Hornsey & Friern Barnet

[John Chanin]

This seat covers the west side of the borough of Haringey, with Southgate to the north, and Finchley to the west, and is very different from Tottenham in the east of the borough. This is very much a middle-class seat, with a highly educated population. While Hampstead has historically been seen as the intellectual centre of London, this seat would more appropriately take this title today, although the demographic data is very similar. The seat can be divided into four sections.  In the first on the west are Muswell Hill and Fortis Green, the old middle-class section of the seat, once safely Conservative, in the days when class determined voting. On the east is Alexandra Park, with its famous pleasure palace in expansive grounds, formerly the BBC headquarters, and perhaps best known these days as the home of the World Darts Championship. It is something of a crumbling wreck, and plans to restore it to its former glory come and go without ever coming to fruition. These days the three wards here form the Liberal Democratic heartland in the seat and borough. This area is three-quarters white, majority owner-occupied, with very little social housing. The proportion of the population doing routine jobs is less than 10%, and two-thirds have degrees. There is also a significant Jewish population of 7%.

Added at the latest boundary review is the Friern Barnet ward to the north, which divides neatly into three parts. The Colney Hatch area south of the North Circular road is geographically a continuation of Fortis Green, with Edwardian housing, and some council housing, but is a little down market. Between the North Circular Road and Friern Barnet Road is an entirely new quarter, built on the site of the old Friern mental hospital, one of the largest institutions of its type. The main hospital building, renamed Princess Park Manor, has also been converted into up market housing. North of here, you are into traditional suburbia, with streets of inter-war semi-detached houses. Friern Barnet ward as a whole is decidedly down market of Hornsey, with much lower occupational and educational statistics, and fewer white households, and votes comfortably Labour at local level.

In the south is Hornsey proper, including Crouch End and Stroud Green. This is the intellectual heart of the seat, with a more recent middle-class population of a different nature in the Victorian housing. There is significantly more renting, including social housing, and a higher black population here, but it is equally high in managerial occupations and educational qualifications. Local elections see close contests between the Liberal Democrats and Labour. Harringay to the east across the barrier of the mainline railway into Kings Cross is rather different. North of the large Finsbury Park, long rows of Victorian housing extend between Green Lanes and Wightman Road, with no road connections between them and the area is known locally as “the ladder”. Owner-occupation is the lowest in the seat, and there is an enormous private rented sector. Demographically it is more similar to the other area coming into the seat, Friern Barnet, than to the rest of the seat, and like Friern Barnet it is normally Labour.

Politically this seat has an interesting history. Prior to 1983 the Hornsey seat was always Conservative. After this it was amalgamated with Wood Green and the new seat, now marginal, fell to Labour in 1992. This however was not the end of the story. The Liberal Democrats built up a large support locally, winning 5 of the 9 wards in the 2002 council elections, and then capturing the parliamentary seat in 2005. They consolidated this by winning all the Hornsey wards in 2006 and 2010, and defending the parliamentary seat comfortably. They continued to have considerable strength here at parliamentary level as well as local level, having co-opted most of the former Conservative vote in the old middle-class areas, while also gaining support from the strongly pro-EU population in the intellectual areas. Things changed in 2024. There were substantial boundary changes here, with Labour voting Wood Green being moved to a cross-borough seat with Enfield, while Liberal Democrat voting Highgate has been linked with Hampstead. However with both wards coming in to replace them voting Labour, the latter’s position should not have been weakened much, and nor should the Liberal Democrats. However while the Labour vote did indeed remain static, The Liberal Democrat vote deserted en masse to the Greens, as in similar well-educated urban seats elsewhere, leading to a substantial increase in the Labour majority. The present MP is Australian born Catherine West, former leader of Islington Council, who won the seat back for Labour in 2015 with a large post-coalition swing, and has subsequently consolidated her position.

