In 1985 the most horrifying of the decade’s riots took place on the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham, north London. If its name sounds like something from The Archers and if its location on the edge of a rustic park is also farm-like, there its bucolia ends: it is a large, isolated and forbidding system-built concrete estate. Modernist architecture took the blame for the violence, despite the fact that elsewhere Victorian streets had proved equally welcoming to rioters, and more than £30m was spent removing walkways, adding postmodern porches and applying pastel paint. A multi-storey mural of a waterfall decorates the end of a block.

Whatever benefit these measures had, they didn’t stop Tottenham rioting again, in 2011, sparking violence across the country. Again, it was felt that something should be done. Public money was promised, and a report – called It Took Another Riot – was commissioned from a panel led by the property developer Sir Stuart Lipton. The reference was not only to 1985, but to Michael Heseltine’s report following disturbances in Toxteth, Liverpool, in 1981, It Took a Riot. This document is now remembered by experts in such things as “the daddy of regeneration”, the start of what is now an industry of urban renewal in Britain. One question is whether the flurry of attention will make a more lasting difference than the Broadwater Farm paint. The other is whether the usual pitfalls of regeneration can be avoided: locals pushed out of homes and businesses by rising prices, the loss of the distinctive qualities that make a place special.

One of the first things people tell you about the area is its deprivation. “It has really ingrained structural problems,” says Claire Kober, the leader of Haringey council, which includes Tottenham. Originally a flourishing industrial centre, it “has suffered structural economic decline since the 1970s.” Two years ago the parliamentary constituency of Tottenham had the highest unemployment of any in London. Northumberland Park ward, named after the dukes of Northumberland who were major landowners in the area, is among the most deprived in London, and in the bottom 5% nationally. Housing is overcrowded, with illegal landlords packing families into tiny homes. Gang conflicts remain a problem. They mean, among other things, that young men won’t go to job interviews in territories controlled by their enemies.

Next they tell you about its assets – its transport connections to central London, to Stansted airport, and the booming technology economy of Cambridge, its green spaces, the improving performances of its schools, the relative affordability of its housing, its historic buildings. They talk about its diversity: 200, in some accounts 300, different languages are spoken. If you take all these factors together, Kober believes, you can “talk about Tottenham being the future of London”.

August 2011: rioters on the streets of Tottenham. Photograph: Lewis Whyld/PA

Great things are promised. “By 2025,” says the Physical Development Framework by the planning and design consultants Arup, “Tottenham will have more than 10,000 new high-quality homes and 5,000 new jobs, with almost a million square feet of employment and commercial space added.” The area can be “London’s next contemporary suburb”. It “has the potential to be London’s next big growth opportunity”. The scale of transformation will be “equivalent to a new town”. Earlier this month Kober and Haringey’s council member for housing and regeneration, Alan Strickland, went to Cannes for the property trade fair MIPIM, as they also did last year, in order to sell development opportunities in Tottenham to potential investors.

Most of this is not yet visible, but there have been changes since 2011. Public spaces have been improved, and a traffic gyratory system that did violence to a swath of streets has been reorganised and tamed. A clump of housing has gone up around Tottenham Hale station, for now a somewhat isolated zone on the eastern edge of the area and the station itself is to be remodelled, with further housing built around it. The most important thing, say those involved, has been attracting funding and recognition from London’s mayor and national government, such as the former’s decision to create two “housing zones”, which come with £45m of investment. Those involved talk of “pulling together”, of “cross-party consensus”, of borough, mayor and national government transcending their traditional differences in order to get something done.

There has also appeared, among the raucous plastic fascias of the High Road, a cool calm facade in white, black and grey, through whose large window can be seen a cool calm interior. This is the result of a chance meeting between Kober and the architect John McAslan at which the council leader expressed her wish to lift Tottenham; McAslan, excited by a recent visit to a remarkable cultural centre in São Paulo called SESC Pompéia, expressed his wish to help. Perhaps something similar could be done for Tottenham. The upshot is an outpost of McAslan’s office, called N17, where some of the normal business of the practice is carried on, but which would also take apprentices from the area and would be the base for educational projects with local schools. It would host discussions about future development, with the help of a model of Tottenham and exhibition panels on the walls. Haringey contributed £181,000 towards setting the office up.

