Prior to any building development, the area was part of the demesne lands of Stoke Newington Manor. It was known as ‘Berrie Down Wood’ in the seventeenth century and ‘Wood Berry Downs Meadow’ a hundred years later. Building started on Green Lanes with the appearance in 1821 of a large house at a spot that would later be the site of the junction with Woodberry Down (the road). Further north on Green Lanes, just to the south of the New River, Northumberland House, a three-storeyed building with a pillared entrance, balustrade, and urns on its roof, was completed in 1822. It was sold for conversion to a ‘private lunatic asylum’ in 1826 It was then used as a private mental hospital until it was demolished in 1955. One of its most famous patients was Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot, first wife of the American poet T.S. Eliot, who lived at the hospital from 1938 until her death in 1947. A thatched cottage, with Gothic windows, was constructed on the boundary with the borough of Tottenham by 1825. Woodberry Down Cottages, four detached houses on the south side of Woodberry Down, had been built by 1829. Manor House tavern was built nearby in 1830. With the development of Finsbury Park almost a certainty, the land to the south and east of the present-day park was acquired by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners as ideal for building. The park was laid out between 1857 and 1869 and the adjacent land was sold to builders.

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