‘Black Boy Lane’, Heritage of Our Times

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The Cultural Location of fascism

By Gabriel Bristow

Following the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, Haringey Council in North London began a consultation process that ended in the renaming of a local street in Tottenham from ‘Black Boy Lane’ to ‘La Rose Lane’ in 2023. The old name was subject to anti-racist scrutiny, local historical research, and speculation; the new name was intended to honour the late Trinidadian poet, publisher and activist John La Rose. Immediately following the official name change, the new signage was defaced and numerous residents of the predominantly working class cosmopolitan road put up ‘Black Boy Lane’ signs in their windows. Two years later many of those signs remain. Walking or sitting on the bus down the street, I find myself tallying them up, as if their blunt numerical value alone might allow me to take the measure of a culture of reaction fermenting across not only this country but the entire world. While counting the signs is of course inadequate, interpreting the affective charge of the name change might provide some insight into current prospects for multiculturalism in the face of a bullish far right.

The renaming and opposition to it was covered by national news outlets in early 2023, including the BBC, The Guardian, The Daily Mail, and others besides. In their coverage, the BBC ran a quote from the ‘anti-woke’ blog and campaign Save Our Statues, headed by architect Robert Poll, Reform’s candidate for Croydon & Sutton in the 2021 London Assembly elections. According to Poll, the name change was ‘representative of the current impulse to hunt out racism and offence where there is none as a performative display of virtuousness’.1 This is of course a familiar ‘culture wars’ script, one that has been playing out in different parts of the world over the last decade or so, from the toppling of Confederate statues in the United States to the Rhodes Must Fall campaign in South Africa. The stage is generally set thus: on the one side, a conspiracy between left anti-West extremists and establishment politicians; on the other, the common man, naturally patriotic, defending his way of life. While this is certainly the tenor of Poll’s Save Our Statues blog, this familiar script overwrites a more complex story latent in the street. The ‘Black Boy Lane’ signs that remain in many windows signify more than imperial nostalgia or a straightforward desire for racial hierarchy; remnants of what Ernst Bloch called an ‘unrefurbished past’, they also express other hopes, albeit in perhaps unfamiliar and uncomfortable terms. To unearth those hopes requires a detour through local history and the contemporary press.

How the street came to be called ‘Black Boy Lane’ remains contested. One thing all seem to agree on is that the road was named after the former Black Boy pub at the top of the road, which changed its name to the Black Grape before closing around 2011 (it remains boarded up today). The controversy then resides in how the pub itself came by its name, with the explanations tending to divide along ideological lines. For those who support the recent change, ‘black boy’ likely stems from Britain’s imperial history, and perhaps more specifically from the documented presence of black slaves in Tottenham as far back as the 17th century.2 For those against, the pub at the top of the road was simply one of many similarly named establishments across England, ‘black boy’ either signalling an allegiance to Charles II (whose ‘swarthy’ appearance apparently earned him that nickname) or referring to chimney sweeps.3 That the pub had a sign on it depicting a ‘Little Black Sambo’ in a grass skirt up until the late 1970s (before a local campaign group persuaded the owners to replace it) is apparently deemed marginal compared to the deeper streams of English history that the true origins of the name gesture towards.4 The historical disavowal in evidence here fits the pattern analysed in Paul Gilroy’s Postcolonial Melancholia and detailed in Ingrid Pollard’s artistic explorations of England’s ‘black boy’ pub signs.5 The idea that the street name has nothing to do with the history of British racism is clearly untenable, and the strength of opposition to the change is surely some measure of an ongoing collective failure to properly reckon with colonial history. And yet I suspect this is not the whole story.

In the wake of the name change, an article published in The Daily Mail made much of the apparent lack of appetite for the change amongst black local residents. A lengthy headline claimed that Haringey council’s survey ‘found not a single objection [to the old name] from a black person’.6 The article illustrates its point with photographs of residents looking bemused and disgruntled. One particularly noticeable character is 83-year-old Berris Raynor, a black man pictured wearing an outback hat, bright shirt, and a blazer adorned with appliquéd eagles, smiling in front of a house with a ‘black boy lane’ sign on it. Though the Mail do not let us know that this is not in fact where Rayner lives (I only know this because I have spoken with residents), they describe him as ‘dismissive’ of the name change: ‘“Black Boy Lane? White Boy Lane?” he laughs, “who cares?”’. Another older black local, Joubert Roberts, says ‘it’s a nice name. It’s part of our heritage. Leave it alone’. While the Mail’s intention is seemingly to corral these off-the-cuff remarks into a broader ‘war on woke’, the opinions of the residents reveal a more complex picture than simply that of a ‘loony left’ council riding roughshod over local common sense. Following Sita Balani’s prompt to look beneath the culture wars in order to understand the ordinary features of everyday multiculture that might scramble the siren calls of the far right, I want to suggest a different, speculative reading of the sentiments cited above.7

