File:Block - 1 Slab City - Tottenham Hale.jpg

English: 13 October 2010. This building is not actually named 'Block Number 1 - Slab City'.

It is Emily Bowes Court. Student accommodation run by Unite. It's one of two blocks for students in Hale "Village". (The second is North Lodge - at the northwest corner of the site.)

Historical Fact

Emily Bowes Gosse was a real person. Now, I'm sceptical when commercial companies appropriate the name of a historical person ─ presumably to add a patina of age and continuity. But I'm open to persuasion.

Hoping to be convinced. I looked up the Dictionary of National Biography (DNB). Who was Emily Bowes? And what was the connection between her life and work; and this part of Tottenham - Ferry Lane, The Hale, or Tottenham Marshes?

I failed to discover any such links. Though she and Philip Henry Gosse were married in Brook Street Chapel near High Road Tottenham. __________________________________

Edmund Gosse's entry for his mother in the (Dictionary of National Biography. (Wikisource).

"GOSSE, EMILY (1806–1857), religious writer, was born on 9 Nov. 1806 in London. Her parents, William and Hannah Bowes of Boston, Mass., were on both sides of old New England families. In 1848 she became the first wife of Philip Henry Gosse [q. v.] Mrs. Gosse, besides publishing two small volumes of devotional verse and a prose work on education, entitled ‘Abraham and his Children,’ 1855, was the author of a series of extremely popular religious tracts. In conjunction with her husband, she published, without the name of either author, in 1853, a volume of sketches in North Devon entitled ‘Seaside Pleasures.’ She was a woman of somewhat unusual acquirements, a fair Greek and a good Hebrew scholar, and one of the earliest of the modern ‘workers in the East End.’ She died in London on 9 Feb. 1857, after a very painful illness." ═════════════════════════════════════

Make-Believe History Does historical factual accuracy matter? Especially when there's money to be made from property development. After all, we've already got a make-believe "village". Plus a fantasy 'New Urban Centre".

I can pitch an alternative fictional story. For example let's imagine that Emily Bowes (1906-57) was a worker and trades union activist at the Harris Lebus furniture ite factory in Ferry Lane. Known locally as "Red Em" she wrote fiery pamphlets denouncing capitalism and led a series of strikes. These climaxed in the great strike of 1957 when tens of thousands of workers brandishing walnut-veneered dovetail-jointed placards stormed Downing Street and caused the downfall of the ...

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Emily Gosse [née Bowes] 1806-1857, wrote religious poems and tracts, and was a landscape painter and illustrator. She lived part of her life in Hackney. In 1848 she married the naturalist Philip Henry Gosse at Brook Street Chapel, near High Road, Tottenham. She died in 1857 in Islington and was buried in Abney Park Cemetery, Stoke Newington. (Sources: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and Wikipedia.)

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