London street names
Ever wondered how your road got its name? If, like East End Life, you live in Mulberry Place and Clove Crescent, it doesn’t take much working out – Docklands is peppered with roads named after the area’s maritime past and the pungent delicacies unloaded on its quays.
Go back a century or two and you can still work out the provenance of most of the East End’s road names. Commercial Road and Street reflect the optimism and delight in trade of the Victorians, these routes carrying the goods from the port to the rest of the country.
Cable Street, meanwhile, was not only the site of cable and rope works from the Middle Ages on, the road itself was a cable in length, a cable being a now-defunct measurement.
But many of the names of places and streets are rooted in the Middle Ages or even back to Roman times, and take some working out. Stepney dates back to the Saxon settlement of a character called Stebba and the name is a corruption of “Stebba’s landing place”.
Another Saxon settlement was “Blida’s Corner”, which somehow became Bethnal Green. The Isle of Dogs is considerably more recent, first appearing on maps in 1588. Nevertheless, there is no definitive answer as to the origins of the name – a popular theory is that Henry VIII kept his hunting dogs there in the days when the island was wild countryside.
Some of the East End hamlets’ names make perfect sense. Bow was the site of a bow-shaped bridge, Old Ford was the lowest point on the tidal River Lea where the Romans would cross on their way to their city of Colchester. And Mile End was a country spot where Londoners would go to take the Sunday air – conveniently sited just at the end of a mile’s walk from the City.
As for Poplar, before it was drained and developed the area was marshland, and dotted with poplar trees.
Limehouse got its name from the 14th Century lime kilns or oasts which grew up round the docks, and Spitalfields was originally the farm land belonging to the medieval priory and hospital of St Mary’s ’spital fields. The name lived on in Whitechapel’s St Mary’s underground station, closed in the early part of this century.
It wasn’t the only legacy of the old abbeys and priories. Minories recalls a “minor” order of the nuns of St Clare, established in 1248 by the Earl of Lancaster. And Bishopsgate was the site of the old Bishop’s Gate from Essex into the City.
Many of the road names mark particular points in East End history. Royal Mint Street was the home of the mint for around 50 years in the 1800s. Previously, and for some years after, the royal coin was struck in the Tower of London.
And Burdett Road marks the philanthropic contributions of Victorian do-gooder Angela Burdett-Coutts. Less celebrated is her fellow philanthropist William Cotton, though he actually paid for the land. Cotton himself is remembered in Cotton Street, Poplar.
Two hundred years back, Fairfield Road in Bow was a field where a regular fair was held – though it was eventually banned due to rowdiness and excessive drinking.
One of the most famous East End streets probably has the most deceptive name. Roman Road, with a name that seems to date back two millennia, was in fact called Drift Street until a century or so ago.
An archeological dig in the mid-1800s uncovered remains near Drift Street, suggesting the old road to Colchester may have lain nearby.
The story caught the popular imagination and Roman Road was born.