The fairy village [the model village] – there was a little plaque set in wood saying that this model of an English village was made and donated by mister somebody or other from the architect’s office of the LCC. And this was a whole village set out: a pilgrim’s rest, and the forge, and the thatched houses, and the church, and the vicarage and the old school house - impeccably kept all through the war, it wasn’t damaged. There were no figures or cows, they had the little tiny railing, and right in front there was the watermill and the forge and there was a little tiny pond by the watermill not much bigger than a dinner plate. And what absolutely delighted the children – me, and then my children – was that invariably a duck would fly over and settle in this pond and would settle in this pool and would flap about and all the children would cry out and all the fathers would take pictures and there would always be a crowd.

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And then somewhere along the line I noticed there seemed to be a house missing, and then another one, and then it was obvious there was nothing left – and there was just the church left. And then the railing went as there was no point in having a railing anymore... But it was such a pity that Hitler didn’t catch it but the local boys did.





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We bought the house in ’82 – which is just over the other side of the railway line – and one of the reasons was because you could walk out of the back garden and come into the park. We had two small children. So my first encounter with the park was as a play area for my kids. When I came, the GLC ran it, and it was a bit run down but it was okay. And it had a funky café with an Italian family running it – I thought it was much older, but actually it was only built in the ‘70s, so it was only ten years old. [Have a] kickabout or whatever – this is what the park was for me, to start with. Then, when the GLC went, they built a large play area and what’s now called the Hope Play Space, which had wonderful climbing gears and a water feature, and it was absolutely fabulous. It was kind of the GLC getting rid of their little bits of money before they were got rid of. Then Haringey [Council] took it over – I wasn’t involved in any of that discussion, I wasn’t even aware. And Haringey took over and immediately shut down this play area – said it was dangerous. [It was] very upsetting to my son particularly because he loved it. And that was shut for two years under Haringey – three years, something like that. And then slowly the park declined into this place that was really a no-go area. And that was when I started to get active.

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At the same time, they’d had sort of bands playing in tents during the summer, which was fine – in small tents. People like The Pogues came and played in a small tent in the late ‘80s. And then they started having boxing matches and bigger tents. Well, one of the tents blew away and destroyed some trees in the wind. And then they got even bigger, until they were having these massive concerts - the biggest, I think, was 120,000 people, eventually. They built up. And it was always in the summer when everyone wants to enjoy the park. That, again, was upsetting lots of people, not just me – lots of people. You didn’t feel the money was going back into the park – although the money was costing Haringey money, so you could say it was some sort of recompense for the cost of having to run it [the park]. So that was when I joined the Friends [of Finsbury Park], which Bruce Kent was running at the time… We used to run small events in the park and complain about Haringey’s management of the park [laughs] – that’s what we did!

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We’ve got to the ‘90s when these big concerts started happening and the park was incredibly run down. You never saw a single woman wandering about this park, ever. Haringey’s staffing… One year it was part of the education budget – they moved it around, the Parks Department. Part of the Education Department at one time, and they decided that they had no money – so no repairs were done for the whole year in the park. Nothing. While they still ran the concerts, which trashed the park.

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There was a large cruising community coming here. It was advertised in gay magazines as a good place to come. And that meant that there was – the muggers came out. So there was quite a lot of very violent crimes committed. I imagine a number of them weren’t even reported. And the old toilet block, which has been rebuilt now – you’d take your kid to the play area and you’d go and have a pee and there’d be men sort of stopping you from going in, or trying to.  It wasn’t a very nice experience, that…

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The tarmac was all very worn out, the – well they’ve got rid of it now – but there was really nice wire netting round the football area and that was all falling apart. So anyone who played football would lose their ball into the railway line through the poles [laughs]. And they had their system – what they called Rangers, Park Rangers, who drove round the park and they had some sort of electronic equipment that clicked on the posts in the park to prove they’d been there. But these people came round and went off again! It wasn’t a good time. I mean, I suppose it was a recession at the time so there was no money – councils had no money. So we were all writing in, saying ‘What are you going to do about the park?’. I remember the Chair or whatever of Haringey wrote to me and said, ‘We basically can’t afford to keep it – we don’t have the money’.

















Well, I moved to Stroud Green in 1894 with my mum and we lived in a flat on Victoria Road – so I was seven then – and I think one of the first things we did was go to the park. So we walked down Victoria Road and we would have gone into the park across the footbridge at the end of Oxford Road… Now there’s actually a route that goes all the way from Finsbury Park station, all the way up the side, and this bit is a bit more pleasant  - sort of open and recreational. At the time this was quite overgrown and weedy – it was almost wild land. As you come in here there used to be – and they tore it down about ten years ago – but there used to be a little stone platform here, which I think was built for train spotters. You could walk up it. It looked like a ‘Casualty’ episode waiting to happen. But you got a slightly better view of everything around you. But that was really good fun – I’d never seen one before – so that was overlooking the railway. And that’s probably, technically, my first memory of Finsbury Park – thinking, ‘Well, I’m going to go up that platform’.



