Sanitised sewage: learning from the history of the Haringey Passage

In Life Between Buildings, urban designer Jan Gehl explains how incremental changes to an urban environment can gradually make it more welcoming to its inhabitants; not just to those that live in it, but to those too that flow through it. Gehl distinguishes between necessary activities in the public realm and those that are more “social”, arguing that social activities – such as stopping to talk, read, or simply think – are far more common in the spaces that have good urban design. People rush through poorly designed places, engaging with them at a bare minimum. As Lauren Elkin once described the act of walking, they are far less likely to “toss in their chips” to the public realm.

    Haringey Passage is an alleyway loaded with dichotomies. At one end lies Turnpike Lane, the grime of Hornsey Park and the seedy underbelly of Wood Green. At the other lies Haringey Park, Railway Fields, pretty primary schools; Finsbury Park beckons and brightest London beyond. Two sides to multifaceted old Haringey. Inner Middlesex within Outer London. Modern infrastructure with traces of the obsolete Victorian. Convenience - for cyclists, dog-walkers, drug dealers… in bed with discomfort - for women, night-walkers, the Metropolitan Police. Unsure on the postcode: is it N8, N4, or, as on some signs, simply the Victorian N? Is the year 2020 or 1880? Are things simply pedestrian, or more? It even extends to the name. Signage at one end for Haringey Passage, at the other for Harringay Passage.

    LCC Municipal wrote a beautiful three-part dissection on the nomenclature of our individual London boroughs. But Haringey is perhaps one of the more confusing cases; perhaps it would have been better off with a divisive name, like Highgate and Tottenham; a borough of such sharp contrasts could surely handle one more on its own tag. But more often than not Haringey frames its division as a misrepresented diversity; show London the smiling face of a child from somewhere else and they’ll forget the self-congratulating, infuriatingly cosmopolitan Muswell Hillbillies, the simmering resentment beyond the Great Northern Railway, the riots from beneath the borough’s heart. Forget history, for now: Harringay is a place, and Haringey is a borough. So to which does the Passage belong? And why does it seem so toxic, in this dualistic borough, to suggest that the answer might be “both”?

    Haringey Passage is a sewer in sheep's clothing. To gather that the street was actually intended this way, you would have to bend down by one of the old manhole covers and wait for running water. This is odd, given that the Passage owes its existence, overwhelmingly, to the Hornsey Local Board of Health’s plan of 1869. Much like houses on the Haringey Ladder dodge the New River as it bullets down from the waters of Ware, the 19th century terraces also skirted the sewer that ran between Wightman Road and Green Lanes, ensuring sufficient flow capacity for the burgeoning hygiene needs of early Greater Londoners. This sewer was never going to be dug wide enough to be filled in with houses, so it was paved over and surrendered as a public right of way. Old York stone slabs mark the original paving in the south; too pricey for the dog-eared north. But it’s all pavement: one kind of Passage above ground, another below. At Railway Fields, a vast Victorian tower marks where waters would surge in the rain. Between Falkland and Frobisher Road, a lanky, ornate vent as tall as most houses ejects the spectre of old world noxious gas. Maybe the older Passage is historical fact – but if it were fiction, what would change?

    Nothing about Haringey Passage requires identity. It is an alleyway. Websites and fora with patrons across the borough discuss it, like any other alley, as a hotbed for crime, the home of unsavoury sorts, worthy of gates, fences, keys, more privatising of public space. Never mind the school children who use it daily or the traffic calming potential of the Passage crossing on each of the ladder’s “rungs”; any alleyway is danger, a peculiar anathema typical of Londoners who not only act but likely live like Bruce Wayne.

    There is little within the Passage to help place anyone who chooses to walk it. Each of its individual alleys share a similar length, fences backing onto gardens or petrified concrete walls. A surprising lack of London’s graffiti habit; the nexus of “out of sight” and “easy target” marking Haringey Passage unattractive for budding street artists. And, of course, there is not a single frontage from tip to toe. No addresses take residence on Haringey Passage, easing the spelling problem. No numbers. No permanence. So the postcode, then, is a moot point. One dichotomy for the bin. Anything else about this place there’s cause to eliminate, before it collapses in on itself? It almost feels like doing this anyway; the self-defeating architectural attitude of skinny, skinflint alleyways. Perhaps the Passage is eerie because it could so easily pop out of existence. Google Maps wouldn’t miss it; if it disappeared from our tools of rationality, it would be closer to nothing than if it disappeared from reality itself.

    It doesn’t matter whether the Haringey Passage is for pedestrians, schoolchildren, cyclists, dogwalkers, drug dealers, or their mortal enemies. It doesn’t matter if it exists in the present or some sort of gilded, sanitised past. The Passage is a utility. But if we were Jan Gehl, we might note how Londoners (if they can even feel that way against ageless, placeless fences and walls) rush through this space. There is nothing to tie us down here. No cause to toss in our chips. No collective memory. No explicit tells that it’s a sewer, nor for the existence of the street at all, no explanation for the ladder's third leg, nor why there was cause for a stunted, surplus stile. Of all the roads the Passage creeps across, no two alley-parts are distinguishable from one another. Meaning fades to incomprehension. There is no façade; there is nothing to remember.