Hi,

I’m afraid that this blog will be on hold for a while.

My life got too busy in recent time and the lack of help doesn’t allow me to keep up with blog updates.

RSS feeds are always active so you can read the latest about Finsbury Park area from some friend site.

Regards,

“A blog for Finsbury Park” admin

Give us access to Finsbury Park

In a City the size of London, the Underground system is the quickest way to get around and we are disappointed with the Mayor’s decision to shelve 22 of the 45 planned step free access projects across London only committing himself to providing step-free access at 29 per cent of all stations by 2017. This is a major step back from previous plans to provide step-free access on a third of the network by 2013. As a result, many disabled passengers, older people and parents with young children are being denied access to this mode of transport. This is particularly concerning in the run up to the 2012 Paralympics and makes us wonder how the Mayor is planning to keep his post-Beijing pledge to make London’s Games the most accessible ever.

http://www.gopetition.co.uk/petitions/give-us-access-to-finsbury-park.html

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Islington Tribune – by PETER GRUNER Published: 4 September 2009

Hugh Grant Finsbury to feature in moody love story A NEW £1.5million feature film could do for Finsbury Park what the movie Notting Hill, starring Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts, did for Notting Hill. Broken Lines, due to be premiered in the UK next year, is described as a tense love story set in the moody cosmopolitan setting of Finsbury Park. It is co-written by actors Dan Fredenburgh and Doraly Rosa, who both star in the film alongside veteran actress Rita Tushingham and Paul Bettany. Dan Fredenburgh, 39, a former Highbury Grove pupil from Milner Square, said he was fulfilling a long held dream to make a film around Finsbury Park. “The area has a great atmosphere,” said Dan. “You have the wonderful array of North African and Middle Eastern cafés and restaurants along Blackstock Road. “There are poor neighbourhoods as well as up-and-coming ones.” The story involves Jake, a young Jewish property developer played by Dan, being drawn back to the inner-city Finsbury Park of his youth, where his father owned a tailoring business. He meets and is drawn to B (Doraly Rosa), who is waitressing at a café he frequents. B is also in a relationship, with Chester (Paul Bettany), an ex-boxer crippled after suffering a stroke in a fight, who is becoming increasingly dependent on her. The two hour film was shown in Venice last year.

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Burglary rates are falling, insist police

nlnews@archant.co.uk
26 August 2009

POLICE insist soaring rates of burglary insurance claims are at odds with the borough’s falling break-in rates in crime-hit streets.

Hornsey and Crouch End were named and shamed as the second most risky areas to live in the capital according to the number of insurance claims filed last year.

But Haringey’s borough commander said the most recent burglary rates in the N8 postcode are actually dropping.

Chief superintendent Dave Grant, said: “In terms of wards covered by the N8 postcode, early unconfirmed figures that we are working to show that Hornsey, Crouch End, Muswell Hill, Stroud Green and Harringay wards have all experienced good reductions in residential burglary this financial year to date and we are working to replicate these results across the borough.”

He added the Safer Neighbourhood Teams in Harringay and Stroud Green are carrying out patrols and home security checks which have resulted in a drop in offences since April this year.

The survey by price comparison website moneysupermarket.co.uk also revealed N8 was the eighth most risky postcode for burglaries in Britain.

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BLAZE at derelict Stoke Newington library sparks fears of explosion.

hg.editorial@archant.co.uk
26 August 2009

A mystery blaze at a derelict library sparked fears of an explosion after gas cylinders were discovered inside this morning .

Flames engulfed the former council-run Brownswood Library on the corner of Brownswood Road and Seven Sisters Road, Stoke Newington, which closed 13 years ago and has been occupied in recent times by squatters.

The Fire Brigade received numerous calls from passerby and nearby residents after the blaze broke out at 7.15am.

Fire crew manager Paul Dykes, from Stoke Newington Fire Station said firefighters had to be extra careful to prevent the gas cylinders exploding.

The one-storey building had been earmarked for development by the Genesis Housing association into a five-storey block of 17 residential flats.