It hasn’t been a bad deal for McAslan, you feel, as this toehold in Tottenham can only have helped him land the four projects he now has in the area. N17 doesn’t have SESC’s theatre, library, swimming pool and sports courts, but there is no doubting the enthusiasm of the apprentices, of whom there are so far five, chosen from a hundred applicants. Mostly they are not planning to be architects – among other things the high cost of the training deters them – but they are learning skills they can take to other businesses.

Claire Kober, leader of Haringey council: ‘You can talk about Tottenham being the future of London.’ Photograph: David Levene/Guardian

Daisy Ignatiou, aged 17, whose family has been in Tottenham since her grandparents moved into their first flat there, says that “jobs like architecture and high-up jobs seem really far away”, so she is grateful for the opportunity offered by N17. Zehra Harrison, 20, says she was told by an art college outside the area that “‘we don’t take people from Tottenham’. People tell us we won’t go anywhere. Too many people round here believe that.”

“We know there is a problem,” says Daisy, “so we are ready to take on regeneration in a good way. People are just scared that it might bring too many rich people… There’s not been anything really good in Tottenham for a long time, so people don’t believe it. Other people are really excited about what Tottenham will become.”

I hear praise, from Lipton and others, for the way that Kober and Strickland are setting about seeking investment in the area. The developers Argent (responsible for the regeneration of King’s Cross), who are talking to Haringey about possible involvement in the area, say the councillors are “totally forward-thinking and see the benefit of public private partnership”. I am told that at the end of the last decade the borough of Haringey was traumatised to the point of paralysis by its role in the Baby P case, and therefore incapable of constructive thought about regeneration, but that it has now turned itself around. Lipton’s report called for a special agency dedicated to Tottenham to be set up, bypassing the borough, but he is now happy for Haringey to remain in charge.

There are also dissenting voices. Mark Brearley and Jane Clossick of Cass Cities at the London Metropolitan University, which is studying Tottenham closely, say that “this is an ideal place. It’s fantastic. It’s got massive problems, but the urban structure is organised in a really good way. If you’re looking for the big urban idea for our century – here it is in Tottenham.” Too much of the proposed change, they say, is based on a “misunderstanding” of what’s there already.

After the bells stop sounding through the surrounding streets, clergy in birettas and purple robes process through air thick with incense towards the altar. Beneath wall paintings and stained glass and amid the late-flowering gothic-revival architecture of JEK Cutts, the priest quotes the pope and, as priests do, makes slightly strained references to John Lennon and Oasis. St Mary’s is deeply traditional, as Catholic as you can get while still remaining technically Anglican, which seems to be how its large, dedicated, mostly Afro-Caribbean congregation seem to want it. It is one of the several well-attended religious offerings that are among Tottenham’s distinctive features: the International Ministries for the Living Word, the Calvary Church of God in Christ, the New Life Holy Ghost Ministries (London Miracle Centre), the Fresh Anointing Christian Centre, the Rainbow Church, the Global Light Revival Church.

If you exit St Mary’s and turn left you see a brand-new old-looking structure on the corner with the High Road. This is the Co-op or Carpetright building, a better-then-ever replica of a 1930 work which, charred, twisted and hollow, became an emblem of the aftermath of the riots. The High Road itself is a bit too straight, narrow and long for comfort, which can be blamed on Roman highway engineers: this is part of Ermine Street, the road that ran from London to Lincoln and York, and in the first century AD, as now, the functional minds that design such things didn’t think much about the urban consequences of their work. The road is lined with small, sometimes repetitive, but useful businesses: phone shops, hairdressers, cafes. For those who have known it long enough, such as the Tottenham MP and London mayoral hopeful David Lammy, the road is haunted by the departure of Marks & Spencer and other desirable brands – “even Kentucky Fried Chicken” – that left when Wood Green Shopping City opened in the 1970s, two miles to the west.

The High Road is a kebab skewer transfixing Tottenham, which gathers along its length more-or-less tasty urban surprises: interludes of green and elegance, the edifying gothic of a Victorian school, the shells of interwar pleasure palaces, handsome Georgian houses and bits of terrace, with broader more easeful proportions than they would have in central London – fragments of a time when Tottenham was a prosperous recreational retreat from the capital. If you head south it widens into the recently refurbished triangle of Tottenham Green, watched over by the splendour of the old town hall – English baroque outside, a Moorish hall within. In due course you get to Seven Sisters underground station, a mere 13 minutes from Oxford Circus.

