| Description | Several Catholic recusants were associated with the Tottenham area during the 16th century, the most prominent being William Vaux, Lord Vaux of Harrowden, freed from the Fleet prison after harbouring Edmund Campion, and his sons Henry and George. However, after the mid-17th century, no Roman Catholics were formally recorded in Tottenham until the end of the 18th century.
French émigrés under Fr Cheverus (later Cardinal) opened a chapel in Queen Street in 1793, thereby starting the revival of Roman Catholic worship on the northern fringe of London. Bishop John Douglas, Vicar Apostolic of the London district, estimated that nearly 100 people attended in 1796, the year of Cheverus's departure for America. The chapel, dedicated to St. Francis de Sales, was rebuilt in Chapel Place, White Hart Lane, in 1826 and reopened in 1827, when a school was established near by. The congregation largely comprised poor, itinerant labourers, who relied on agricultural work in the home counties during the summer and worked as stevedores in the London docks during the winter. Their numbers were enhanced every summer by Irish workers. In 1851 the average attendance was estimated at 200 in the morning and 100 in the evening.
From the 1860s Archbishop, later Cardinal, Manning preached annually at the chapel, in aid of the local Catholic school. Services were transferred in 1882 to a new school in Brereton Road, where a partition between schoolroom and chapel was removed on Sundays; the old chapel was then sold, although the building survived, as a blouse factory, for at least 30 years. In 1895 another church of St. Francis de Sales, a yellow-brick building, decorated with red bricks and stone dressings, in the Gothic style designed some 7 years earlier by J. and B. Sinnott of Liverpool, was opened between the school and High Road, at the south corner of Brereton Road. A new sanctuary and entrance to the church was completed in 1967, at which time there was seating for 500.
The chapel of St. Bede, at the corner of Compton Crescent and White Hart Lane, was built and registered as part of a private school, in 1938. After closure during the Second World War, the building was re-opened by the Jesuits and later made an annexe to St. Thomas More's secondary school. The annexe's isolation from the main school site made it a target of repeated vandalism and, from 1972 onwards, it ceased to be used for classes. For a while the plain yellow-brick hall was used solely for Sunday Mass as a chapel of ease for St Francis de Sales. However, continuing vandalism forced the chapel to be closed permanently and it was sold to Haringey Council in 1977. |