My thinking about street names, or more particularly about changing street names, has changed. My initial reaction to the intention of Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, to review London’s statues and street names was to groan inwardly, and possibly audibly.
‘Yet more party political interference in my life?’ I thought. And I still think it’s tricky territory. But as I’ve explored some of the history of my own local streets I do see that their names have an evolutionary life of their own.
My address is Kennington Park Road however my front door is in Braganza Street. Braganza Street was New Street until the 1930’s. It says so on the street sign attached to my house,
BOROUGH OF SOUTHWARK
BRAGANZA STREET SE17
LATE NEW STREET
(By the way my postal address is SE11 so don’t be fooled by the sign.)
So why the change and why Braganza? I think the change was simply because the street was far from new and there were already too many New Streets around. As for why Braganza? There’s the mystery – at least for me.
On the wall of the house next door but one from mine, high up, there is a plaque. It’s not one of those smart blue plaques put up by English Heritage to show who lived there like the one on number thirty nine Methley Street where Charlie Chaplin lived from 1898-1899. I pass that one often when I’ve done enough turns around Cleaver Square. Charlie Chaplin has a second plaque on a block of flats in the Brixton Road. He lived there from 1908 – 1910. His family were very poor and, locals tell me, they ‘flitted’ frequently, that is, moved on without paying the rent. I’m told they also lived in Kennington Road but there’s no plaque there.
The plaque on the next door house but one to me is a serious plaque. It’s either brass or bronze, like those on headstones, and it’s on the side of the house in de Laune Street. The house is the corner house. The front is in Braganza Street. The plaque reads
Braganzas
This two-dimensional form is a braganza, a Cognate word which can be crudely translated as ‘spirit door’ or ‘tombshadow,’ but really meant something a bit more playful and mischievous. The Sharaara Tlar, the people of this area which was an island before it was a river’s side, believed that you shared your home with the spirits of the children you didn’t have by the person you didn’t marry. In fact, in some sects, you did not exist but they did.
Discover Endless Kymhuir
PLAQUE PLACED BY KYMAERICAPROJECT.CO.UK
As you will have realised it was definitely not placed by English Heritage.
From what I can discover the plaque and it’s placing is the work of an American, Eames Demetrios who is, amongst other things, a ‘geographer-at-large’, an artist and film maker. This plaque is part of current large-scale project, Kcymaerxthaere, which, according to his website
‘is a multi-pronged and ongoing work of 3 dimensional fiction and has been underway for 11 years. The project can be found in stories set in bronze markers and historic sites-like a novel where every page is in a different city.’
It’s a sort of mythical history, I think, set in bronze, and I’m not going to explore the history of the Sharaara Tlar people. And I live alone.
I find much more fascinating the actual history I discover on every one of my walks. Why Braganza Street? My guess, and it’s only a guess, is that it has something to do with Catherine of Braganza wife of King Charles the second. But why? Did someone want to make a link between Kennington and Elephant and Castle, Portugal and Spain? The Spanish La ‘Infanta de Castillia’, is thought by some to have been corrupted to become the English ‘Elephant and Castle’. The Elephant and Castle was an Inn, a significant pub which certainly existed in 1765. By the way the Elephant Lodgings are mentioned by Shakespeare in Twelfth Night Act 3 Scene3.
But none of that really helps me with Braganza Street and I’m only just out my front door. I’m disappointed to discover that the street can’t have been named after Operation Braganza that was part of the desert campaign in the Second World War because the street was renamed before the war. Perhaps there was, living locally, or on the Council, a Mr or Mrs Braganza. More research needed.
I’ve already discovered a little about the family Faunce de Laune who owned land hereabouts and were generous benefactors of local community projects. I don’t know where their money came from. I walk down Faunce Street and have friends living in de Laune Street. I haven’t been able to find out whether or not there were orchards in what is now Berryfield Road that I walked along this morning having turned off Manor Place. The original manor being Walworth Manor.
There are of course lots of ‘Manors’. When I lived in Chelsea we used to buy our pizzas from an excellent Pizzeria in Chelsea Manor Street. I lived in Flood Street – named, of course, because it regularly flooded until the Embankment was begun in 1854 and opened in 1874. The various manors were the medieval areas of land that sometimes had a manor house. Walworth manor house was at the corner of what is now Penton Place and Manor Place. Also on my walk.
My much walked around Cleaver Square, three times round is one thousand steps, was called Prince’s Square when it was laid out in 1788. The Prince of Wales is an excellent pub in the corner of the square. But the square wasn’t named for any royal prince but for Mr Joseph Prince who owned the two houses on Kennington Park Road which were at that end of the square. The name was changed in 1937 to that of Mary Cleaver who had owned the land in the eighteenth century. And, while I’m across the road in that direction, the White Bear Pub and Theatre in Kennington Park Road, where, incidentally, I have performed, is named for White Bear Field which was the name of the land that Mary Cleaver inherited. It seems the 1930’s must have been a time for name changes around here.
But the name change I enjoy most is in New Zealand. The first parish I worked in was St Silas, Redwood. But the suburb wasn’t Redwood when I was at school in the 1950s, it was Styx, and it wasn’t Styx when it was first named in the 1850s. It was Sticks.
It happened like this. North of Christchurch there was a stream and marshy land. There was one good place to cross the stream without getting bogged down so one of the early settlers put some sticks in the ground to mark the crossing. It became known, of course, as the place of the sticks, then Sticks. Later in the century a well educated English gent thought,
‘Oh dear. These ignorant colonials. They don’t know their mythology at all. It is clearly the river Styx.’
Actually I don’t know whether he thought that at all but the spelling was changed and the name remained until the locals discovered that the Styx was not a good place to be so there was a vote in the 1960s and the locals chose the name Redwood. There was a handsome Sequoia redwood tree in one of the streets so Redwood it became.
Clearly street names evolve and change and I hope they will always give us some history to discover. Much as I love trees and plants to have the local streets named, Plane Road, Oak Street or even Kangaroo Apple Place, (I bought a Kangaroo Apple plant from the Walworth Garden Centre in Manor Place this morning), to have streets named botanically might be safe but would not give much room for education and the enjoyment of historical discovery.