Stapleton Hall

<P style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt; BACKGROUND: white" class=MsoNormal><SPAN style="FONT-FAMILY: 'Garamond', 'serif'; COLOR: black; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'"><FONT size=3>As some will know, my <U>Three Houses, Many Lives</U> was published last year in hardback. The paperback is due out now in early June, in an edition by Vintage. One of the Three Houses is Stapleton Hall in Stroud Green, and it was thanks to a couple of contributors to this website that I was able to say something about the place when it was in a strange limbo of decline in the 1960s, '70s and early '80s, when it had ceased to be an intensely respectable bastion of the local Conservative party and had not yet been expanded into the present block of neo-Georgian flats.</FONT></SPAN></P> <P style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt; BACKGROUND: white" class=MsoNormal><SPAN style="FONT-FAMILY: 'Garamond', 'serif'; COLOR: black; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'"></SPAN> </P> <P style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt; BACKGROUND: white" class=MsoNormal><SPAN style="FONT-FAMILY: 'Garamond', 'serif'; COLOR: black; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'"></SPAN><SPAN style="FONT-FAMILY: 'Garamond', 'serif'; COLOR: black; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'"><FONT size=3>Originally, of course, the house stood among fields. The story of its changing fortunes, as it found itself gradually absorbed first into a pretty outer suburb full of `gentlemen's seats' and then, with the inexorable spread of London, into a sooty inner district from which the upper classes fled, is the essential story of all great cities that swallow up their surrounding countryside. The cow pastures that surrounded the old house, survived, however, till Stapleton Hall Road was built in the 1880s, and their owner, Charles Turner, (who made a very good bargain selling them off for houses) was the last dairy farmer in the district. </FONT></SPAN></P> <P style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt; BACKGROUND: white" class=MsoNormal><SPAN style="FONT-FAMILY: 'Garamond', 'serif'; COLOR: black; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'"></SPAN> </P> <P style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt; BACKGROUND: white" class=MsoNormal><SPAN style="FONT-FAMILY: 'Garamond', 'serif'; COLOR: black; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'"></SPAN><SPAN style="FONT-FAMILY: 'Garamond', 'serif'; COLOR: black; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'"><FONT size=3>There is a memorial stained-glass window to him and his wife in St Mary's church, in Ashley Road, which runs between Hornsey Road and Crouch Hill. It features very polite-looking angels with curling fair hair. He was a prominent local figure, who had come from humble farming origins and had done very well in the melting pot that was the nineteenth century. I hope he would be pleased that a hundred and twenty years later someone has brought him back from oblivion.</FONT></SPAN></P>