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Islington Tribune – by PETER GRUNER Published: 21 August 2009

Shiri Shalmy One year on… and gallery lies empty A YEAR after arts exhibitions were kicked out of a converted public toilet in 115-acre Finsbury Park, the building remains empty. And this week a row blew up over the eviction of arts promoter Shiri Shalmy from the gallery she had lovingly created with thousands of pounds of her own money. Haringey Council, which runs the park, ordered her out in July 2008 because the building was needed urgently for a new information centre. Paul Morris, chairman of independent enterprise board FinFuture, said: “Obviously, they may well have a practical and sensible use for the building in the future. Although they may have a more viable use for the building, until they are ready to start they could have put her on a month’s licence.” He added: “I thought the gallery was a nice local effort.” Islington Green councillor Katie Dawson said: “It’s a wasted resource and needs to be used for the community.” Ms Shalmy has since become the contemporary curator at the £10million Jewish Museum in Camden Town, due to open early next year. She has indicated she would be unlikely to return to Finsbury Park even if she was offered her old gallery back. Ms Shalmy said: “Despite all my efforts I was treated pretty poorly at Finsbury Park and I have a new direction to my life now. “But it is sad that the building is still empty because someone could make a go of a gallery if not me.” The gallery, opposite the lake, boasted hundreds of visitors each week, including peace campaigner Bruce Kent. It received a £3,000 grant from Islington Council. Artist Graham Carrick, who exhibited regularly at the space, said: “I’ll never understand why they closed her down.” Ann Barwick, chairwoman of the Friends of Finsbury Park, said the building was always intended to be used an information centre. She added: “The building is occasionally used for children’s art classes and by the Play Association. “But we are still encouraging Haringey to completely fulfil its promises to turn it into an information centre. “It was never meant to be exclusively used just as an art centre.”

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Please your palate at Harringay Food Festival

7:00am Friday 14th August 2009

FESTIVAL organisers are searching for residents who are a dab hand in the kitchen to get involved with the Harringay Food Festival.

The first Harringay Food Festival, to be held in Green Lanes on September 20, promises to be a celebration of the cuisine, culture and history of the area.

Organisers are anticipating hundreds of people to flock to the one-day party and Haringey Council has pledged to close one of the roads so the street festival can really kick off.

Stalls are available for hire for food, information or arts and crafts.

Rob Chau, of Harringay Traders Association, said: “We want to celebrate all of the fantastic things Green Lanes has to offer with a tremendous variety of food and a range of interesting stalls.

“There will be hundreds of residents and visitors enjoying the fun on the day. Taking out a stall – whether to sell food, crafts and other goods, or to hand out information – will be the perfect opportunity to reach a captive audience for a very reasonable price.”

Councillor Nilgun Canver, chair of the Green Lanes Strategy Group, said: “The festival will be a fantastic event and I’m confident that we will see a great range of stalls reflecting the wonderful diversity of this area.

“We are looking forward to welcoming a variety of different hot and cold, sweet and savoury, international and local food stalls to help make the festival a success.”

For more information on stall hire contact Rob Chau on 0871 230 2388 or Marcia Connell on 020 8489 4543 for non-food stalls or visit www.harringayfoodfestival.com

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New cyclists come out for London’s Cycle Friday

The first Cycle Friday has made its mark on London, and the London Cycling Campaign (LCC) is pleased with how today’s rides have gone. The Cycle Fridays in the city have been launched to encourage novice cyclists to commute to work in the hoe that they tempt new cyclists into the saddle.

Run by the London Cycling Campaign (LCC) in partnership with Transport for London, the rides will run for the next eight weeks until October 2. By then it’s hoped the novice cyclists will have improved in confidence enough to follow routes alone.

There will be eight rides per week and today saw six routes running from the suburbs into Central London – Brixton to Russell Square, Finsbury Park to St Pauls, Mile End to St Pauls, Ravenscourt to Trafalgar Square, Swiss Cottage to Holborn and Greenwich to St Pauls. Our London correspondent, TR was a marshall on the ride from Finsbury Park you can find out how he got on on his blog.

Charlie Lloyd, a back up marshal from the LCC, said: “The first cycle Friday has gone really well. We were targeting around 25 new riders per ride and we were pleased with the support. There were two rides of 24 people from Brixton, and the Greenwich ride saw a similar turnout. I was on the Finsbury Park one and it was a nice ride in and we hope to see everyone again next week and some more new riders.

The LCC provide qualified and experienced marshals to guide each ride, which make full use of cycle lanes, start at 8am, and hope to show cyclists the safest routes into the city centre.

Transport for London will be publicising the led rides through the cycling pages of the TfL website.

The Cycle Fridays come on the back of a series of successful BikeTubes events run by the LCC in June.

