Ward’s Corner

The corner building of Ward’s Stores has stood proudly overlooking the busy junction of the High Road and Seven Sisters since it was built in 1909, giving its name ‘Ward’s Corner’ to this neighbourhood. It may have lost its date-stone at the top now, but for well over a century this former department store has certainly seen change.

(Ward’s Stores at The Broadway on the High Road, c.1910. From the collections and © Bruce Castle Museum and Archive.

It stopped trading in June 1972 after a fire. The site then was partly vacant until the Seven Sisters Indoor Market developed. It has since become an important centre for Spanish-speaking communities in London and a place where food, language and culture meet. Known as the Latin Village, it has become the largest concentration of Latin traders in the UK.

(Ward’s Corner in 1976. From the collections and © Bruce Castle Museum and Archive).

You can read more about the Latin Village and see photographs as a portrait of the community here by Barry McDonald, and also here of El Pueblito Paisa by photographer Stephanie Rose Ward. For over 15 years the site and community has been the focus for developers and has seen the wider community coming together to form the active Ward’s Corner Coalition and the Save the Latin Village campaign.

(Ward’s Corner, c.2008. From the collections and © Bruce Castle Museum and Archive).

In its department store hey-day in the 1950s onwards, Ward’s was becoming a byword as the go-to place for styling your home in North London. Opening originally around the corner in West Green Road in 1901, this family-owned business expanded into the High Road as it grew with success.

You could buy all sorts here: furniture, jewellery, furnishings and fabrics. One overwhelming and vivid memory by locals is seeing the small cash-pods or tubes whizzing along the mechanical overhanging wire system with payments or ticket orders inside (gravity helped propel the pods along the wires). You can see the little wooden capsule from Ward’s on display at Bruce Castle Museum and Archive.