In 1884, a deputation led by Lord Shaftesbury was made to the Great Eastern Railway and Great Northern Railway, proposing that for trains due to arrive in central London prior to 8 am, third class tickets should be sold at a fare of 3d providing the return journey was not made before 4 pm. By May 1885 both railways had adopted this policy. However, the delays and uncertainty caused by the fares dispute had discouraged prospective tenants, leaving large numbers of properties vacant and causing further building work to slow considerably. In 1887, construction work was temporarily suspended altogether, in response to the large backlog of un-let properties. By the time of the 1894 Ordnance Survey, roughly 50% of the estate was complete. The entire southern half of the estate between Gladstone Avenue and Westbury Avenue at this point remained open fields. Terraces of shops were built around the fringes of the estate, to cater for the residents of the expanding suburb of Wood Green including the Noel Park Estate as well as for the users of the adjacent railway station. The designs of the terraces varied, from short terraces of small shops on the edges of the less-visited eastern portions of the estate, to parades of large shops on Wood Green High Road near the railway station. One of the few buildings constructed in the early stages of Noel Park's development not designed by Rowland Plumbe, Noel Park School was built in 1889 by the Wood Green School Board, to the design of architect Charles Wall. The school was designed to accommodate 1,524 pupils of both sexes; however, by 1898 the growth of the Noel Park estate led to severe overcrowding problems, with an average attendance of 1,803, making it the most overcrowded school in the School Board's area. In 1924 a school for the partially blind opened within the school. In 1946, the school became a Secondary Modern. Between 1957 and 1963 the secondary facilities were closed, leaving the school as a primary school. In 1965, the school came under the control of the newly created London Borough of Haringey. Following reorganisation of Haringey's education services, it is now a primary school serving approximately 500 pupils between the ages of three and 11. Although Plumbe's original plans for the estate had envisaged a recreational area in the centre of the estate, this never came into being and the land reserved for it was built over during the estate's early development. Despite Noel Park's proximity to the leisure facilities of nearby Alexandra Park, in 1929 a long, thin strip of land near the south of the estate was designated as parkland and given the name "Russell Park".