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Friday bike convoys converging on City of London

12 August 2009

By Mike Brooke

A SERIES of bike ‘convoys’ led by experienced riders begins on Friday (August 14) to guide novice commuter cyclists into central London.

The ‘Cycle Fridays’ are departing at 8am from six locations in all directions for riders who need a little extra support to start cycling to work.

The East London convoy to St Paul’s in the City begins at the Mile End Green Bridge in Mile End Road.

EAST LONDON ROUTE

Cyclists are being accompanied through Mile End Park alongside the Regent’s Canal, over the canal bridge at Solebay Street, along Harford Street past Shandy Park, turning right into Ben Jonson Road, left into Stepney High Street past St Dunstan’s, right along Stepney Way, left into Jubilee Street, crossing over Commercial Road into Sutton Street down to Shadwell, then right into Cable Street, all the way to Tower Hill, then Monument and onto St Paul’s.

Other starting points across town are from Cutty Sark Gardens in Greenwich, Finsbury Park in north London, Brixton’s Coldharbour Lane in south London, Swiss Cottage in north-west London and Ravenscourt Park in west London.

The Friday convoys were inspired by the London Underground strike in June.

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‘Drugs’ shooting shocks estate

nlnews@archant.co.uk
13 August 2009

PAUL DELAPPE outside Fallowfield: “”Estate is bad for drugs

A MAN was shot in the head for his BMW and three mobile phones just yards from people’s front doors.Detectives are investigating whether last Thursday’s shooting – during which the victim narrowly escaped with his life – was a drug deal gone wrong.

Worried residents claim that the Six Acres Estate, off Durham Road, Finsbury Park, is rife with users and pushers – and that two other shootings have also taken place in the past two years. Neither the victim nor his attackers were from the block, which has had thousands spent on security measures designed to stop non-residents gaining access. The shooting took place at about 8.45pm inside the estate’s Fallowfield block.

The 23-year-old South London victim was in a stairwell when he was assaulted by two handgun-wielding robbers. One of them pistol-whipped him before taking his phones and car keys. The other shot him in the head. Then they fled in the victim’s grey BMW 1-Series, which still has not been found.

The victim was taken to hospital where the bullet was removed. He has since been discharged and is expected to make a full recovery.

A police source confirmed that they were looking into whether the shooting was a drug deal gone wrong. He said: “Drugs is certainly one line of inquiry that we are pursuing.”

Islington police deny that Six Acres is a lawless area – but on Tuesday they brought in a dispersal zone giving them the power to break up groups of troublemakers gathering on the estate.

People living in Fallowfield insist that more must be done to specifically tackle the drug problem.

Paul Delappe, area panel representative for the Six Acres Estate, said: “This estate is very bad for drugs. Kids of 14 or 15 stand in the stairways selling drugs.

“They are dealing crack, heroin, everything. They have done all the security work but we don’t feel any safer.”

Chief Superintendent Wise said: “There have been concerns about youths from neighbouring estates congregating in the area but we have been banning them with injunctions, we have a dispersal order and we are working to put in place activities to keep young people occupied through the summer.

The suspects are black, about 5ft 7ins to 5ft 11ins tall and aged about 20. Anyone who can help should call Trident on 020 8733 4774 or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.

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‘30 bullets’ fired into sports store with machine gun

nlnews@archant.co.uk
12 August 2009

MACHINE gun fire rang out across a busy street on Tuesday night as two men sprayed bullets into a shop.Up to 30 shots were fired at a sportswear store with no name in Seven Sisters Road, close to the junction with Yonge Park, Finsbury Park, at 9.20pm.

Armed officers raced to the scene but the gunmen had disappeared by the time they arrived. Miraculously, no-one was hurt – but the shop was left littered with bullet holes.

A male eyewitness said: “I was sitting in a car and heard about 27 to 30 shots. I knew it was a type of sub-machine gun straight away because I used to be in the army.

“As soon as I heard it I ducked down. When the shooting stopped I came out and had a look. The shopfront was riddled with about 30 bullet holes.

“I don’t know how many people were in the shop at the time but they ran out. Then I heard another couple of shots ring out towards Isledon Road and then another shot by Finsbury Park station.”

He added: “A guy who actually saw the shooting said that two men had come down with hoodies on. They walked up Seven Sisters Road and calmly stood in front of the shop, got out their weapons and sprayed the whole shop front with bullets.”