In the road’s hinterland, on either side, there are pleasant two-storeyed, bay-windowed houses in sometimes leafy streets of a generic late-19th-century type which when in a posher place such as Fulham sell for a million or two, as opposed to £350-450,000 here. There are more surprises, such as Bruce Castle, a Tudor manor house built by someone with the important and influential job of Groom of the Stool to Henry VIII. If you look hard, in the brick and concrete heart of an industrial estate, you will find the area’s first glimmer of hipsterdom – Craving Coffee, a delicate peaceful place where you can wash down your wheat free muesli with a choice of Okumidori Sencha green tea or locally made cranberry and pomegranate juice. On the eastern edge of Tottenham are big skies, expanses of water, what you might almost call wildness, formed of marshes, the river Lea and a series of reservoirs.

Most exotic of all, so habituated are we to the idea that Britain now trades only in services and financial abstractions, people still make things in Tottenham. Furniture is formed, beer brewed, clothes sewn, car bodies sprayed, windows constructed, meat processed, bread baked (pitta and otherwise) and mannequins repaired. Businesses include Ritec, a chemicals company making self-cleaning coatings for glass, the luxury shoe company Gina and Bouncepad, makers of the casings that allow iPads and other tablets to be displayed in public places. This is not what industry in Tottenham used to be, when tens of thousands were employed by such things as the world’s largest furniture factory, or in making gas mains and pipelines, or Eagle pencils and Berol pens. But the area’s factories and workshops still create jobs and perform vital roles in the economy of a city where land values are squeezing manufacturing to almost nothing.

If you head north up the High Road the right hand side starts breaking up into ragged gaps, followed by a hoarding-ringed void. These are not the results of riots, but of the new stadium project of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, whose existing ground can be seen beyond some buildings preserved for their historic interest. The hoardings’ computer-generated images show fans milling about the huge silvery spaceship of the promised future building, but the names on their shirts are of players who have moved on, which tells you both that the club gets quickly through its playing staff and that the plan has been some time in the making.

This is Tottenham, super Tottenham, as one chant has it, the greatest club the world has even seen, according to another, a team glorious in the 1960s, with twin traditions of favouring flair over achievement and of tragicomic near-misses, and for the past decade bobbing about at the edges of the top of English football. It owes its romantic name to Harry Hotspur, the medieval knight from the family that provided earls and dukes of Northumberland, who owned the land on which the club started. It is a huge part of the area’s identity, the reason why the name is recognised nationally and internationally by people who would otherwise have no clue what or where Tottenham is.

CGI image of the projected stadium development. Photograph: PR

Spurs’ existing stadium, with 35,000 seats, is small compared to those of its rivals, which limits the club’s turnover and ability to grow. In 2008 it unveiled a plan for a new stadium with 56,250 seats just north of its current one, plus blocks of flats and a new supermarket to help pay for it. The club won planning permission and were presumably addressing themselves to the most difficult part of the project – raising the £400m necessary to build it – when a distraction arose a few miles down the river Lea. The organisers of the London Olympics were looking for a future for their stadium after the 2012 games, and Spurs decided to bid for it.

Accounts differ of what exactly happened, but it seems that Boris Johnson encouraged the chairman of Spurs, Daniel Levy, to enter the fray, in order to provide some competition for the frontrunners, West Ham. What effect this might have on Tottenham, the place, seemed to be of no concern to London’s mayor. The club went in with a brutally practical proposal – as the Olympic stadium was designed for athletics not football, it would be best to knock it down, rebuild it, and hold athletics events elsewhere. Sebastian Coe was outraged by this sacrilege against his sport. Lammy was appalled by the possible loss of “the only international brand in my constituency”. Both campaigned against Spurs’ proposed move. It was an ugly fight, in which private investigators hired by Tottenham Hotspur were convicted of unlawful espionage on the personal data of senior figures at West Ham, although Tottenham denied any involvement.