Census data: Owner-occupied 50% (501/575 in England & Wales), private rented 34% (40th), social rented 16% (265th).
                      : White 70%(465th), Black 8%(77th), South Asian 5%(207th), Mixed 7%(11th), Other 10%(62nd)
                      : Managerial & professional 58% (15th), Routine & Semi-routine 15% (563rd)
                      : Degree 60% (11th), Minimal qualifications 16% (556th)
                      : Students 7% (184th), Over 65: 12% (507th)

Boundaries : The new seat is made up of 72% from Hornsey & Wood Green, 16% from Chipping Barnet, and 12% from Tottenham
                       60% of the old seat is in the new one, with 28% going to Southgate & Wood Green, and 11% to Hampstead & Highgate

	2017	%	2019	%	Notional	%	2024	%
Labour	40,738	65.4	35,126	57.5	30,007	57.3	28,535	58.7
Conservative	9,246	14.8	6,829	11.2	6,200	11.8	4,011	8.2
Liberal Democrat	10,000	16.1	15,884	26.0	13,470	25.6	6,099	12.5
UKIP/Brexit/Reform	429	0.7	763	1.2	494	0.9	1,989	4.1
Green	1,181	1.9	2,192	3.6	1,983	3.8	7,060	14.5
Other	699	1.1	311	0.5	311	0.6	948	2.0
Majority	30,738	49.3	19,242	31.5	16,607	31.6	21,475	44.1

[Peter Wilkinson]

Aug 28, 2023 16:00:29 GMT John Chanin said:

This seat covers the west side of the borough of Haringey, with Southgate to the north, and Finchley to the west, and is very different from Tottenham in the east of the borough. This is very much a middle-class seat, with a highly educated population. While Hampstead has historically been seen as the intellectual centre of London, this seat would more appropriately take this title today, although the demographic data is very similar. The seat can be divided into four sections. To the west are Muswell Hill and Fortis Green, the old middle-class section of the seat, once safely Conservative, in the days when class determined voting. These days the three wards here form the Liberal Democratic heartland in the seat and borough. To the east is Alexandra Park, with its famous pleasure palace in expansive grounds, formerly the BBC headquarters, and perhaps best known these days as the home of the World Darts Championship. It is something of a crumbling wreck, and plans to restore it to its former glory come and go without ever coming to fruition. This area is three-quarters white, majority owner-occupied, with very little social housing. The proportion of the population doing routine jobs is less than 10%, and two-thirds have degrees. There is also a significant Jewish population of 7%.

I'm afraid that this paragraph is not entirely clear. You state that the seat "can be divided into four sections", go on to mention Muswell Hill and Fortis Green and talk about "the three wards here". You then seem to be contrasting them with Alexandra Park ward, mentioning Alexandra Palace, and finish with three sentences on demographics. The demographics don't entirely apply to Alexandra Park ward itself (which seems to have a bit under 5% Jewish population), though they look as if they do probably apply to these three wards taken together. But the Jewish population figure at least (and I think a couple of the others) would be a more comfortable fit if it had been written for the old Hornsey and Wood Green constituency boundaries, and with Highgate instead (or, for that matter, as well as) Alexandra Park. So is this paragraph meant to cover just one of your four sections (in which case the other three are presumably Friern Barnet, "Hornsey proper" and Harringay) or two?

Additionally I'd comment that while your remarks on Alexandra Palace are sufficiently correct to be OK as they stand, the restoration plans have, in a very stuttering fashion, had some partial success. Some quite sizeable parts of the interior have been restored far enough, since the fire back in the 1980s, to give at least some reflection of its glory days, even though much of the exterior facades are all too convincing as crumbling wreck.

Added at the latest boundary review is the Friern Barnet ward to the north, which divides neatly into three parts. The Colney Hatch area south of the North Circular road is geographically a continuation of Fortis Green, with Edwardian housing, and some council housing, but is a little down market.

