Tottenham High Street

The Summer of 2011 saw the streets of Tottenham erupt in violence and looting in the aftermath of the shooting of Mark Duggan by the police. The subsequent plight of local businesses was highlighted in the press. But the long term future of the High Street area is bound up with the major urban regeneration plans of the local council, LB Haringey, intertwined with the redevelopment plans of the football club, Tottenham Hotspurs. Recent reports in the Guardian (http://www.theguardian.com/football/2013/oct/30/tottenham-new-stadium-local-business-demolition) suggest that this future is being strongly influenced by the growth-dependent planning paradigm. The new £400m stadium will bring with it major restructuring of the area including new shops, cafes, a library and a cinema as well as, centrally, a new walkway to the stadium for the 56,000 football fans which is supposed to act as a new public space on non-match days. To make way for all this a council housing tower block and rows of shops with flats above will be demolished. But will there be sufficient public gains from the development, from this replacement of the existing with the new? The concern here seems to be that the threat of Spurs moving out of Tottenham (voiced during the discussions over the future of the Olympic Stadium in Stratford) and the impact of the economic downturn has enabled Spurs in 2012 to renegotiate the planning obligation which was to provide affordable housing and provide community and transport facilities worth £16m. The economic power of the football club as local landowner and leading development partner puts the potential of this growth-dependent urban regeneration to deliver wider social benefits in question. To my mind, this is a case where a two-pronged approach is needed. There needs to be some holding of the line for planning gain arising from the development; not all the benefits can be assumed to arise from future local economic growth consequent on the development. And, second, there needs to be a strategy for those displaced by the development and perhaps left out of any positive spillover effects. Here a community-led approach could yield dividends as, indeed, has been shown to work elsewhere in the borough.