While some of those attached to the old names may well be nostalgic for empire or white advantage, I would suggest that others might be speaking from a place where ‘race’ is neither insignificant nor all-consuming; that is, from a vantage point that recognises the lie of a premature ‘colour-blindness’ while insisting that racism does not determine every aspect of existence.8 The way in which this stance differs from that of The Daily Mail is both simple and strangely complex, due to the newspaper’s duplicity. On the one hand, much of the Mail’s day-to-day ultraconservatism continuously elides ‘race’ and nation, with stories that underline Britain’s imperilled ethnic purity. On the other, as in their write-up of the ‘Black Boy Lane’ controversy, they evince a version of colour-blindness that would have us believe that—to borrow Gilroy’s mocking characterisation—‘racism requires no specific intervention beyond the worn-out rubrics of generic liberalism’.9 While we cannot, at this point, ascertain a more concrete understanding of local sentiments, I believe that they escape the Mail’s manipulations. When Raynor laughs off the name (‘Black Boy Lane? White Boy Lane? Who cares?’) or when Roberts lays claim to it (‘it’s a nice name. It’s part of our heritage. Leave it alone’), I would speculate that they are in part reacting against the idea that ‘race’ has become a ‘permanent and apparently inescapable feature of society’.10 Though the name change does not in-and-of-itself suggest that ‘race’ is eternal and omnipotent, the wider context in which it took place—in which corporations and governments often superficially scrambled to appear politically correct—did at times lend credence to such a worldview. In addition, laughing off the significance of the old name also testifies to the ordinary multiculturalism of Tottenham, a place where many people are at ease with difference, even if that relative ease had—and has—to be fought for and renewed.

Many would see the new name, La Rose Lane, as just such an attempt to remember and renew the area’s powerful history of anti-racism. Given this, the strength of the reaction against it cannot be entirely explained away by the forgoing speculations. The ‘Black Boy Lane’ signs that remain in windows more than two years on from the change contain further meanings and indicate other cleavages. They are, I want to argue, what Ernst Bloch calls ‘non-contemporaneous’ cultural elements—‘heritage’ that residually contradicts the modernising thrust of capitalist culture. It is precisely the anachronousness of the old name—its evocation of a lost past—that lends it a certain appeal and solidity in the flux of the present. Whatever its precise origins, all can agree that it is ‘historical’: both the council reformers and the local opposition agree that the name is not of this time. Indeed, former leader of Haringey council, Josef Ejiofor, describes it as ‘of a bygone era’ and explicitly criticises ‘the view that because its “historical” it must be OK’.11 For those attached to the old name, however, its very antiquatedness and the unknowability of its origins bestow a mysterious aura that—once threatened—needs protecting. The signs in the windows are a ‘muffled non-desire for the Now’ that expresses itself through an attachment to remnants of an ‘unrefurbished past’ containing an unfulfilled promise of order.12 Hence the call to ‘save our statues’ (largely unnoticed until now) and restore certainty. The question that Bloch then pushes us to ask is whether or not this rescue mission must of necessity be a nationalist one. Do the ‘Black Boy Lane’ signs in the windows translate as ‘we want our country back’? Or might they be demanding something different?

