Sainsbury's is coming to Stroud Green Road - Woody's is going!
  • Papa L

    Good history lesson Arkady.

    Look at the old maps from before Finsbury Park existed and Stroud Green centres on Fiveways - the section below Stapleton Hall Road, between there and Mount View Road and round by the Triangle that occasionally gets claimed as the 'real' Stroud Green was all fields .

    In a move that must have started with the station, people then started migrating what was perceived as the centre of Stroud Green north east. Since then Ordnance Survey / A to Z maps etc have actually moved the Stroud Green words up and right, so that they misleadingly now hang over an area that wasn't the original Stroud Green but fields.

    (At this rate people in Turnpike Lane will be claiming they live in the real Stroud Green in a hundred year's time.)

    Goes to show Stroud Green is clearly a loose concept, has shifted over time and, as said above, a state of mind. So I'd say anyone who lives on Stroud Green Road, or a road near it, and says they live in Stroud Green is pretty much spot on.

    And that Sainsbury's is definitely in Stroud Green and needs to open soon.

  • ArkadyArkady

    Stroud Green’s borders to the north, east and west are more clearly definable than is often suggested, overlap with FP and ‘Crouch Hill’ aside. It’s the western border that is problematic, due to the centrality of SGR (despite SG’s weak historical claims to the ‘West Bank’) and the ‘strange death of Tollington’ as a used name.

    Incidentally, if I were Islington council I would be tempted to put together a regeneration masterplan involving the rebranding (or restoration) of the area centred on Hornsey Road as ‘Tollington’, incorporating Tollington Park and the streets either side of Hornsey Road between the two railway lines (i.e. from Hornsey Rise to the Sobell Centre, especially on the eastern side with its clear redevelopment need and potential. Something involving the restoration of the Victorian streetplan in the Andover and Six Acres estates. The lack of a clear identify or urban centre retards development there, in my opinion.

  • ADGS
    Any top-down effort at rebranding areas tends to be cringeworthy, though. It used to work in the past - Finsbury Park itself being one example, Victoria another - but when I read something like NewcastleGateshead now, I shudder. See also the lack of affection for the new counties created by local government reforms.
  • Ali

    http://www.hornseyjournal.co.uk/content/haringey/hornseyjournal/news/story.aspx?brand=HCEJOnline&category=news&tBrand=northlondon24&tCategory=newshcej&itemid=WeED18%20Aug%202010%2016%3A20%3A52%3A980

  • ActionVerb

    Have no sympathy for the Sunflower Gallery, their stuff is ridiculously over-priced and usually not any good. I got annoyed by his attitude as well. There's also a current planning application to provide new frontage for the Sunflower Gallery paid for by some sort of local business charity.

    I can't see any business along SGR being seriously affected by this, apart from the small convenience shop between the Sainsbury's and Tesco Metro, but I imagine they'll just go back to the same trading levels as when Woody's was there. They'll probably pick up more late-night trade as well.

  • sincers

    "Hopefully it will make the standard of other local supermarkets improve." - Malcolm Levy, partner at Davies & Davies

    lol, Malcolm must have been caught out by Lake Tesco!

    ditto @Actionverb. that flower shop is absolute crap. I went in there once and he didn't know what a seed tray was. I'm not sure Sainsbury's will either, but if you're going run a flower shop and you don't sell seed trays, you must at least know what they are!

    I think the Sainsbury's will be brill. It may even make Londis prices a bit more competitive. And this shouldn't be too much of a shock to the area, since there used to be a Sainsbury's on Hornsey Road, in the Shell garage. And if I'm correct, Woody's used to sell flowers at his kind of standard as well. I think he should wind his neck in and tidy up his front pavement.

  • Misscara

    Sunflower Gallery is rubbish, and expensive. I would never buy anything in there. On Valentine's Day I wanted to buy a single rose to cheer up a friend and he wanted £4. I only had £2 cash on me so I offered him that and he said no (it was late evening and he clearly wasn't going to sell them all), then I went into Tesco and got a much better one for £1.50. Sunflower were still selling the Valentines stock 4 days later.

    Their 'floral displays' are so ugly and tacky with nasty cellophane and teddy bears and plastic butterflies etc. And at Christmas he wanted £25 for a 3ft high tree, they were selling the same size for £7 at Homebase!