Tottenham lost the bid, with Levy by all accounts furious with Johnson for leading him up a garden path, but only after the club’s legal challenges had helped make less generous the deal offered by the public purse to the pornography magnates who run West Ham. Spurs made a further challenge, eventually called off, after which Johnson announced some funding to assist Tottenham, and the area around the stadium in particular. Tottenham also went back to Haringey to ask for a better deal on their planning permission: they wanted the requirement to build affordable housing, usual with proposed residential developments, to be removed. They wanted their Section 106 contribution, the money paid to help the public costs associated with private development, and which here included such things as upgrading nearby railway stations, reduced from £16.4m to £500,000. By now the riots had happened and Haringey, probably anxious to see something make progress in Tottenham, agreed to the reductions.

In the financial hyperspace in which football operates, the cash they were clawing back from the council is less than might be lost on buying a single misfiring Spanish striker or gained on selling a magical Croat midfielder which, given the often-mentioned deprivation in the Northumberland Park ward in which Spurs’ ground sits, looks outrageous. The club, however, insist that “the total value” of their contribution “comprising capital costs, direct funding, in kind, delivery and long-term public sector savings” is “a substantial contribution in excess of £20m”. Asked for more detail on this figure, they say that it “includes ongoing costs… so it could only be calculated and broken up upon completion”. They point to their support for a university technical college and the £4.5m a year they spend on their foundation which, like those of other Premier League clubs, uses “sport and in particular football as a vehicle to create life-changing opportunities for children, groups and individuals within communities”.

The Spurs project also required the removal of 72 businesses from the site with the help of compulsory purchase orders, of which 71 went quietly. The last, called Archway Steel, fought a long legal challenge during which they also endured hate mail and a suspected arson attack, one might guess from very disgruntled fans. Archway finally called off the legal fight earlier this month, but not before Spurs’ ex-chairman Lord Sugar had called them “silly people” who were “delaying the regeneration of Haringey”.

Micky Josif, whose family owns and runs Archway Metals, the only business to fight (and lose) the compulsory purchase order served on 72 businesses to make way for the new stadium. Photograph: Jonny Weeks/Guardian

The extent to which they were is moot. Yes it would have been bad for Tottenham if the stadium project had been stuck in an impasse. It is hard to find people in the area who don’t want the club to stay. The foundation would be missed. But the regenerative power of stadia is regularly overstated – apart from 20 to 30 match days per year that briefly flood the location with crowds, they are cold dark places that add little to their surroundings. This is one reason why Wembley, for example, is not the most vibrant part of London. “In the context of Tottenham,” says Claire Kober, whose face seems to harden at the mention of the football club, “it is a very small part of the wider regeneration.”

The Archway v Spurs battle also dramatises a central issue in the future of the area, which is the extent to which the old Tottenham of making things and running small shops has to make way for the new Tottenham, packaged for external investors at MIPIM. It is playing out just across the road from the new stadium in an area branded High Road West, where the Love Lane council estate is to be demolished, along with the Peacock industrial estate, and a row of shops on the High Road. New, better and more numerous homes are promised instead. Haringey is promising to rehouse its tenants and rebuild the council flats, but 120 businesses will have to go elsewhere. The council claims “strong support” for their proposals; objectors says that only residents, not businesses, were able to vote on them, of whom only 6% did so.

High Road West is in theory Haringey’s project, not Spurs’, but looks very much as if it has been tailored to the club’s wishes. It features a broad “public square” leading directly from White Hart Lane railway station – refurbished at public expense – to the new ground, lined with the sort of premium retailing you don’t currently get round here. It looks geared to a corporate supporter who will be able to get on a train in the City of London and go straight to his or her seat without leaving a bubble of Premier League glamour, or making contact with the shops and streets that currently make up Tottenham. Donna-Maria Cullen, executive director, survivor of three management regimes over the past two decades, and Spurs to her dark-blue lacquered fingertips, says as much: the advice they are getting on potential investment is that the area around has to changed as well as the stadium site.

The body language of the stadium designs and of the “world class public realm” also suggest a wish to be anywhere but Tottenham. They are as unlike as can be from anything that is there already, with no attempt to create affinities of materials or scale. Spurs were allowed to obliterate two blocks of what is a conservation area along the High Road, but have so far been obliged to keep some listed buildings, which stand pitifully like broken teeth in the images of the new project. Of course you can’t put a stadium on a high street without making an impact, and shouldn’t try, but good architecture is about walking and chewing gum at the same time, such as reconciling something large with something small.

