Annual Assessment of North London’s Most Interesting Commercial Strip Finds It Alive, Changing, Complicated
By Lowri Griffiths | The London Prat
I walked the length of Green Lanes from Manor House to Turnpike Lane last Saturday, which is a walk I do periodically to assess the state of what I consider one of the best high streets in London, and which produced the usual mix of the familiar, the changed, and the new that a good high street generates when you pay sufficient attention. Green Lanes is not a single street but a character: Turkish bakeries, Kurdish restaurants, Brazilian hair salons, Polish delicatessens, a Vietnamese nail bar that has been there for fifteen years and is busier than it has ever been, the Turkish supermarkets that stock things you cannot get anywhere else in London, and the specific Monday morning energy of a street that was trading heavily on Sunday and is taking a collective breath before doing it again.
What Changed
Three new openings since my last assessment: a ramen shop where the laundromat was, which the neighbourhood needed and which has been full every time I have walked past it; a co-working space that replaced a newsagent, which the neighbourhood did not need but which the market has decided the neighbourhood wanted; and a wine bar with exposed brickwork and a menu written in a font that signals its target demographic clearly enough that I walked past it twice before deciding whether I am in that demographic. I decided I am not, but the wine is apparently very good.
One closure: the grocery shop on the corner near the reservoir that had been there since before I moved to Haringey and that closed quietly with no notice and no explanation, which is how independent shops close and which always produces a specific sadness that the opening of a ramen restaurant cannot fully replace, because the grocery was serving the people who live there and the ramen restaurant is serving the people who have moved there, and these are overlapping but distinct populations.
What Green Lanes Represents
Green Lanes represents the version of London that makes London worth the cost of living in London, which is a version that includes people from everywhere, food from everywhere, the specific noise and colour and commercial energy that a genuinely diverse high street produces, and the ongoing negotiation between long-established communities and newly arrived ones that London manages better in some places than others and that Green Lanes manages very well. It is not a gentrification success story or a gentrification cautionary tale. It is a high street in North London in 2026, which is complicated and mostly good.
For North London lifestyle and community, see MyLondon. For London food and culture coverage, visit Evening Standard. For London independent business news, see Metro London.
Lowri Griffiths writes from North London with the directness of someone who has watched the city change around her and formed views about whether the changes are improvements. London in 2026 remains simultaneously extraordinary and exhausting, beautiful and unaffordable, among the world’s great cities and among its most difficult to live in without inherited wealth or an income in the top decile. She covers it because it is where she lives and because the story it tells about urban life, economic inequality, culture, and community in the twenty-first century is worth telling with honesty and occasional outrage. She does not claim to be neutral. She claims to be accurate, which is harder and more useful.
I started writing about North London because I lived here and nobody was writing about it the way I wanted to read about it: honestly, with affection and criticism in equal measure, without the twee village-in-the-city framing that lifestyle journalism uses and without the class anxiety that serious journalism uses when it notices that people are paying extortionate rents to live somewhere that has a good bus service and a Waitrose. North London is a place where people actually live, and living somewhere is more complicated than either of those framings captures. I write the complication. Lowri Griffiths, bigsmokebrokecom.
The North London I cover is not the North London of property supplements, which features period features and excellent school catchment areas and the phrase ‘up and coming’ applied to every street within cycling distance of a farmers market. It is the North London of the 141 bus, the Haringey housing waiting list, the Turkish social clubs on Green Lanes, the Hackney planning meetings, the Tottenham High Road, and the Overground trains that are reliable enough to build a commute around. It is a place, not a postcode lifestyle category, and I am stubborn about covering it as a place.
What London journalism owes its readers is the same thing all journalism owes its readers: accuracy about what is actually happening, context for why it is happening, and the honesty to say when something is going wrong rather than finding the positive angle that makes the story easier to read and less useful. North London is going through changes that are making it both better in some ways and less affordable, less accessible, and less diverse in others, and both things are happening simultaneously and deserve simultaneous coverage. I am trying to provide that coverage, one piece at a time, from the perspective of someone who lives here, pays rent here, takes the bus here, and wants the place to be better than it is.
