Josiah Forster's Almshouses

Forster's Cottages is a terrace of four single-storey cottages with some original features remaining. There was a strong Quaker presence in C18th and C19th Tottenham, with a meeting house built here in 1712. The Forster family were Quakers and had moved to Tottenham from Birmingham in 1752 and from that time Josiah Forster II ran a Friends School at Reynardson's House, close to the site of these almshouses. When he died in 1763 the house remained in the family but is since demolished. A plan of William Forster's freehold and copyhold at Tottenham High Cross 1757/1779 shows the future site of the almshouses as an orchard. In 1862 Josiah Forster IV (1782-1870) and his wife conveyed four recently built cottages and £500 stock to William Edward Forster MP and others to belong to the Tottenham Monthly Meeting. Josiah Forster was active in the antislavery movement and William Edward Forster (1818-86) was MP for Bradford and a member of Gladstone's Cabinet, responsible for the 1870 Elementary Education Act. His father William (1784-1854) was a Quaker minister from Tottenham and Bristol who worked as a missionary and lobbied for the antislavery movement in USA.

The almshouses were to be maintained by the Trustees for four Tottenham residents, not necessarily Quakers, giving preference to widows or spinsters aged at least 55. Each resident was to have half a ton of coal a year but was expected to have some personal resources. Under a scheme of 1955 Friends Trusts Ltd became custodian trustees, later transferring to Family Welfare Association in the 1990s and then to the Anchor Trust and continues as sheltered homes for the elderly.

The cottages have a communal front garden now separated from the road by a brick wall, although old photographs show this was a wooden picket fence in 1900, and metal railings in 1907. To the right and part of the back boundary is close-boarded fencing, the rest of the boundary brick. Two gates lead to the front garden from the street, with a 6 ft gate leading into the back garden. A plaque over the central doorway has the words 'Forster's Cottages 18 J & R 60'. The front garden has functional path, flower beds and shrubs, with a rectangle of grass behind the houses, with a 3ft wide bed planted with hellebores, bulbs, perennials and wallflowers. The front garden was replanted in 1988 and has flowers including wallflowers and perennials, shaped evergreen bushes and shrubs in mixed planting including privet, forsythia, pyracantha trained on the fence and a large climbing rose trained on the back wall.