Meanwhile, down the other end of the High Road, by Seven Sisters station, an Edwardian block called Ward’s Corner is to be replaced by development – described by Arup’s Physical Development Framework as “transformational” – by the property company Grainger, which helps pay for the council’s MIPIM trip. It is actually a ho-hum, could-be-anywhere, glass’n’granite retail and residential scheme whose ambition seems to be to entice Pizza Express to the area – whose tolerable-but-not-thrilling menus the architecture indeed resembles.

The existing Ward’s Corner includes a lively market that resembles a larger, more famous one in Brixton, south London, with among other things one of the country’s finest suppliers of Argentine beef. It includes the Pueblito Paisa cafe, which sells empanadas of genius to the local Colombian and Peruvian communities. This is diversity. This is vibrancy, and it is exactly the sort of thing that makes people want to come to a place, but Alan Strickland says that its replacement “is about making Seven Sisters the gateway to Tottenham”. This sort of regen-babble is suspect at the best of times, but here it seems to mean that, when you exit the tube, you should get the message that Tottenham is the same as everywhere else. It says to developers “come and build here and we won’t be too demanding”.

At other times Kober and Strickland talk about the importance of consolidating the High Road. The road is long and has too many shops, they say. Most are not registered for VAT, which suggests that they have low turnovers. They say that some larger units are needed, to entice back brands like the late lamented Marks & Spencer. This last point could well be true, but they seem over-eager to dismiss what is already there: those modest shops are livelihoods, and lives, for somebody. They provide services for someone.

They also conspicuously don’t mention the industries that are such an important part of Tottenham. Neither does the Arup report. So far a principal effect of regeneration plans is the loss, already accomplished on the Spurs stadium site and proposed on the Peacock Estate, of a large amount of employment space. Perhaps when the 5,000 promised jobs materialise all will be well, but closing down these working areas seems like a funny way to set about reviving employment. They are also important to London as a whole – there has to be somewhere where its bread is baked, its coffee machines maintained and its cars fixed.

‘When Costa Coffee comes in, it’s a big deal,’ says David Lammy. Really? Is that the best the area can hope for?

Tottenham is a place that doesn’t know how big it is. If the football club makes the name known around the world, it also has very local characteristics. With 115,000 residents, it’s as big as a decent-sized town, but there is a void where its local government should be: the old borough of Tottenham was absorbed into Haringey 50 years ago, an uneasy union from which many of the area’s problems stem. Affluent places on the other side of Haringey mean that the modern borough is the most unequal in London. Council decisions, like the creation of Wood Green Shopping City in the 1970s, have not always been to Tottenham’s benefit. It is an exceptional place that suffers from low self-esteem: “When Costa Coffee comes in,” says David Lammy, “it’s a big deal.” Really? Is this the best the area can hope for? People keep talking about “putting Tottenham on the map”, but it’s there already.

Of the riots, Lammy points out that “while 600 people burned shops and homes and looted, 99% of Tottenham’s young people were terrified in their homes.” That figure includes the N17 apprentices: “I was home alone with my cousins,” says Zehra Harrison, “and suddenly there were waves and waves of sirens. There were helicopters. The phone networks shut down. It was really scary. And then waves and waves of people came down the road. Afterwards everywhere was a tip, smashed up.”

“It hits you in the face”, says Rhasan Brunner, 20, “how some people can act.”

The N17 apprentices, in truth, would rather everyone stopped dwelling on the riots. They also stress the good they brought out: “There is a strong sense of community here,” says Zehra, “and everyone cares about each other. People were taking food and clothing to people who needed them. If you could do something, you did.” Tottenham, they feel, “could be a model of integration across the world”. “I’m Catholic,” says Daisy Ignatiou, “but I know more about other religions than I do about my own.”

This sounds like a good place to start, with the characteristics of the place and the peoples, of the kinds of work that is done here and the imprints left by Tottenham’s inimitable history. It is an exceptionally good thing that Haringey is getting organised and giving the area the attention it has lacked for so long, but there is the opportunity to do more. It could set a model for regeneration for the next generation: of the people, by the people, for the people. I think that Kober and Strickland would agree. But if so then Ward’s Corner, the Spurs stadium and High Road West are not the best ways of starting as you mean to go on.