House Clearance in Finsbury Park

Most London interchange stations are the result of the gradual accruing of new lines over the decades, a process that has rarely resulted in the ideal experience for station users. Finsbury Park is a particularly striking example of this, in part due to that peculiarity of North London geography that led one local branch line to be dubbed ‘The Northern Heights’. The locality of the future station was historically known as Stroud Green (now only applied to the area north of Finsbury Park), long a marshy and disputed borderland between the parishes of Hornsey and Islington. It was crossed by the north-south Stroud Green Road, and, from the 1830s, the Seven Sisters toll-road linking Holloway and Tottenham.

When the Great Northern Railway (the modern East Coast Main Line) was driven though in the late 1840s the navvies dug out a wide cutting through the hills here, complete with the extensive drainage work that opened the area to future development. The Seven Sisters/Stroud Green crossroads, however, lies in a hollow between Highgate and Crouch Hill, and the railway had to be carried over these roads on bridges linked by a high embankment. In 1861, eleven years after the first Great Northern terminus arrived at Maiden Lane, the future Finsbury Park Station that opened atop the embankment was little more than a rural halt. It was named ‘Seven Sisters Road (Holloway)’.