As a historical footnote, I'd add that this seems to be in part because, when Alexandra Palace was being built, while the residents of Hornsey were quite willing to host the prestigious new building, they weren't happy about hosting its construction workers. Who were provided (possibly effectively by the earliest of themselves) with basic "temporary" accommodation across the parish boundary and most of the way down into the valley, close to the very small Friern Barnet hamlet of Colney Hatch. And it's still noticeable that while the short southern boundary of Friern Barnet ward, where Colney Hatch Lane crosses into Fortis Green ward, is almost unnoticeable, the western boundary (also with Fortis Green) and the eastern boundary (with Alexandra Park ward) through to the North Circular (which came along several decades after Alexandra Palace) both become increasingly noticeable as one goes northwards.

Between the North Circular Road and Friern Barnet Road is an entirely new quarter, built on the site of the old Friern mental hospital {previously Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum}, one of the largest institutions of its type. The main hospital building, renamed Princess Park Manor, has also been converted into housing. North of here, you are into traditional suburbia, with streets of inter-war semi-detached houses. Friern Barnet is decidedly down market of Hornsey, with much lower occupational and educational statistics, and fewer white households, and votes comfortably Labour at local level.

Though this last sentence varies quite a bit with where one is in the ward. Most of the southern third of the ward is very much so. In the middle third, Princess Park Manor itself is very much up-market, though the rest is far more standard turn-of-the millennium low-rise housing estate (with more houses and fewer flats as one moves uphill towards Princess Park Manor). In the northern third, apart from one or two council estates or later infill, the inter-war semi-detached houses shade from 1920s to 1930s and perhaps slightly more upmarket towards (and over) the northern tip of the ward.

Also, the ward is not quite as comfortably Labour as recent elections might suggest. Coppetts ward, its approximate predecessor between 2002 and 2022 (between 80% and 90% overlap), returned two Conservative councillors (out of three) in 2006 and one in 2010. And while the latest ward boundary changes were probably nearly neutral, they most likely slightly favoured the Conservatives. Basically, while the ward should comfortably remain Labour in a fairly neutral year, it would be likely to become marginal in a moderately bad Labour year and go fully Conservative in a really bad one. By the way, the ward is one of the decidedly less Jewish wards in Barnet, at just over 4% - lower than Fortis Green, Muswell Hill or even Alexandra Park, though probably higher than at least a couple of the other wards.

In the south is Hornsey proper, including Crouch End and Stroud Green. This is the intellectual heart of the seat, with a more recent middle-class population of a different nature in the Victorian housing. There is significantly more renting, including social housing, and a higher black population here, but it is equally high in managerial occupations and educational qualifications. Local elections see close contests between the Liberal Democrats and Labour. Harringay to the east across the barrier of the mainline railway into Kings Cross is rather different. North of the large Finsbury Park, long rows of Victorian housing extend between Green Lanes and Wightman Road, with no connections between them and the area is known locally as “the ladder”. Owner-occupation is the lowest in the seat, and there is an enormous private rented sector. Demographically it is more similar to the other area coming into the seat, Friern Barnet, than to the rest of the seat, and like Friern Barnet it is normally Labour.

Actually, there is a connection between the streets in the Ladder, and a historically important one. When the Ladder was developed, back in the 1880s, two of the design constraints were that the New River ran (roughly north-north-west to south-south-east) through the southern half of the site, and that a north-south sewer right the way through the site, a bit to the east (and downhill) of the New River, was required in order to avoid occasional flooding within the site and downhill across Green Lanes. So the sewer was included, and no houses could safely be built over the sewer (as demonstrated when it proved, about 20 years later, to have been under-designed and needed upgrading). So what to do with it? Cover it over, but with just a footpath, Harringay Passage, on top. A highly useful footpath, for locals and any other walker wanting a quiet route through from Turnpike Lane at the northern end to Umfreville Road, the southernmost street on the Ladder. Quiet, that is, except at the start and end of the school day, when children arrive at and leave the couple of schools built next to Harringay Passage.

