Manor House is a district in the London Borough of Hackney. Located in North London, it lies immediately east of Finsbury Park, west of Stamford Hill and south of Harringay.
The area was originally known as Woodberry Down. However, the construction of the Seven Sisters Road and the consequent establishment of the Manor House Tavern gave rise to the alternative name Manor House CrossroadsNorth London Mercury and Crouch End Echo, Nov 11 1899 and with the arrival of the tube station in 1932, the area immediately around the tube station began to be known as Manor House. The demolition of the once very fashionable area of Woodberry Down and its replacement with one of London's biggest public housing estates resulted in 'Woodberry Down Estate' being used to refer to the public housing area and 'Manor House' for the area beyond. With the regeneration of the area during the early part of the 21st Century, the area is now being referred to once again by its nineteenth-century name of 'Woodberry Down'.
Location Built up during the middle part of the nineteenth century as part of an area called Woodberry Down, Manor House is now a small district without a formal town centre, but distant enough from other town centres that it has come to be referred to as an area. Taking its name from the Manor House Tavern (see below), via the Manor House tube station, it is centred at the junction of Seven Sisters Road and Green Lanes. The western border is defined by Finsbury Park in the neighbourhood of Harringay. Its other borders are defined by the New River, which loops around it on three sides.Google map showing the rough boundaries of Manor House. The area consists mainly of the Woodberry Down development and the Woodberry Down reservoirs. The reservoirs were constructed in 1833 to purify the New River water and to act as a water reserve. The East reservoir is now a nature reserve known as Woodberry Wetlands, following a redevelopment in 2016 as part of the wider regeneration of Woodberry Down, and the West Reservoir is now a leisure facility, offering sailing, canoeing and other water sports. On its western edge stands the former filter house, now set out as a visitor centre with a café; some of the old hydraulic machinery can be viewed in the main hall. The pumping station at the reservoir gates, converted to a climbing centre in 1995 was designed in a distinctive castellated style by Robert Billings under the supervision of William Chadwell Mylne and built in 1854–56. Bridget Cherry and Nikolaus Pevsner, London 4: North, London, Penguin, 1999, p. 540 There are also two small shopping areas, playgrounds, three schools and a pub.
History Early development Prior to any building development, the area was part of the demesne lands of Stoke Newington Manor. It was also part of the near coterminous ancient parish and Metropolitan Borough of Stoke Newington.
The area was known as 'Berrie Down Wood' in the seventeenth century and 'Wood Berry Downs Meadow' a hundred years later.
Building started on Green Lanes with the appearance in 1821 of a large house at a spot that would later be the site of the junction with Woodberry Down (the road). Further north on Green Lanes, just to the south of the New River, Northumberland House, a three-storeyed building with a pillared entrance, balustrade, and urns on its roof, was completed in 1822.Original plans of Northumberland House in Bulletin 51, Pickering & Chatto, May 2016Whilst no evidence has yet been unearthed that links the house to the Percys, the Dukes of Northumberland, the presence of the Percy lion over the gates suggests that there may have been a link. The Percys also had a historic connection to the area, once owning a house on Newington Green (Old and New London: Volume 2. Originally published by Cassell, Petter & Galpin, London, 1878) It was sold for conversion to a 'private lunatic asylum' in 1826Morning Advertiser, page 1, 13 November 1826, London It was then used as a private mental hospital until it was demolished in 1955.Roberts, Andrew. Northumberland House, The 1832 Madhouse Act and the Metropolitan Commission in Lunacy from 1832, Middlesex University, accessed 11 November 2009. Roberts cites Murphy, Elaine (2000) The Administration of Insanity in East London 1800-1870 PhD Thesis, University of London. One of its most famous patients was Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot, first wife of the American poet T.S. Eliot,Seymour-Jones, Carole. Painted Shadow, Doubleday 2001. who lived at the hospital from 1938 until her death in 1947.
A thatched cottage, with Gothic windows, was constructed on the boundary with the borough of Tottenham by 1825. Woodberry Down Cottages, four detached houses on the south side of Woodberry Down, had been built by 1829. Manor House tavern was built nearby in 1830. With the development of Finsbury Park almost a certainty, the land to the south and east of the present-day park was acquired by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners as ideal for building. The park was laid out between 1857 and 1869 and the adjacent land was sold to builders.
During the 1860s, Thomas John Angell, who appears to have been a speculator rather than a builder, built Finsbury Park Villas. This was a terrace of at least twelve houses, which, starting with the Finsbury Park Tavern, ran northward along Green Lanes from its junction with the new Woodberry Grove.
At around the same time, Angell and a London builder Thomas Oldis were responsible for development that began to spread eastward along the north side of Seven Sisters Road. From 1868 to 1870 large detached houses with gardens running down to the New River were built at the east end of Seven Sisters Road. In 1867 were leased on the southern side of the eastern end of the road, for the building of four detached or nine 'substantial' houses; three detached houses were built by 1871. An architect, William Reddall of Finsbury, was one of those who leased the houses. Woodberry Down was laid out in 1868, when it was extended eastward from Lordship Road, and villas were built on the south side in the late 1860s. The area was the northern section of a district called Brownswood Park (named after Brownswood Manor) and was regarded as a particularly select suburb.
