ABSTRACT
This chapter emphasises the importance of interrogating the successes and failures of past efforts to promote bottom-up community participation and top-down responsiveness to communities. It highlights some key findings of the research that undertook during the early 1990s and followed up decade later. The chapter sets out unsolicited community activism in the East of the borough between 2004 and 2010. Yet, overall the Haringey experience suggests that there cannot be one Big Society where the same prescriptions will work for prosperous areas like the West of Haringey and deprived areas as are found in the East. Haringey has become one of the best-known British local authorities, at least in terms of name recognition. Haringey local politics, in essence political debates within the local Labour Party, came to be shaped by the boroughs East-West socio-economic divide. In Haringey's well-to-do West anti-muncipalist antipathy towards the local authority was identifiable on some issues.
