My next B Road joins Finsbury Park to Wood Green and is sandwiched between the East Coast Mainline and Green Lanes. It also joins the B150 to the B151 so goodness knows why it's the B-One-Hundred-And-Thirty Something, but road classification was never an entirely rational activity. You may know it better as one leg of the Harringay Ladder, a multi-runged estate of desirable Victorian terraces, so expect this to be quite a pleasant walk.
The B138 starts beside the northern edge of Finsbury Park (the actual park, not the suburb). A couple of grand townhouses guard the entrance, a faded circle of paint acts as a mini-roundabout and the street name is written in raised rusted letters high up on the wall. The first 100 metres are Alroy Road - a different name to what follows because this strip alongside the railway was developed before everything further north. It's only long enough for a dozen houses, plus a former Hornsey council depot that now hosts MOTs and car repairs. The road then rises up alongside the East Coast Mainline and over the Goblin via a bridge officially numbered 2022, which is a splendid coincidence. From here on it's Wightman Road and this is the HarringayLadder, and trains will merely be a near neighbour.
The developers of the Harringay Park Estate prioritised housing over services, so this is one of only two shopping parades they included. A lot of units have subsequently been converted to residential, somewhat inelegantly, but you can still get a Thai takeaway, your tyres fixed or a cheap room for the night. The finest throwbacks are George's Tailors (he was plainly visible through the window hanging up shirts) and Sylvia's Hair Care (for what looked like an authentic 90s styling experience). Harringay railway station is accessed on one side via a fragile footbridge, and on the other the first rung of the Harringay Ladder runs down to Green Lanes (or rather runs up because the rungs are alternating one-way streets). It's called Umfreville Road, a name so unusual that many have assumed the streets of the ladder were named coherently, but apparently not.
I was quite taken aback by St Paul'schurch at the top of Cavendish Road. It looks like a child's building blocks, or maybe a Toblerone on a Viennetta, more precisely a grey equilateral prism balanced on a hefty brick cuboid. Until March 1984 this was a fairly standard Victorian church but then it burnt to the ground, on Ash Wednesday no less, and a decade later this bold postmodernconfection arose in its place. I couldn't take a look inside but online you can, and imagine worshipping in that.
Wightman Road was the first part of the Ladder to be built, which'd be late 1880s, and is relentlessly residential for the next three quarters of a mile. Its houses aren't quite identical but do share certain characteristics - terraced, fiddly plasterwork, a recessed porch and invariably bay-windowed. Their front gardens are just about large enough to contain a table tennis table, so long as you didn't need to walk around it, which means owning a vehicle is pretty much out of the question. And whereas some frontages are well-maintained with painted ironwork and stained glass others are tattier with overflowing bins and smashed-open meters, so gentrification hasn't fully overwhelmed the area yet.
Unlike the rest of the ladder Wightman Road's not straight, and also manages to gently rise and fall a couple of times. Partway down the last slope is the New River, here buried underground but if you follow the footpath beside number 201 it emerges soon after. The only non-house on this section is M&A Motors, another vintage garage where exhausts and paintwork are seen to, often in a shower of welded sparks. The small park between Falkland Road & Fairfax Road isn't original, it's the end result of a doodlebug strike in July 1944 (and was intermediately prefabs). It's officially dog-free and currently daff-free, and is overlooked by a bulbous blue sculpture atop a landscaped mound.
Here come the places of worship, all of which are evolutions of their original self. St John the Baptist was a derelict Anglican church when a Greek Orthodox congregation took over in the 1980s, and its interior iconography took 12 years to paint. The domed mosque is a 1990s project by the London Islamic Cultural Society and was built on the site of the Hornsey & Wood Green Synagogue. And the Gospel Centre started out as a non-denominational space but has since morphed from The Church of Christ to a Jesus-Centred Community. Only the Greek church was hosting a funeral the day I passed, the undertakers waiting patiently for the mourners to shuffle inside before the deceased could join them.
Here comes the next station up the line, which is Hornsey, and also the second of the shopping parades. It's much busier and blessed with several continental food options including a large but lowly Polish delicatessen and a small but intimate Greek bakery. You can of course also get your car fixed, because this seems to be a very B138 kind of thing, and buy all sorts of sparkly dangly things at Angelo's Lighting. His corner shop marks the point where the Harringay Park estate becomes the Hornsey Park estate and also the only place where there's a very busy road to cross, which'd be Turnpike Lane. For those who like to know which bus route we're following it's none at all, surprisingly.
From here on it's all Hornsey Park Road, a non-laddered entity. The houses here are of a similar age but less fancy, often three-storey and with no bay windows above ground level. More importantly some of the gardens are now just big enough to squeeze a hatchback into which you can bet adds a few thousand to the asking price. The inhabitant of number 36 has placed a stone wolf, a stone wizard and a stone Paddington Bear on their pebbledash, and I suspect that's taken a few thousand off instead.
These cranes are busy constructing a 12-acre "city village" called Clarendon, which sounds classy but is actually the name of the gasworks they demolished first. 1700 homes are on their way in stacked towers and are currently half-built, and I don't need to show you a photo because they look as predictable as you'd expect. The development has a smallpark with south-facing sun-loungers and heritage lampposts, and a publicity campaign focused on solvent incomers rather than local need. You don't have to go far to see what council housing used to look like because round the bend is Sky City, a large rooftop estate in angular brick perched on top of Wood Green's 1980sshoppingmall. It's quite the finale to the B138, a Victorian terrace with a looming backdrop of rotunda and pitched roofs.
Here we discover another example of how anachronistic the numbering of B Roads can be. Originally this was a T-junction where Hornsey Park Road met Mayes Road, so it made sense one was the B138 and the other the B151. But when Shopping City was built the direct link to the High Road was severed, somewhere around TK Maxx, and the T-junction became a simple right-angled bend. It means the two B Roads could both be given the same number because if you start driving down one you end up on the other, but it'll never happen because classification inertia rules. And Mayes Road is somehow of medieval origin, a country lane crossing a lost river, as you'll discover when I come back and walk the B151... assuming I ever get that far.