Paul Delappe, area panel representative for the neighbouring Six Acres Estate, said: “I was absolutely petrified because my boys had just gone round to the kebab shop. They heard the shots and came running back saying ‘there’s been a drive-by’.”

Witnesses say it is not the first time the store has been targeted in recent weeks.

A second eyewitness said: “Two months ago when it was a barber’s shop some people drove by and shot at it then too.

“The day before Tuesday’s shooting at about 11pm there was a fight on that side of the road involving about eight people and baseball bats. These people are maniacs.”

A police spokesman said: “We responded to reports of gunshots in Seven Sisters road at 9.20pm. Evidence of shots was found but no victims have made themselves known to police. Inquiries are ongoing.

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Islington Tribune – by PETER GRUNER Published: 7 August 2009

From left, Business Forum chief executive Talal Karim, previous chief executive Despina Johnson, London Assembly member Jennette Arnold and Forum chairman Paul Morris £80m shops, offices and homes plan for buzzing fashion centre Entry arch to go up at street market under ambitious regeneration scheme THE man who founded Islington’s world-famous Business Design Centre at the Angel spoke this week about his vision for Finsbury Park. Paul Morris, born on the Woodberry Down council estate in Manor House, described how his family has been associated with Islington for more than 50 years. He spoke at an event on Tuesday night to welcome the new chief executive of Finsbury Park Business Forum, former Islington councillor Talal Karim. Mr Morris, chairman of the Forum, said the process of rejuvenating the area began with the refurbishment of Finsbury Park station two years ago. The result has been that new shops and businesses, including many popular restaurants and cafés, have slowly moved into the area, where rents are still relatively cheap. The next big development, currently in the planning process, will be the estimated £80million City North scheme in Fonthill Road, which backs onto the railway line. “It will mean more shops, offices and up to 200 homes,” Mr Morris added. “This type of regeneration will give the area a new buzz and start to change people’s perceptions.” There are plans for a street market in Fonthill Road and an entry arch at Seven Sisters Road. Mr Morris said that when his family opened a shopfitting business in Fonthill Road in the early 1960s the street consisted of just a barber shop, an antiques shop, and a café. “It’s amazing how it has since evolved into a well-known fashion centre,” he added. The Business Design Centre was based on an American concept, providing lots of companies under one roof with an exhibition centre. Mr Morris said: “We stepped in when they wanted to demolish the former Royal Agricultural Hall at the Angel in 1981. “We took it over and it now houses more than 100 businesses, with hundreds of conferences and exhibitions every year. “I’m not saying that Upper Street wasn’t a great place at the time. But the centre was a catalyst for improving the area. After we opened the centre, things really started to move, with new restaurants and shops opening and the area beginning to flourish.” He believes the same improvement is destined for Finsbury Park over the next seven to 10 years. “Ten or 12 years ago Finsbury Park was like the bad bit of filling in a sandwich between Canonbury and Crouch End,” he said. “Today I think it is on the way to becoming the caviar or smoked salmon.” Mr Karim was an Islington Labour councillor for Junction ward from 1982 to 2002, and later worked for Camden council’s regeneration department. He believes the area offers great opportunities for the future. “We have this fantastic transport hub, and there’s the Emirates Stadium,” said Mr Karim, who lives in Stroud Green Road. “Our target will be to reduce youth crime in the area by providing more facilities and to clean up the litter and graffiti.” Islington’s London Assembly Labour member Jennette Arnold, who lives in Finsbury Park, said: “It’s a wonderful cosmopolitan place. There is a great community spirit here and it needs to be recognised. “Finsbury Park station is the second-busiest transport hub in London. But there is no step-free access to the Underground. That has been a campaign issue of mine for the past 20 years.”

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‘Unsafe’ festival is axed

nlnews@archant.co.uk
06 August 2009

A TWO-day fashion and music festival in Finsbury Park has been scrapped just four days before it was set to take place – after police raised “serious safety concerns”.

Police claimed organisers of the first ever Africa Caribbean Asia Fashion Week would struggle to cope with up to 10,000 visitors expected to take over the park on Saturday and Sunday.

A panel of councillors, prompted by fears for public safety, refused to give the festival approval at a licensing meeting on Monday.

Now critics fear the streets will be awash with revellers – many of whom have already bought tickets to the charity gig, expecting to see big-named artists like rapper Sway.

