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the Board with advance plans of his work the business at its meetings consisted
largely of sanctioning other builders' plans and dealing with the
surveyor's proposals for extending the Board's roads, pavements and street
lighting to keep pace with new building. By 1863 the Board's total expenditure
on paving alone had mounted to the very considerable sum of
£21,000. A further £2,000 had been expended in the previous year on a
new service reservoir at Wood Green and a constant water supply was being
more or less maintained in the face of increased demands. For the sewage
works, no less under pressure from the population increase than the water
works, the Board had so far provided no comparable extensions and it was
temporising with this troublesome situation by discreetly overlooking the
fact that a great part of the new housing had as yet not been connected
up with the main sewer, which at a cost of £9,000 was being pushed out to
Wood Green, and that when the connections came to be made the overtaxed
sewage works would break down. Meantime, much of the sewage from the
new houses was again trickling through the town to reach the Lea via the
Moselle.
Though its expenditure was lavish in these various connections the
Board's procedures were largely of a routine character Furthermore the
current practices of allowing the accounts to run on unbalanced from year
to year and of scorning annual estimates as inevitably illusory in an era
of such unpredictable expansion made the Board's financial problems considerably
less worrying than they ought to have been. Responsibility, in
fact, lay so lightly on the Board' s shoulders that the attendances of members
fell off sharply. Regular weekly meetings, with avacation in August,
had so far been the rule. In 1862 only forty-two meetings were called, and
of these six had to be abandoned owing to failure to reach the quorum of
three, while another five achieved only a bare quorum In line with
this trend the Board in the following year agreed on fortnightly meetings
and also clipped an hour off the length of each meeting by making a later
start.
As for the "building mania," there was scarcely a corner of the parish
unaffected by it during this period and it was a fair cross section
of the working Londoner, from business man to artisan in search of a suburban
dormitory, who was being attracted to Tottenham Wood Green was
growing at the rate of "some seventy-five families a year." West Green
and Palmers Green were equally active. Shortly Northumberland Park was
said to be "nearly all staked out in plots for building." The Great
Eastern Railway was the life line of the new inhabitants: "as many as
seven hundred mostly workmen" so the Herald reported," are travelling
daily by the trains to their work in London," at a return fare of sixpence.
For the immigrant businessmen there were rows of pretentious
little villas which the anonymous author of "Our Suburban Residence.,"
(an article published by Charles Dickens in his periodical "All the Year
Round"), so pleasantly debunked: their owners were the new "aristocracy
of the village," - their hallmark the possession of a first class "season".
We may note at this point that the great majority of the new inhabitants
were in no position to participate in the conduct of public and parish