There is no high street here. CONEL's timetable and the Bernie Grant Arts Centre's programme decide when your customers are actually around.

Tottenham Green

Tottenham Town Hall, the Bernie Grant Arts Centre, the Marcus Garvey Library, the leisure centre and the college: five public buildings around a green, and almost no shopping between them.

Tottenham Green is genuinely small, and it should be described that way rather than inflated into something it isn't. The area around the green is home to the Grade II listed Tottenham Town Hall, the Marcus Garvey Library, The College of Haringey, Enfield and North East London, Tottenham Green Leisure Centre and the Bernie Grant Arts Centre, a £15 million purpose-built multi-arts centre at Town Hall Approach Road designed by David Adjaye and opened in September 2007, with a 274-seat auditorium, studio and rehearsal space, a cafe and bar, and an enterprise centre. That is a genuine cultural and civic cluster. It is not a retail centre. There is no shopping parade of any depth, only the High Road frontage passing the green and a Sunday market on the second Sunday of the month.

That shapes trade completely differently from the working high street at Bruce Grove a few hundred metres south, or the market and interchange at Seven Sisters just beyond it. Here, the businesses that do well are the ones built around the institutions rather than in competition with a shopping street that doesn't exist: cafes and food near the college and the library, print and creative services near the arts centre's enterprise space, childcare and professional services on the surrounding streets, and community and training organisations that use the green's own buildings. Tottenham Green was designated a conservation area in 1976 and sits within the wider Tottenham High Road Historic Corridor, so what change is possible to the buildings themselves is limited in the same way it is at Bruce Grove.

The practical consequence is that opening hours here have to match a timetable nobody in the business sets. A college day starts and ends at fixed times; the library and leisure centre run to their own weekly schedule; the arts centre's programme creates evening surges around performance start times that have nothing to do with a normal closing time. A website that publishes real hours against that rhythm, and says plainly whether a business is open before an evening show or during college holidays, does the job a passing shopper would otherwise do by simply looking in the window — except there is no window to look in.