Haringey councillor Ron Aitken, who sat on the licensing committee, said: “Unfortunately, the application did not demonstrate the organiser could give a reasonable assurance of public safety, so it was turned down. So we may have several thousand people turning up on Saturday and Sunday with nothing to do.”

The festival was set to take place from 2pm-7pm on both days and feature live music, dance and a catwalk modelling show to raise money for charities, including the Great Ormond Street Hospital and Christian Aid.

Sergeant Simon Willmott, of Haringey police football and events office, said: “Police had serious concerns about public safety due to the inadequacy of the event management plan presented by the organiser and the inexperience of the people that were expected to deliver and be responsible for the event.

“Police attended the licensing meeting on Monday night and made these representations to the council licensing committee, along with other organisations that also raised concerns.

“If the proposed performers were advertised, there is the possibility of numbers above 9,999 being attracted to the event.”

Residents had also raised concerns over noise and revelry, claiming neighbours’ peace and quiet would be destroyed.

Now organiser Kate Ajike will have to cancel the event and gives refunds on tickets, the majority of which had already been sold. The 23-year-old from Enfield said before the meeting: “I think people are missing the main aspect here – it is a charity festival, we finish at 7pm both nights and we are not here to make a profit.”

A council spokesman said: “It was declined because the applicant was unable to submit a clear, well thought-out, event management plan to satisfy us that she could uphold public safety objectives.

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The travel writer Norman Lewis became a close friend of Don McCullin while they were travelling on assignments together for The Sunday Times. “I learnt from him,” Lewis told his biographer Julian Evans, “how beautiful the ordinary can be, where previously the only things that attracted me really were non-ordinary things. But with him, I would see him suddenly spellbound by the beauty of rain drizzling down the mountainside, where I would normally pass it by, I wouldn’t notice it was happening.”

The conventional wisdom is that McCullin escaped by the skin of his teeth from an addiction to war and became a landscape photographer whose bleak, stormy vision of the British countryside was informed by the demons of a career whose horrors most of us could not imagine. There is a certain amount of truth in this, but it is too simplistic. McCullin is a subtle man whose particular gift has been to find a style of photography – that is to say a manner of expressing himself – which, while respecting the dignity of those he photographs, misses no iota of his anger at the injustices and the absurdities he chooses unblinkingly to see.

‘Sitting in deckchairs, Blackpool’ (early 1970s)

McCullin’s latest book is called In England, and an exhibition derived from it is on show at the National Media Museum in Bradford. Beyond a few demonstrations, it contains no pictures of conflict. Yet every picture is beautifully, recognisably McCullin’s. It is not the olive drab of the subjects that makes the manner, so much as the applied intelligence of the photographer.McCullin represents an odd split in the appreciation of photographs in Britain. On the one hand, he is routinely described as the greatest of war photographers, he has been awarded a CBE and included in “greatest hits” shows for as long as anybody can remember. In 1967, for example, long before interest in photography picked up in the mid-1970s, McCullin was included in the oddly named Modfot One (it meant “modern photography”), which became a British Council touring exhibition of some importance and contributed to the increased attention given to photography as an art form in its own right.

On the other hand, McCullin, born in 1935, is part of a lost generation of British social photographers whose work remains insufficiently published and understood. In this, he takes his place alongside the likes of Ray Moore, 15 years his senior, Tony Ray Jones, born in 1941, Graham Smith, born in 1947, or Chris Killip, born in 1946. None of them are unknown, but nor do they have a tenth of the recognition they deserve. Compared, for example, to that group loosely known as the French humanist photographers – such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Doisneau – the British group are barely acknowledged at all.

All of them were consciously influenced by Bill Brandt, and McCullin was no different. He wasn’t some instinctive photographer picking up ideas at random. He has often made it plain that he felt himself to be ill-educated, and he was diagnosed as dyslexic. Yet he was meticulous in acquiring and understanding the waypoints of the craft he was to excel in. McCullin actively sought Brandt out, asked him questions, and looked attentively at his work. At no stage in his career has McCullin been frightened of black tones in a print. He got that from Brandt.