It was all very run down. There was an adventure playground and a proper children’s playground and it was very typical of Britain in the early ‘80s. It was partly vandalised. On the adventure playground things looked very dangerous and I think it actually closed quite soon after that… Although the [children’s] playground was quite nice, the park itself was very sort of desolate and it felt neglected.

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Throughout the ‘80s the park just had this general air of neglect. Now, I remember once coming through gate here on Seven Sisters Road with my dad, and I think we were walking back home… What we would do if I was off school is we would play Monopoly typically in the morning and then walk down to Seven Sisters Road, go to what was then a Wimpy just near the station and then we’d walk back through the park… I remember, as you walked in here, there was this sort of almost transient community of kind of vagrant types hanging around. And I think one asked my dad for a cigarette – and he probably gave him a cigarette – and I remember my dad on the way back up said, ‘Oh, that lot are the Finsbury Park Intelligentsia’… So that was what it was like.

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When I went to sixth form, which was 1993, and then university, it was noticeable that everything in London was getting nicer… Things like the rubbish that used to be everywhere. Everywhere used to be covered in rubbish - it was just perfectly acceptable to drop rubbish in places. Whatever it was, it isn’t now. And that kind of thing started happening – things started smartening up. Little dilapidated cafes got turned into nice smart coffee houses – just everything started improving. And I think it was around that time that I remember things like the area around the lake being redeveloped. Things like the new playground opened up, and the café was smartened up, and there was a sense of – from being an area which was synonymous with poverty, Finsbury Park gradually started becoming affluent. And it was noticeable in the sense that you got, walking through the park.

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And then, I think it was about ’93 or ’94, I remember was when they created this route that goes along the [west] side [of the park] here, and that route follows the line of a railway line... It was the line that actually becomes the Parkland Walk. It was an abandoned railway line that, if you were to follow it, goes along the side of Finsbury Park and then turns into the Parkland Walk. They opened that up and made it a little walk. They didn’t do a terribly good job to being with, because it was still bounded by chainlink fences all the way down, but it was at least a walk through bits of trees and grass and stuff. And I started walking home along that… I remember this one moment when I was going home along that route, I got to this bit of the route which for some reason was covered in cuckoo spit – you know that stuff that comes out of certain plants? It was like fluff and little bubbles - the whole of the area. And I think it had just been some tree which had been doing its annual thing but I remember thinking it was almost like going through an alien landscape – that for about three metres everything was covered in this weird white stuff. But that opened up, and then – I think about a year or two later – because it was so obviously a ridiculous idea to have it cut off from the park, they took away the fence, so that now walk – which originally didn’t exist and was just an abandoned train line – then became a train line you could walk down and is now a fully functional path that you wouldn’t know wasn’t completely part of the park. And now you go past the tennis courts, which have been there for years, but there’s a skate park there which you walk past now on your way down and it all looks very smart and well kept.

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I never went up to the far reaches – you know, the Manor House end – apart from on really special occasions. My area of the park was this bit [south-west side]. I would hardly ever go up here [Manor House end] except for the fact I started having piano lessons with a chap who lived on the other side of Seven Sisters Road – let’s say a couple of hundred metres down the road from Finsbury Park. I would come back from school – so I was aged about 15, this was the early 90s – and I would sometimes come over here [south side] and sit on a bench and wait for 15 minutes until it was my piano lesson. I remember thinking that this area had a very different feel – we’re talking about the strip that runs along Seven Sisters Road. It felt very different. This area here [west side] goes along a train line and the backs of houses – and who doesn’t love the backs of houses? It’s really nice to look at the bits which the Victorians didn’t intend you to see. It’s all sort of higgledy-piggledy, they don’t all look the same. With people doing their washing and with chairs and gnomes and that kind of thing. Whereas this bit [south side] is a really, really main road - this bit feels really depressing. This strip is a no man’s land – you would never go there to have a nice picnic because of all the buses and the taxis and the cars. You wouldn’t use that for leisure, and it generally isn’t – this bit is used for the circus, the area where you come into the gate off Seven Sisters Road, right on the corner of Stroud Green Road and Seven Sisters Road. You would never want to spend a relaxing half hour in that bit, which is I think why they use that for circuses and that sort of thing.
 
The area [around Finsbury Park] in the mid ‘80s, it was really nice. It wasn’t dangerous. I never once got mugged in Finsbury Park – only got mugged in Stoke Newington. It didn’t feel unfriendly at all. But it was very left-wing – a really nice sort hotbed of north London left-wingery… That’s the kind of people I’m talking about – these kind of militant, activist type. They were always outside Tesco’s, they were collecting for the miners’ strike. There were loads of them in Finsbury Park, and you think ‘Where are they now?’. There used to be a guy selling the Morning Star outside Finsbury Park station every day – there may still be someone there selling the Morning Star... No, it was Socialist Worker – [shouts] ‘Socialist Worker!’ – throughout the ‘80s.. A guy selling Socialist Worker outside Finsbury Park station, is a really good microcosm of the whole area in the mid ‘80s. All the things that were both good and bad.