However, with the increasing suburbanisation of the area, mainly for the middle and lower middle classes, many of the original families had moved out by 1895 and others were being replaced by poorer people in 1913. Social decline continued, until in 1954 the district was inhabited mainly by students, foreigners, and the working class, with most houses containing four or five families and all in decay.
Twentieth-century redevelopment – the Woodberry Down Estate From 1949 through to the 1970s much of the area was redeveloped, the old houses being demolished and replaced with a large council development known locally as Woodberry Down. The LCC compulsorily purchased the area for this purpose in 1934 in order to alleviate chronic housing shortages, but work did not begin till after the Second World War. Construction began in 1949 and the 57 blocks of flats were completed in 1962.
Initially, the estate offered greatly improved living conditions for tenants. However, over time, the estate suffered the problems of comparably idealistic, post-war, social housing projects. By the late 1980s, many of the flats were in a poor state of repair, while many more were empty and boarded up with metal shutters.
1980s squatter community Throughout the 1980s and 1990s the increasing number of abandoned properties on the estate became occupied by a growing squatter community. The squatters at Woodberry Down Estate were predominantly young punks from all over the UK and Ireland. Several had squatted previously in the Noel Park area in Wood Green. The squatters’ relationship with tenants ranged from amicable to antagonistic, but the two communities generally managed to co-exist without too much hostility. The strong community spirit, which existed among residents in the 1950s was still evident to a lesser extent during this time, and the estate managed to avoid the more extreme crime and social problems often associated with inner-city housing projects. The sharp increase in numbers of squatters has clear links to the huge increases in homelessness in London that resulted from Thatcherite policies, such as the Right to Buy scheme (introduced in the Housing Act 1980).Thatcherite policies condemned for causing 'unjust premature death'
The Manor House Tavern
The tavern was the source of the name of the tube station and consequently the immediate vicinity. The first tavern on the site was built by Stoke Newington builder Thomas WiddowsT. F. T. Baker & R. B. Pugh (Editors), A History of the County of Middlesex, Volume 6: Friern Barnet, Finchley, Hornsey with Highgate, Accessed online at British History Online, 1976 between 1830 and 1834Baker & Pugh (see previous reference) state that the pub was built "by 1832". However, the pub's first landlord advertised is as a new building in 1834, see below next to the turnpike on Green Lanes. Prior to this date a cottage had existed on the site,Described as "Cottage and Garden. On the Eastern Side of the Green Lanes, opposite the Road leading to Hornsey Wood House" in the Schedule of the Act to amend an Act of the Seventh Year of His Present Majesty for Consolidating the Trusts of the Several Turnpike Roads in the Neighbourhood of the Metropolis, North of the River Thames, and to make and maintain Two New or Branch Road to communicate with the said Metropolis Road, pp 853-863 of The Statutes of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Volume 11, George Eyre and Andrew Strahan, Printers to the King's Most Excellent Majesty, 1829". The cottage was built c. 1810. No building is shown on map OSD 152 / Serial 104 Hampstead 1807 - 08 at Hackney Archives, but one does appear on the 1814 Map of the Parish and Prebendal Manor of the Parish of Stoke Newington, also at Hackney Archives. On Crutchley's 1829 map, the building is labelled as "Lodge", a term often used at the time to refer to a very respectable villa type dwelling. but in 1829 an Act of Parliament was passed to permit the building of the Seven Sisters Road. Thomas Widdows was both the owner of the house and its occupant. With the building soon to be sited on the junction of the existing Green Lanes turnpike road and the new Seven Sisters Road, Widdows no doubt saw a roadside tavern as an excellent investment.
The new building was within sight of the Hornsey Wood Tavern, which had been formed out of the old Copt Hall, the manor house of the Manor of Brownswood.See also Settlement section in History of Harringay Prehistory to 1750 It is possible that its name was taken from this connection.This was certainly the belief of Edwardian author J. J. Sexby who wrote in his 1905 book, "In the neighbourhood of the (Finsbury) park we still have Brownswood Road and Manor-House Tavern to remind us of the Manor of Brownswood and of its manor-house, which has now disappeared" (The Municipal Gardens, and Open Spaces of London, Lt-Col J. J. Sexby, Elliot Stock 1905). The land itself however was on the demesne of Stoke Newington Manor.A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 8, Islington and Stoke Newington Parishes, Victoria County History, London, 1985. Pages 143-151. At around the time that the pub was first built, on the southern boundary of the demesne, on Church Street, a school called Manor School was operating.A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 8, Islington and Stoke Newington Parishes, Victoria County History, London, 1985, Pages 217-223 The school was next door to the trading premises of Thomas Widdows, builder of the pub. So it is equally possible that the 'Manor House' name was just a fashionable name, more related to the connection with Stoke Newington Manor.