In 1294 view of frankpledge, infangthief, outfangthief, and tumbrils were claimed by Hugh de Kendale as grantee for life of the manor of Hastings, later the Pembrokes ward in Toteham. The same rights, as well as assizes of bread and ale, gallows, and waifs and strays, were claimed by John de Balliol in 1319. There was a pillory on High Road in 1455 but by 1526 Tottenham had neither stocks, cucking stool nor pillory, and also lacked weights and measures for assizes. The lord had supplied none of these three years later, except a cucking stool, with which a woman was threatened in 1530. During the 17th and most of the 18th centuries two aleconners and four constables, one for each ward, were chosen at the annual manorial court, as were a hayward, two drivers, and two cattle markers to protect the common lands. Is the best description of Tottenham history the internet has to offer.
  That Friday April 2016, traipsing down the Seven Sisters. First time in six years. To visit a shop that stocks canned guava for the breakfast treat, and the only one still going. I’d forgotten what a buzzy wee township it is. A constantly evolving back street theatre – before your very eyes. Was a geezer holed up in a telephone booth surrounded by policemen with red-lit machineguns and growling dogs in bomb-proof armour. A party parade of Caribbean culture shiver shimmers past, freezing in the frost. A bookies’ on the high road yellow-taped shut had a row of bullet holes across the front window like a scene from a ’30s gangster movie. And a funeral procession with the bowler-hatted bloke in a black and red sash cool coming to a stop every few hundred feet. As the schools come out with Polish or Afro-Caribbean kids in a moiling mix of blonde and brown; black and white; no in-between, not yet at least. Then there were only two tins of guava out for sale, and later to find they sure don’t taste like they do back home…
  Those elegantly figured stately shop-frontages along the Tottenham High Road were built bespoke in the 1910s. The whole precious precinct; all brass and iron and curved coloured windows; arty overseen by glassed-in balconies, nouveau lead-lights, khaki copper castings of grapes on vines. Before the rioters rampant raging burned blocks of it down in the 2010s. That 1930s storied emporium had a faux-deco belltower always caught the eye – hawking carpets on the cheap, yet didn’t deserve such an ugly ending. Reading a list of historic complaints on the substandard finish on parts rebuilt in the 1920s – how beautiful the older buildings must have been? If they could see our modern orthodox upgrades they’d be spinning in their exhumated, council deconsecrated, reinterred graves.
  A wizened twisted toothless codger, one arm clamped in a crab cruel crutch, dining on rubbish from wastebasket bins up Lordship Lane. Should surely be sequestered, analysed and probed – use his blood in a universal vaccine against every viral threat now known – as immune to all. Scuttling scraping. Rogue ratmanity.
  At a crowded clinic by Chestnuts Park, was a renovated theatre, with très gothique signage vandalised down to: OCTORS URGERY – already sounds painful? Around a tense turning to the best barber’s banner: JOHNNYS GOLDEN SCISSORS in a green, black and gold hand-painted script.
  A neglected, dog-eared parade of shops is party plastered with dazzling postings; high-lit Cyrillic, Orkhon, Abjad, screaming adbabs? no translative cold concessions or bracketed glosses; English is irrelevant, all around here. Lettings, employment, insurance agencies – butcher, baker, crab-stickmaker – to takeaway or eat inside. Halaal or kosher. This is Moslem turf?
  A sign in a window offers: ‘BEDBUG SERVICE’. A camera crew slumming as fashion models prance that equine stamp by blaring banks of blazing bulbs through a fog damp derelict children’s playground – hairy huddlers, cosy crouched behind massive cameras, sipping sharp shots from steaming coffee cans.  As a huge, expensively-suited skinhead takes a heavy-looking bat from the boot of his Jag and shrugging no nods to a remonstrating biddy strides stock staunch to a dingy laundrette. Discretion being the better part of valour we politely move along…