Tottenham High Road: Traders' big brains

To run a small, precarious business on a London high street you have to be bright. Without exception everyone I have spoken to this week and last has come across as quick witted, and some exceedingly erudite. 

That this comes as a surprise to me says much more about me than about anyone in Tottenham, but try and cut me some slack... Before beginning this particular piece of research the extent of my interaction with the owners of small independent businesses on high streets was pretty much limited to buying food and everyday products in my locality of East London. In this I think I have had a similar experience to the vast majority of users of local high streets: I would bring milk, or lemons or batteries whatever, to the counter. The person at the till would take my money and if any words were spoken (frequently these transactions are carried out in complete silence) it would be an exchange about whether I wanted a bag, and in an extremely sociable example, the state of the weather (usually reserved for the fifth or sixth visit to the shop). 

Now, I'm engaging people about their business, and a little bit of their personal life (how many languages they speak, and where they live) and I realise two things. First, that the person behind the counter more often than not actually owns the entire business, organising everything from ordering stock to customer retention and loyalty strategies. They eat, sleep and work their shop, often with their immediate and extended family working alongside them. Second, to succeed in this extremely complex and many-faceted endeavour, you have to have a good bit between the ears, both knowledge and also practical wisdom, to nurture relationships, understand the economics, tax, rates and everything else. 

One way in which business owners demonstrate their skill and know-how is in their choice and arrangement of products, constantly rearranging the contents of their shop in a complex dance of sell by dates, customer preferences and psychology. Unlike the big players, who have teams of environmental psychologists on hand to help keep them in profit, for small traders this is a constant experiment of trial and error.

In addition, business-owners use a number of languages, appropriating their choice of language to accommodate different situations. Tottenham is a patchwork of immigrant groups, and traders speak in a huge range of tongues, both as native speakers and in the name of getting and retaining business. One man told me that while he is fluent in English and Swahili, he can "do business" in about ten more languages, as around half his customers do not speak English. He told me that he assesses the language in which he should greet a customer as they walk through the door, a skill which must involve combined and complex interpretation of the cultural clues presented by the person. 

It is the ability of the high road to enable people to start a business with very small initial investment (and to grow the business by increments, from market stall to shared premises, to a leased, individually-owned shop) which also makes it a true meritocracy. Negotiating the complex and ever-changing cultural and economic landscape requires a substantial amount between the ears. Traders who do not have all the skills, or the quick-wittedness to acquire the skills fast, are not running shops on the high street, and I am unlikely to meet any of them in this survey. 

For some more detailed research about languages spoken on London's high streets, visit the LSE's Ordinary Streets project, led by Dr. Suzi Hall http://lsecities.net/objects/research-projects/ordinary-streets.

For a fascinating photographic record and discussion of the activities of London's small, local shopkeepers, visit Mia Hunt's excellent blog: Keeping Shop, Keeping Place  http://keepingshop.blogspot.co.uk/?m=1

Surveying Tottenham High Road

Today, for the first time, I began a face to face survey of the whole of Tottenham High Road, with the help if four fantastic undergraduate Architecture students from UEL, here for a year from Brazil. Towards the end of a PhD (mine is due to be finished on the romantic date of February 14th next year) does not seem to be the ideal time to start on a major new data and information gathering exercise, but here we are, thanks to a great funding opportunity from Cass Cities at London Met, the newly emerging research group led by former head of Design for London, Mark Brearley.

You can plan and plan, but until you get out in the field, there is no knowing how things will go, or what you may have missed. The learning curve experienced today by me and my students was steep, and pretty much encompassed a lot of the type of interpretive, embodied knowledge I am trying to get to grips with in the course of writing my thesis. 

It immediately became apparent that different shopkeepers and business owners react very differently to being asked questions about their business. The reactions we encountered ranged from people actually running away (!) to a stall-holder who kindly gave me a punnet of my favourite type of peaches. One ripped up the information sheet we had given her and dropped it pointedly in the bin, another - in a cafe where we stopped for coffee while surveying - gave us a plate of churros for our trouble: "from the chef". It's not yet easy to understand these different reactions, I think as we grow in confidence and experience we may begin to be able to predict how people will react, depending on the type of shop, and peoples' body language as we walk I through the door. In turn, I hope we can mitigate their negative responses - I noticed that we got a better reaction when we introduced ourselves by name before we began, and the other group found that confidence and being authoritative could be a good technique for getting a positive response.

Shopkeepers are also very busy people. So we soon realised that for some, it was better to drop in the survey sheet and information about our activities and then return later to pick up the answers, which could then be augmented by the surveyor's observations. 

At times, the most interesting information and insights we collected were in the conversation around the questions on the form, which could only be noted down briefly in the 'comments' section. These narratives, like the guy who mentioned he was working for his cousin, or the man who expressed the opinion that Columbian traders were probably criminals are deeply revealing about the metabolism, interrelations and tensions of this ordinary street. 