The council’s consultations showed that residents of the street were firmly opposed to the name change (by over 70%), even if people elsewhere in the borough were more supportive. While it would be too easy to recode the street signs as a call for democracy, one of them, since removed by the council, did frame the antagonism in such plebiscitary terms: ‘London Borough of the Residents (Formerly London Borough of Haringey)’. Another factor seems to be home ownership: perhaps unsurprisingly it appears that it is the residents who own their homes and have lived on the street longest that are most committed to the old name.13 Other locals saw the name change as a waste of public money, particularly in the context of under-funded services.14 As I have tried to suggest above, the affection for the ‘Black Boy Lane’ name is overdetermined and cannot be unlocked by a single explanatory key. Neither democracy, property, ‘race’, or nation can singly account for the signs and attendant sentiments. But analysing the underlying details of such culture-war set pieces could bear political fruit. The left might stand to refine its thinking in the face of a rising ‘multi-racial right’: rather than imagining ‘racialised communities’ as a more-or-less coherent whole ready to be coaxed into a socialist bloc, divergent cultural and political inclinations might be taken into account in order to avoid simply adding a dash of race determinism to the traditional recipe of class reductionism.15 As ever, the task is to try to work from where people actually are, rather than where they are imagined to be. By thinking through the hidden backstories behind culture-war headlines, we can untangle the knot of determinations that shapes people’s lives and consciousnesses. From there, we can begin to undo far right narratives that harness all errant longings and obstinate attachments to the nation.

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  1. BBC News, ‘Black Boy Lane renamed due to racial connotations’, 21 January 2023, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-64354190. ↩︎
  2. Harringay Online, ‘Where did West Green’s Black Boy Name Come From?’, 27 June 2020, https://harringayonline.com/forum/topics/where-did-west-green-s-black-boy-name-come-from. An account of the history that is seemingly supportive of the name change can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/aZt2rA4chDk. ↩︎
  3. A historical account that is sneeringly against the name change can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PAHvZWQ8Rk. ↩︎
  4. David Jesudason, ‘The Black Boy pub, Tottenham – ‘It was disempowering and shaming’’, 20 September 2024, https://davidjesudason.substack.com/p/the-black-boy-pub-sign-tottenham. Ingrid Pollard has underlined the significance of the shorter lifecycles of pub signage vis-à-vis pub names. See Ingrid Pollard, ‘Hidden in a Public Place’, in Seventeen of Sixty Eight (London, 2019), 34. ↩︎
  5. Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York, 2005); Pollard, ‘Hidden in a Public Place’; Michael Keith and Ingrid Pollard, ‘From the Black Boy Series: Michael Keith interviews Ingrid Pollard’, in Street Signs, Autumn 2009: 32-35. ↩︎
  6. Robert Hardman, ‘The ‘hard-up’ Labour council that blew £100,000 changing the name of Black Boy Lane even though its own survey found not a single objection from a black person… And provoked a spectacular backlash!’, The Daily Mail, 27 January 2023, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11685469/The-hard-Labour-council-blew-100-000-changing-Black-Boy-Lane.html. ↩︎
  7. Sita Balani, ‘Not normal but ordinary: Living against the culture wars’, Radical Philosophy, No. 218 (Spring 2025): 10–22. ↩︎
  8. Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia, 144-145. ↩︎
  9. Ibid., 144. ↩︎
  10. Ibid., 145. ↩︎
  11. Joseph Ejiofor, ‘Proud to see La Rose Lane’, 24 February 2023, The Voice, https://www.voice-online.co.uk/opinion/comment/2023/01/24/proud-to-see-la-rose-lane/. In 2022, Ejiofor claimed that his support for the name change was one of the reasons that the Labour Party blocked him from re-standing. See Elliott Chappell, ‘Councillor and ex-leader Ejiofor blocked from standing as Labour candidate’, Labour List, 23 February 2022, https://labourlist.org/2022/02/councillor-and-ex-council-leader-blocked-from-standing-as-labour-candidate/. ↩︎
  12. Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times (Cambridge, 1991), 108.
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  13. Anecdotal evidence pending further research. ↩︎
  14. This came up in Haringay Online forums and in conversations I have had with residents. ↩︎
  15. Alberto Toscano, ‘Trump and the Rise of the Multiracial Right’, In These Times, 13 March 2025, https://inthesetimes.com/article/multiracial-right-trump-republicans; on ‘racialised communities’ as part of a socialist bloc, see James Schneider, ‘Building the Party’, Sidecar, 15 July 2025, https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/building-the-party; for a recent example of class reductionism, see Andrew Murray’s disagreements with Schneider in ‘Force of Opposition’, Sidecar, 6 August 2025, https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/force-of-opposition. ↩︎

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