[John Chanin]

Aug 29, 2023 17:13:22 GMT Peter Wilkinson said:

I'm afraid that this paragraph is not entirely clear. You state that the seat "can be divided into four sections", go on to mention Muswell Hill and Fortis Green and talk about "the three wards here". You then seem to be contrasting them with Alexandra Park ward, mentioning Alexandra Palace, and finish with three sentences on demographics. The demographics don't entirely apply to Alexandra Park ward itself (which seems to have a bit under 5% Jewish population), though they look as if they do probably apply to these three wards taken together. But the Jewish population figure at least (and I think a couple of the others) would be a more comfortable fit if it had been written for the old Hornsey and Wood Green constituency boundaries, and with Highgate instead (or, for that matter, as well as) Alexandra Park. So is this paragraph meant to cover just one of your four sections (in which case the other three are presumably Friern Barnet, "Hornsey proper" and Harringay) or two?

Yes I'm treating the 3 wards in the north together, and yes this is one of the four sections, and yes I am using ward data, which does show the Jewish population in this section as I say, and yes the demographic comments refer to the three wards taken together, although as you say they are not identical for the 3 wards.  I think it is reasonably clear to any reader with less detailed knowledge of the area than you, but I will think if my wording is too elliptical.

Between the North Circular Road and Friern Barnet Road is an entirely new quarter, built on the site of the old Friern mental hospital {previously Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum}, one of the largest institutions of its type. The main hospital building, renamed Princess Park Manor, has also been converted into housing. North of here, you are into traditional suburbia, with streets of inter-war semi-detached houses. Friern Barnet is decidedly down market of Hornsey, with much lower occupational and educational statistics, and fewer white households, and votes comfortably Labour at local level.

Though this last sentence varies quite a bit with where one is in the ward. Most of the southern third of the ward is very much so. In the middle third, Princess Park Manor itself is very much up-market, though the rest is far more standard turn-of-the millennium low-rise housing estate (with more houses and fewer flats as one moves uphill towards Princess Park Manor). In the northern third, apart from one or two council estates or later infill, the inter-war semi-detached houses shade from 1920s to 1930s and perhaps slightly more upmarket towards (and over) the northern tip of the ward.  Also, the ward is not quite as comfortably Labour as recent elections might suggest. Coppetts ward, its approximate predecessor between 2002 and 2022 (between 80% and 90% overlap), returned two Conservative councillors (out of three) in 2006 and one in 2010. And while the latest ward boundary changes were probably nearly neutral, they most likely slightly favoured the Conservatives. Basically, while the ward should comfortably remain Labour in a fairly neutral year, it would be likely to become marginal in a moderately bad Labour year and go fully Conservative in a really bad one. 

Well yes, but the Friern Barnet ward is very large, and on average my comments are correct.  I think the ward is fairly reliably Labour these days as times change.  You're the Barnet expert, and my knowledge is more in Haringey.

Actually, there is a connection between the streets in the Ladder, and a historically important one. When the Ladder was developed, back in the 1880s, two of the design constraints were that the New River ran (roughly north-north-west to south-south-east) through the southern half of the site, and that a north-south sewer right the way through the site, a bit to the east (and downhill) of the New River, was required in order to avoid occasional flooding within the site and downhill across Green Lanes. So the sewer was included, and no houses could safely be built over the sewer (as demonstrated when it proved, about 20 years later, to have been under-designed and needed upgrading). So what to do with it? Cover it over, but with just a footpath, Harringay Passage, on top. A highly useful footpath, for locals and any other walker wanting a quiet route through from Turnpike Lane at the northern end to Umfreville Road, the southernmost street on the Ladder. Quiet, that is, except at the start and end of the school day, when children arrive at and leave the couple of schools built next to Harringay Passage.

Yes.  It's many years since I was a housing association employee managing property in the ladder.  I think I should amend that comment.

Thanks very much for your informative comments. This is a much more interesting seat than some I have done profiles for.