Our experiences today have reiterated just how deep and complex the physical and social landscape of Tottenham High Road actually is, where a thousand every day lives are lived... It turns out this may be a lot more than just an audit of 

the local, small-scale economy, it can't help but be, because the local even only is such a key and integrated part of absolutely everything else. 

http://www.thecass.com/projects/projects/current1/where-is-tottenhams-economy

Thoughts on Housing in Tottenham

This area features Victorian terraced houses very heavily, of which there are hundreds of thousands in the UK, and which make up vast swathes of the housing stock in London. In this block there are 30 such houses on Reform Row and Dowsett Road, built by developers at the end of the nineteenth century to house the workforce of the burgeoning industrial city. There are other types of houses in the block too, 1930s terraced houses built by developers for the private market on Albion Road and Parkhurst Road, and 1940s-50s red-brick council houses in the North East corner on Scotland Green and Parkhurst Road built after the second world war during the period of mass social house building after the inception of the welfare state. These typologies of house are repeated throughout London, and in fact the block contains a neat cross section of the most common house types in London with the exception of some mid-twentieth century terraced ‘townhouse’ typologies, found in 1960s-80s housing estates.

The most diverting aspect of all these different house typologies is not their difference, but their extreme similarity. Looking at estate agents’ particulars it is apparent that every floor plan includes rooms labelled ‘kitchen’, ‘living’ and ‘dining’, and almost without exception these rooms will be situated on the ground floor (except in some late 20th century ‘townhouse’ typologies, of which there are none in this block). Sometimes a wall will separate them, sometimes there will be rooms with a joint function labelled kitchen/living/dining, or living/dining and so forth. Then, upstairs we find bedrooms and a bathroom or separate bathroom and WC. The two levels will be connected by a staircase that is within a small range of sizes in width and proportion. The circulation in houses is also remarkably uniform in its arrangement. Although on the ground floor many housing typologies have an entrance which leads directly into the living room or kitchen, minimising or removing the hallway altogether, on the upper floor the bedrooms and bathroom are almost always accessed from a hallway. On the rare occasions when a bedroom is accessed from another bedroom, or the bathroom is accessed through a bedroom, this significantly affects the value of the property.

It is clear from comparing the plan of the Victorian house in its original form that although the way life as lived in British houses has changed, it has changed remarkably little. The most significant change is the attitude to privacy, and which parts of the house are publicly accessible. In the original plan, the ‘parlour’ to the front of the house, would have been the room in which guests were received. All rooms behind this (the kitchen, scullery and back parlour) were family rooms in which every day life was lived, yet which could not be seen from the street, nor would be seen by visitors in the parlour. The knocking together of rooms blurs this distinction, and brings both ‘everyday life’ functions and ‘for best’ functions into one place. This reflects a dramatic change in the way that everyday life is lived – the actions of running a household (like doing washing, for example) are no longer messy, noisy and dirty. Instead they are contained by electric domestic appliances such as washing machines, which can happily coexist with a conversation, and even become objects of pride to show off to visitors. Similarly, fitted kitchens with gas stoves mean that all the detritus of cooking is concealed, there is no dirty coal required for heat and cooking can take place in front of guests without the host compromising the smartness of the house.

Perhaps the most drastic alteration is that all houses now have an inside bathroom, where the toilet, sink and bath or shower are in close proximity to one another. In the case of the Victorian house plan, this has caused a problem that repeats itself all over the UK. Given the convention that bathrooms are upstairs, the L-shaped layout of the house with a return that houses the kitchen on the ground floor and a bedroom on the upper floor, the location of the bathroom becomes problematic. Various solutions to this have been attempted, including the splitting of the bedroom in the return into two halves, one of which contains a bathroom the other a single bedroom. Another solution is to add a bathroom to the rear of the house, behind the kitchen and accessed from the kitchen.

This is more common in houses which had a bathroom added during the early-mid twentieth century, as the way in which houses were used had not changed greatly, and the kitchen was at the ‘private’ end of the house. This is much less desirable now, and reduces the value of the property, because much more public life is carried out in the kitchen. It may also have had something to do with the earlier arrangement of having the WC in the garden and accessed from the garden, but immediately adjacent to the other ‘dirty’ elements of the house (the kitchen sink and food preparation area). If looked at in terms of whether or not an activity is ‘dirty’, and whether is produces effluent (both in terms of a physical product but also in terms of smells), it makes more sense to have the bathroom immediately next to the kitchen. The migration of the bathroom up the stairs is indicative of a change in attitude to cleanliness. It also coincided with the invention and widespread use of the flushing WC, which allows human waste to be rapidly transported elsewhere leaving only a clean bowl of water.
Thus, the Victorian house lends itself to alteration and transformation in a number of ways. Other housing typologies lend themselves to less successful alteration and examples here are concentrated on the one house typology. The reason for this is that this example encompasses typical aspects of house renovation and change, and the point is made more clearly when focused on one originating house typology. These examples were drawn from a collection of house plans from rightmove.com, which hail from all over London, but the variations are similar, since the originating typology is very similar. Rooms can be knocked together to create bigger rooms, extensions can be built, and bathrooms can be moved. Extensions are usually added to the rear end of the return, but sometimes they fill in the return, making an interior room in the centre of the ground floor that has no windows.
The maintenance of the function of houses behind the high street through alteration in response to changing desires, needs, affluence etc. means that the residential streets in between major arterial routes have remained remarkably stable since they were built. The occupants may change, but the use of the streets for people to live in remains the same. Because the housing typologies can respond, the population can shift dramatically (ie. as new waves of immigration occur), without the apparent physical fabric which accommodates them changing at all.