    I'm all in support of small local businesses that deserve it but this place takes the biscuit. I'm surprised they make any money at all as nobody ever goes in there and always just assumed it must be a front for some dodgy goings on.

  • ActionVerb

    The planning application (number P100861) for a new frontage to the Sunflower Gallery, to split them from the minicab office is about to get refused:

    https://www.islington.gov.uk/onlineplanning/apas/run/WPHAPPDETAIL.DisplayUrl?theApnID=P100861&backURL=Search Criteria > Search Criteria'>Search Results

  • Emma
    Intrigued that the estate agent is trying to suggest Sainsburys is a sign of gentrification. Waitrose, maybe, but Sains?? It's that thing of estate agents saying things, and hoping you'll believe them.
  • Ali

    Depends where you start from ie You have Lidl in Finsbury Park, Tesco in middle Stroud Green, Sainsbury’s in upper Stroud Green , Waitrose in Crouch End - about right I think !

  • graeme
    Yeah but the D&D office is like something out of the Dickensian age. They'd think a Fine Fare was the height of bourgeois decadence.
  • miss annie
    There is a Waitrose on Holloway Road. It would take a Herculean effort from any estate agent to gentrify that stretch of road.
  • Ali

    The All Bar One soon to become a Wetherspoons used to be a Fine Fare with the Yellow and Black own brands. That was back in the days that Dave and Annie used to run the Eurythmics empire from the flat up the stairs next to the shop. So I guess this proves that Crouch End did go upmarket but maybe could in these austere times be going backward with the introduction of a big Wetherspoons (it used to have a small one near the post office in the eraly days)

  • ADGS
    I love the Holloway Road Waitrose, it's like a fish flung that little bit too far up the beach by the tide of gentrification. Must be the only Waitrose in Britain right next to an Argos, too.
  • miss annie
    An Argos 'Extra' no less!
  • sincers

    It used to be a Kwik Save.

    ahh, Kwik Save, we miss you!

  • Ali

    andit being a Sainsburys before that makes all this quite circular !

  • nesta
    BUT WHEN DOES IT OPEN?!
  • KRS-Dan
    September 15th, I was told.
  • crouchend tiger
    Tesco SGR has a brilliant new offer - "get two for the price of two". Tesco is advertising a range of products where you can buy two for a special price - two loaves of bread for £2, for example. And the person who prints up the special yellow offer stickers appears to have decided, presumably by dusting off their old ruler from school - you know, the one that was printed with the two times table - that this means one loaf of bread must cost £1.

    For about 30 seconds I did consider pointing out the likely error, but then realised I'd be there all night.
  • graeme
    They do that quite often, '2 for 1' at more that twice the price of the individual item etc. It must be on purpose to get shot of crap, without affecting profit.

    The BOGOF on items (such as bread) that you're unlikely to have time to eat before it's stale is a bit of a swizz, and needless waste.

    I once helpfully mentioned to an old lady in Tesco as she picked up a bag of nectarines that it was "buy one get one free" - she snapped back that she only needed one. I was a bit taken aback by her response, but on reflection she was bang on the money - what's the point of thinking you're getting a bargain 2for1 deal when half the stuff goes in the bin.
  • ADGS
    I don't have much freezer space, but I can fit a loaf of bread in there, so appreciate those offers, particularly since the normal price of bread these days is shocking. I think it's the one price which resonates with me more than any other because I always remember when I was very small reading the 2000AD strip Invasion, where in the nightmarish occupied Britain of that future date 1999, people are protesting that the price of bread should be brought down to a pound a loaf...
  • Nick10
    Glass frontage and cash machine now present.
  • Ewan
    I actually am in need of a supermarket really soon. cost cutter is lovely but it ain't cutting it
  • crouchend tiger
    I will be in the new Sainsbury's on opening day, tossing rose petals at the feet of the cashiers...
  • Ali

    cost cutter is not cost cutter any more have a look at the sign !

  • Ewan
    reading signs is so 2009 ali ;-)
  • Ali

    How do you get from A to B especailly some where you have not been to before ?

  • andy

    GPS

  • miss annie
    I quite like getting lost in places I've never been to before.
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