of the modern housing estate.
Location
Noel Park is a neighbourhood of Wood Green, north of Charing Cross, near the centre of the modern London Borough of Haringey, of which it is a ward. The area forms a rough triangle, bordered by the A109 road (Lordship Lane) to the north, A1080 road (Westbury Avenue) to the south-east, and A105 road (Wood Green High Road, formerly part of Green Lanes) to the west.
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. During the development of the area in the 1880s the river was culverted and the land between the river and Lordship Lane built on.Welch, p. 48
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. Since the railway's closure in 1964, much of the area between the former railway line and Wood Green High Road has been occupied by the eastern section of the large The Mall Wood Green shopping, cinema and residential complex (commonly known as Shopping City).
History and development
Early history
Most of Wood Green, including the site of Noel Park, was sparsely populated up until the nineteenth century. The 1619 Earl of Dorset's Survey of Tottenham shows the area as forming the historic Duckett's Manor; as with the rest of the Moselle valley, the land consisted almost entirely of woodland and pasture, with the only building shown in the area which was to become Noel Park being Ducketts Farm. This building was the former manor house of Ducketts dating from 1254 and is the earliest recorded property in Wood Green.Welch, p. 11 The tiny settlements at Wood Green and Elses Green are shown a short distance to the north-east. The manor itself was situated on the ancient drovers' road of Green Lanes.The section of Green Lanes between Turnpike Lane and Wood Green stations, which forms the western boundary of modern Noel Park, has since been renamed "Wood Green High Road". The last recorded occupancy of the manor was in 1881, shortly before the site was cleared for the construction of the Noel Park Estate.
By 1880 the estate had been broken up into fifteen smaller farms. The rough northern meadows adjacent to the Moselle were used for beef farming, whilst the southern fields, known as Grainger's Farm, were used as grazing land. The western edge of the estate was by this time occupied by the Great Eastern Railway's Palace Gates Line and Green Lanes railway station, opened in 1878.Connor, p. VIII
Artizans, Labourers & General Dwellings Company The Artizans, Labourers & General Dwellings Company (Artizans Company) was established in 1867 by William Austin. Austin was an illiterate who had begun his working life on a farm as a scarecrow paid 1 penny per day,Long, p. 3 and had worked his way up to become a drainage contractor. The company was established as a for-profit joint stock company, with the objective of building new houses for the working classes "in consequence of the destruction of houses by railroads and other improvements".Welch, p. 8 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.Welch, p. 7 Whilst earlier philanthropic housing companies such as the Peabody Trust and the Improved Industrial Dwellings Company focused on multi-storey blocks of flats in the inner cities, the Artizans Company aimed to build low-rise housing in open countryside alongside existing railway lines to allow workers to live in the countryside and commute into the city.Welch, p. 9 The company attracted the attention of Lord Shaftesbury, who served as president until 1875.
The company built and immediately sold a group of houses in Battersea, then still a rural village. The proceeds of the sale were used to purchase a plot of land in Salford for development, and by 1874 the company had developments in Liverpool, Birmingham, Gosport and Leeds.
The first of the four large-scale estates built by the Artizans Company was Shaftesbury Park, a development of 1,200 two-storey houses covering built in 1872 on the site of a former pig farm in Battersea. The success of Shaftesbury Park led to the construction of Queen's Park, built in 1874 on a far more ambitious scale on of land to the west of London, adjacent to the newly opened Westbourne Park station, purchased from All Souls College, Oxford. A third London estate was planned at Cann Hall, and a site of was purchased.
However, the Queen's Park project suffered serious mismanagement and fraud; the company secretary William Swindlehurst and two others were found guilty in 1877 of defrauding £9,312 (approximately £ today) from the project. The company was forced to raise rents, and tenants were no longer permitted to buy their houses; by 1880 the company's finances had recovered sufficiently to allow further expansion.Welch, p. 10
Selection of the site On 14 February 1881, Rowland Plumbe was appointed Consulting Architect to the Artizans Company, with a brief to prepare a third estate. A leading architect of the period, Plumbe had primarily been a designer of hospitals, such as the London Hospital, and Poplar Hospital; he had been President of the Architectural Association in 1871–72 and a Council Member of the Royal Institute of British Architects since 1876.
In April 1881, the Artizans Company inspected sites at Fulham and "in the vicinity of Alexandra Park" in the Tottenham Local Board. The Fulham site was rejected as too prone to flooding, and the Wood Green site rejected as being too far from any centre of population.
However, the next month, the decision was taken to bid for the site near Wood Green. Despite its distance from London at the time, the area was well served by railways. The Palace Gates Line, opened in 1878 to serve nearby Alexandra Palace, had an intermediate station at Green Lanes, immediately adjacent to the site in question.Connor, § 109 This provided direct service to the City of London from the outset; following the construction of a link with the Tottenham and Hampstead Junction Railway on 1 June 1880, direct services also ran to Blackwall and North Woolwich, providing direct links with the Port of London.Lake, p. 23 In addition, the Great Northern Railway's station at Wood Green (now Alexandra Palace station) was within walking distance. The company decided that the quality of transport links compensated for the distance from any significant centre of population, and in June 1881 a site of was purchased by the company for £56,345 (approximately £ today).Welch, p. 12
Design
Plumbe designed the estate with five classes of houses. Although the houses were built to the same five basic designs, each street was given a distinct style of design and ornamentation. Varying mixes of red and yellow bricks, and variations in window design and ornamental motifs, were used to give each street a distinct identity.Welch, p. 25 All were designed with front and back gardens.Welch, p. 30 Corner houses were given distinctive designs and turrets.Welch, p. 27
The distribution of houses followed the traditional Victorian model of town planning. The larger first- and second-class houses were built in the centre, close to the church and school, while the more numerous third-, fourth-, and fifth-class houses were built in the estate's outskirts.Welch, p. 32 Welch (2006) speculates that this segregation of housing was not Plumbe's intention; Plumbe himself was quoted in 1896 as saying that "I regret that it is necessary to separate the richer and more cultured classes from the poorer, owing to the prejudices which exist; and these prejudices exist on the part of the poor as well as on the part of the other class".London newspaper, 1896-05-28, quoted in Welch, p. 35
Except for the corner houses, the houses were built in pairs, each sharing a porch with its neighbour. For many of the smaller fourth- and fifth-class houses, the doors were aligned at right angles to the façade of the house, so as not to open directly adjacently to their neighbours. All houses were designed with at least one parlour and with the kitchen, scullery, and toilet in separate rooms at the rear of the house; the first-class houses also had toilets upstairs.Welch, p. 28 In line with the design principles of the time, the downstairs toilets were accessible only from the back gardens, and the houses were not fitted with separate bathrooms; baths were taken in a moveable bath located in the kitchen.
All houses were built with marble-mantelpieced fireplaces and flues. All houses were supplied with running water supplied from the New River, which flowed through Wood Green. However, not all houses were supplied with gas or mains electricity from the outset, the remainder being lit by candles or oil or paraffin lamps.
Houses at Noel Park were deliberately designed to be relatively small, both for cheapness and to discourage tenants from taking on lodgers.Tarn, p. 58 Many of the larger houses at Shaftesbury Park had been sublet and split, and the practice went against the principles of the Artizans Company's founders. To discourage the practice at Queen's Park and Noel Park, cottage flats were built; these maintained the terraced façade, but split the house into upper and lower flats, each flat having a separate front door onto the street.
Construction