New neighbourhoods face a familiar chicken-and-egg problem: residents create demand for buses, shops and services, but those same things help make somewhere an attractive and practical place to live. As new bus routes begin running through Haringey Heartlands, could a simple reality check help us understand when a development is becoming a neighbourhood?
For all the attention paid to the design of new neighbourhoods, some of the things that make the greatest difference to living in them are remarkably ordinary. Being able to catch a bus to the station, walk to the shops or get home after midnight may not feature prominently in architectural photography, but these are the practical connections on which everyday life depends.
Since 1 August, Haringey Heartlands has gained some important new ones. Changes to London’s bus network have brought services through the growing neighbourhood between Wood Green and Hornsey, including a night route.
It is a welcome addition to an area that has been developing for many years, and an interesting point at which to consider the gap between building homes and building a neighbourhood. Many of the things residents need can only become viable once enough people are there to use them.
Housing itself is part of this equation. A mix of homes affects who can live in a neighbourhood and whether people can remain as their circumstances change. The ability to put down roots is as relevant to creating a community as the facilities that eventually grow around it.
Planning necessarily relies on targets, standards and measures of accessibility. Alongside those, we wondered what a new neighbourhood might look like when judged through the ordinary activities of the people living there.
Transport: Can you get somewhere useful early in the morning, late at night and at weekends by bus or Tube?
Walk: Can you comfortably reach the surrounding streets and neighbourhoods?
School: Can children get to school without every journey depending on a car?
Shop: Can you buy everyday essentials close to home?
GP: Can you reach routine healthcare reasonably easily?
Park: Is there useful green and play space that people can actually reach and use?
Evening: Does the neighbourhood continue to function when the working day ends?
Community: Are there places and opportunities for people to meet, participate and build a sense of belonging?
This is not another proposed planning metric. Nor does every neighbourhood need its own complete set of services. London has always worked through connections between places. The checklist simply gives us another way to look at what happens after the homes begin to be occupied.
The area immediately west of Wood Green town centre has been earmarked for regeneration for more than two decades. Haringey Council’s development framework proposed bringing former utility and industrial land back into use and improving connections between the eastern and western parts of the borough. Its ambition was a new “Heartland” combining homes with employment, public space and community facilities.
Development has happened in stages. The transformation of the former Clarendon gasworks is one of the largest elements, with more than 1,700 homes planned alongside commercial and green space and Hornsey Park.
The transport network is now adapting too. TfL consulted on changes to buses serving Heartlands in late 2023, receiving 488 responses, and confirmed in March 2024 that it intended to proceed. The new arrangements came into operation on 1 August 2026.
Routes 91 and 232 now run into Heartlands and the N91 has been rerouted through the development. The detail of individual routes is less interesting than the timing. TfL linked the changes to increasing demand as new homes and communities continued to be built.
There is an unavoidable sequencing problem in building somewhere new. Running frequent buses through an almost empty development would make little sense. Shops need enough customers to survive. Schools need pupils, while healthcare and community facilities depend on funding and delivery decisions that stretch beyond an individual development.
Waiting for all of those things has consequences too. People moving in still have to get to work, buy food, take children to school and reach healthcare. If convenient alternatives are not yet available, habits such as driving can become established and existing services in surrounding neighbourhoods can take additional pressure.
The Heartlands bus changes show this process in action rather than suggesting something has gone wrong. The population has grown, journeys have changed and the bus network has been adjusted in response.
Those journeys also look different depending on who is making them. A short walk to a station may be easy for one resident and considerably harder with limited mobility, small children or shopping. The new bus arrangements themselves involve trade-offs: while Heartlands gains connections, TfL acknowledged during consultation that some existing journeys would become less convenient and carried out an Equality Impact Assessment of the changes.
This is where the checklist becomes more useful than simply counting facilities. It asks whether they work in practice. A park can appear on a masterplan without becoming somewhere people use. Wood Green’s shops may be nearby on a map, but the quality of the walking route affects how close they feel. A community room provides space, but not necessarily a community.
That last point is easy to overlook in a discussion dominated by physical infrastructure. Youth provision, faith and cultural facilities, local organisations and informal places to meet do not all arrive through the same planning or funding process. Yet they can influence whether residents know their neighbours, participate locally and begin to feel invested in what happens to the area.
Haringey Heartlands is one neighbourhood, but London is about to have many more conversations about where and how new neighbourhoods should grow.
The Draft London Plan published in July plans for 558,000 additional homes between 2027 and 2036. Brownfield development remains central, alongside more housing in town centres and on small sites, with selected industrial and Green Belt land potentially providing additional capacity. The relationship between growth and infrastructure is already one of the issues identified in our initial examination of the Plan.
The eight-point check could be applied to those proposals without pretending that there is a single formula for a good neighbourhood. It could equally be used to look at an established town centre absorbing more homes or a large regeneration area several years after its first residents arrived.
It also introduces questions that housing numbers alone cannot answer. Who is able to live in the homes being built? Can people remain as families grow or incomes change? What is available within walking distance? How do people get home at night? Where do teenagers go? Where do neighbours meet?
For Haringey Heartlands, the new bus routes are a positive addition rather than the end of the story. They give us a timely reason to look at how the neighbourhood has developed around the people already living there.
If you live or work in Haringey Heartlands, Wood Green or Hornsey, we’d particularly like to hear from you. How does the area measure up against the eight points above? What works well now that did not a few years ago, and what is still catching up?