From Brandt, also, McCullin got a certain dualistic view of British society, split between toffs and toughs. Brandt was from a banking family; McCullin from a modest background in Finsbury Park, north London. But the longstanding divisions between the north and south of England, between the Ashura festival in Bradford and the Goodwood Festival of Speed (both brilliantly represented by McCullin in this exhibition) were the same for each. The exhibition is full of marvellous essays on McCullin’s perception of privilege and deprivation. He is as good as L.S. Lowry, as good as George Orwell.

‘West Hartlepool, Co. Durham, 1963’

In “West Hartlepool, Co. Durham, 1963”, a man hunches against a biting wind, marching away from the camera, visible only as an overcoated silhouette against a classic smokestack-scape in which the smoke is driven horizontally by that same wind. You feel not only the cold but the hardship. That man has done that walk every day for maybe 40 years, and he’s got precisely nowhere. Yet a picket fence next to him has bowed aside in his wake, blown over by the sheer drive of an ordinary working man. This is not the photography of a simple follower of Bill Brandt: it takes inspiration from many sources. Nor is it the photography of an adventurer, an adrenaline junkie. Yet that is somehow, coarsely, how we still tend to think of McCullin, one of the great visual artists of our time. It must be frustrating for him.

‘Gypsy Watching the Police Evict his Family, Kent, 1961’

There is a portrait called “Gypsy Watching the Police Evict his Family, Kent, 1961”. Just a man alone with his thoughts, a bandana around his neck, and his hair flying, pain and doubt and the desire for revenge all fixed in his face. The sitter was good-looking, but McCullin gave that man beauty where he might have given him merely sympathy. In its romanticism it reminds me of the great head-and-shoulder studies of Julia Margaret Cameron, and in its social attention of John Thompson or Lewis Hine. We know from his interviews and his writings that McCullin would never have taken that picture without the gypsy at some level allowing him to. McCullin was never sneaky, never a voyeur. He was already a great photographer, then, long before he went to Vietnam and fame.Again and again McCullin matches up to the greatest specialists of the genre. His unemployed coal pickers, in Sunderland in 1964, shoving heavily laden bikes towards us, are both a tribute to and the equal of Brandt’s famous coal-pickers from 30 years before. His marvellously emotional landscapes are sometimes the equal of Fay Godwin’s. McCullin has the same knack of finding places that were once far more important to people than they are now. Hadrian’s Wall is obviously so, but even in the fenlands of the Somerset Levels he finds places where the meticulous digging of the drainage ditches could only have been done by a population more committed to those wet acres than any there now.

Brandt, like Orwell, T.H. White (author of the powerfully idealistic Once and Future King) and others, was obsessed with Englishness, and McCullin comes from that line. He remains a very literary photographer, his pictures acting as the vehicle for complex, eloquent complex essays on what it means to be him and to be here. It is our good fortune that he feels that he cannot put them into words.

‘Don McCullin: In England’ National Media Museum, Bradford, UK until September 27. Tel: 0870 701 0200 www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk

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City North Site, Finsbury Park, London by Benson & Forsyth

29 July, 2009 | By Richard Waite

The practice landed the 46,000 sq m project in June last year (2008) after seeing off John McAslan & Partners, Panter Hudspith, FLACQ and Studio Egret West following a high-profile RIBA competition.

Backed by the Business Design Centre Group, the development features two 22-storey residential towers sat on a ’ podium building’ housing shops and offices.

A planning application is expected to be shortly – possibly September (2009) – following a recent public consultation exercise.

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Woodberry Down Fun Day draws crowds

OVER 400 local people attended the Woodberry Down’s 5^th Annual Fun Day recently in Hackney, getting a chance to find out more about how to live healthily and engage in the community.

Residents met with staff from the regeneration project to get an update on works and how they can get involved. They also spoke to staff from Genesis Housing Group about the development of the proposed new local community-based housing association and encouraged them to get involved and become resident board members to help gain control over local issues.

Meanwhile, Genesis Community, the charitable arm of Genesis Housing Group, was on-hand to tell jobseekers about employment opportunities.

Activities for the whole family included dance performances, messy arts and recycling activities, relaxing massages and a fun and friendly children’s entertainer.

There was also a football tournament and The Ginga de Quilombo Capoeira duo gave an extraordinary Capoeira demonstration (a Brazilian Martial Art).

Cllr Alcock, Deputy Mayor of Hackney, said: “The regeneration of Woodberry Down is not just about bricks and mortar but delivering social and economic benefits for the existing as well as the new community.  Woodberry Down fun day shows how passionate the community is about their neighbourhood and I’m delighted that so many residents came out to meet with their neighbours and get involved.”

