Although it had not grown by 1800, by 1840 it contained 18 houses. This made it bigger than Wood Green at that time. Development took off during the period after the 1860s, particularly after the arrival of the Tottenham & Hampstead Junction Railway in 1878. Nineteenth-century local author Charlotte Riddell described the changes vividly in her 1874 book, Above Suspicion:

By 1890, the urbanisation