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Haringey is London’s top burglary ‘hotspot’

5:09pm Thursday 30th July 2009

HARINGEY is the worst area for burglaries in London.

The break-in rate is now double the London average and the fourth worst in the UK, according to Home Office figures released this week after research by the Conservatives.

Homes in Haringey suffered 30 break-ins per 1,000 households last year — double the capital’s average of 18 burglaries for every 1,000 homes.

Neighbouring Enfield is the second worst London borough, followed by Redbridge, Brent and Ealing.

There were 599 burglaries reported in Haringey between April and June.

But despite the discouraging statistics, police say the number of burglaries have been reduced by 13.9 per cent in comparison to the same period last year when 696 burglaries were committed.

This drop contrasts sharply with London-wide Metropolitan Police figures, which reveal the number of burglaries has risen by ten per cent.

Overall, residential burglaries are down from 2,966 in 2006/7 and 2,772 in 2007/8.

Haringey Borough Commander Dave Grant said: “While the figures appear disappointing, this year we are showing a 10.8 per cent reduction compared with the same period last year.

“Burglary is a priority crime for the borough and we are working hard to disrupt offenders by carrying out a range of intelligence-led activity.”

He said measures included stop and search and anti-burglary patrols, as well as working with Haringey Council to find long-term burglary hot-spots.

Chris Grayling, the Shadow Home Secretary, blamed the recession and increasing number of drug-takers for the high number of burglaries.

He added: “We desperately need real action to get police away from filling in forms at their desk in police stations and onto the beat tackling the problem.”

The Government maintains that burglaries have more than halved since 1997.

Despite the majority of Haringey’s wealth found in the west of the borough, in Muswell Hill, Highgate and Crouch End, burglaries are most concentrated in the area surrounding the Harringay and St Ann’s wards including Tottenham Green and Stroud Green.

Tottenham Green had the second highest burglary rate in the capital, with more than 21 crimes committed per 1,000 residents. St Ann’s and Harringay had 20 and 19 household thefts per 1,000 residents, respectively.

Stroud Green, was the ninth most burgled ward in London, with more than 17 break-ins per 1,000 residents last year.

Police said the problem was due to the high density of flat shares and bedsits in and around Harringay with more people living there per square metre than anywhere else in the borough, making it easy for would-be burglars to strike several homes through one communal door.

Justin Hinchcliffe, of Tottenham Conservatives, was scathing about policing in Haringey and said there was a risk the figures could be even higher.

He said: “I have had my car broken into and Haringey police didn’t even bother to come round and take forensic testing.

“I am sure that like me, many people, have stopped reporting burglaries because they have no confidence the police will get around to looking into it.”

Councillor Ron Aitken, Liberal Democrat spokesman for crime, said: “I know Haringey police work hard to tackle burglaries, which have been a long-standing problem in the borough. They are meeting all their targets.

“All parties know that the answer to cutting crime is more police on the beat and on patrol and away from their desks.”

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Community’s helping hands leads to green award

12:54pm Monday 27th July 2009

GARDENS and allotments in Haringey run entirely by volunteers were deemed growing successes last week.

Four green spaces that provide welcome relief in between the borough’s many buildings and busy streets were honoured with Green Pennant Awards.

The green accolades are handed out by the Civic Trust for gardens and spaces managed and developed by ordinary people or community projects.

Living Under One Sun Community Allotment, in Tottenham, made it onto the exclusive list of just 96 gardens across the country for the first time.

The Gardens Community Gardens, in Doncaster Gardens, off Stanhope Road, Harringay, Bowes Park Community Gardens, in Myddleton Road, and Mannock Road Allotments, Wood Green, all retained the award.

The Doncaster Gardens is celebrating its fourth award and is also on a shortlist for both Haringey and London’s In Bloom Compeition.

Andy Newman, Gardens Community Garden coordinator, said: “I think we really should sing the praises of all community gardens. It is not just about gardening, it’s a meeting place where people get together and socialise while making the borough a more attractive place.”

The gardens opened seven years ago on the derelict site of the former Harringay Stadium for Speedway and greyhound racing.

It was transformed into a graden to help reduce crime in the area.

“Some people do not know the garden is there and are pleasantly surprised when they find it. Others plan their route around it. It really is a marvellous thing,” Mr Newman added.