THE STREET-NAMES OF SHIREHAMPTON

AND AVONMOUTH

Richard Coates

Shire Community Newspaper, Shirehampton

1

The street-names of Shirehampton and Avonmouth

Richard Coates

The way it was – 1800s: “The retired village of Shirehampton is below the hill of

King’s Weston, sheltered from the north-east and east winds, which renders it a

desirable winter situation. It is composed of some elegant villas; and its cottages,

which have a pretty neatness and quietude, are mostly surrounded by good gardens

and orchards.” – John Chilcott (1849)

The way it was – 1900s: “It has little to see but much to remember.”

– Arthur Mee (1938)

2

First published December 2011

Revision history

1: February 2012 (minor changes)

2: April 2013 (minor changes and corrections)

This electronic book can be read like an ordinary book by scrolling through, or it

can be searched using the search-engine provided on the web-site.

It may be freely downloaded or printed off and bound, on the sole condition of

including this page with this copyright notice:

Text © Richard Coates 2011, 2013

The moral right of Richard Coates to be identified as the author of The street-names

of Shirehampton and Avonmouth has been asserted.

The copyright in images rests with the author except where stated. Some old

images believed to be out of copyright have been used, and others are used by

courtesy of Shire newspaper and of persons mentioned adjacent to the image in

question. Images created as publicity material are presumed to be in the public

domain. The publisher is Shire Community Newspaper, Shirehampton.

3

Contents

Preface ..... 5

The main local place-names ..... 12

The street-names of Shirehampton ..... 18

Two ancient Shirehampton house-names ..... 49

The street-names of Avonmouth ..... 50

The street-names of the part of Lawrence Weston in Avonmouth ward ..... 70

Sources ..... 74

The last page (about the author) ..... 86

4

Shirehampton from the west

5

Preface to The street-names of Shirehampton and

Avonmouth

Many place-names in England are ancient, and many of the oldest ones have

become obscure as time has passed. This is partly because the English language has

changed a lot over the 1500 years during which it has been spoken in Britain, and

partly because the names have been recorded in documents written in French and

Latin as well as English, which has sometimes influenced the names themselves.

But it is often possible to get back to their original meaning through studying these

documents and collecting all the ancient recorded spellings together for

comparison, and we shall see some explanations of ancient names below.

As for more modern local names, which are what this book concentrates on, the

current Bristol City Council guidelines state that “it is the developer’s privilege to

propose a new street name. The developer is invited to propose a name that

should be distinct and have local/historical connections. But there should not be

any current commercial connection.” These principles have been followed for

some time, though some of the names dating from around 1900 in Shirehampton

and Avonmouth do have a hint of commercial interest about them, as will be seen,

and so do some names on private industrial estates. The names chosen reflect a

range of concerns, from religion and politics to history and local patriotism, via

accurate description of the place which is named. Even the blandest names have

something to say about their time or their namer.

This little book presents the fruit of the Survey of English Place-Names for

Gloucestershire, The place-names of Gloucestershire, vol. 3, by A. H. Smith, and

research of my own into the history of the community I now live in. That research

has also taken into account the work of some local writers, particularly Ethel

Thomas, Veronica Smith, and H. C. W. Harris. Their work is the necessary

starting-point, but it sometimes contains mistakes which need to be corrected.

Some historical background

Some words describing the sort of places we are dealing with need to be explained

first, because they crop up in the discussion of the local names. This background

knowledge, simplified here, is important for understanding the very complicated

situation in this corner of historic Gloucestershire, which has had an impact on

local naming.

6

A major basic unit of local organization throughout most of the history of England

has been the parish, a unit originally based on the possession of a church. Other

Christian places of worship within a parish were called chapels, and some of these

may in time become Church of England parish churches in their own right. In

modern times, Roman Catholic churches exist, within an alternative parish structure.

Other long-established denominations prefer to keep the term chapel.

A parish might be divided into units called tithings for some legal and practical

purposes like collecting the rates (taxes mainly to provide support for the poorest

people). Parishes existed alongside agricultural and legal units called manors. A

parish might contain more than one manor, and their boundaries are not

necessarily the same even where there is only one manor. Manors were responsible

for local justice and administration; and despite being a private house,

Shirehampton manor house was still being used for parish council meetings around

1900. Parishes were grouped together for some other purposes into larger units

called hundreds, which were the building-blocks of counties; and from the 19th to the

20th century, parishes were also grouped into Poor Law unions to provide

workhouses for the destitute.

A simplified version of our administrative history goes like this. The local parishes

were Henbury and Westbury-on-Trym, each with its own church. Together with

other parishes, they made up Henbury hundred, though parts of Henbury parish

bordering on Shirehampton were at some time in the Lower division of Berkeley

hundred, which otherwise consisted of Filton and Horfield parishes. Westbury

parish was divided into three tithings, one of which was Shirehampton, which was

completely separated from the rest of Westbury by a strip of Henbury. Henbury

included the tithings of King’s Weston and Lawrence Weston, and it was the

portion of King’s Weston that contains the modern Sea Mills estate which

separated Shirehampton from the rest of Westbury. Westbury also possessed

various small plots of land scattered through the enormous parish of Henbury.

This was because Westbury had once been the dominant parish, being controlled

by the bishop of Worcester from perhaps the ninth century onwards; but in the

Middle Ages most of Westbury was in the hands of Westbury College, a body of

priests (as opposed to monks), whilst the bishop had a palace and manor in his

own personal hands in Henbury in the early Middle Ages. That is probably why the

local hundred, which the bishop also owned, took the name of Henbury rather

than Westbury: he ran the hundred’s affairs from his manor. Shirehampton in

Westbury, like Lawrence Weston in Henbury, had its own chapel; Shirehampton

acquired one probably in the sixteenth century, and it became a separate parish in

7

the nineteenth (1844, to be exact, though it was still treated as part of Westbury for

electoral registration purposes in 1851). History repeated itself when a Church of

England chapel was established in the new settlement of Avonmouth late in the

nineteenth century, and this became a separate parish in the twentieth (1917). Both

places eventually became Roman Catholic parishes too after restrictions on

Catholics were lifted in the 19th century. Shirehampton tithing, including what was

to become Avonmouth, counted as a manor within Westbury by the sixteenth

century. Some small blocks of land in Lawrence Weston were once reckoned as

part of Shirehampton tithing, but I do not refer to them separately in this book.

Field-names have had quite a big impact on local naming. While Shirehampton was

still a tithing of Westbury, just before the separation, two documents were drawn

up which record the local names, especially field-names, current at that time. One

of these is the Enclosure (or Inclosure) Award of 1811, which permitted

landowners to make larger fields and to enclose common lands; that happened

around here in 1822. The other document is the Tithe Award of 1840-1, which is

an assessment of the cash value of the rent income that the tithe-owner (normally

the local Church of England clergyman) had previously received in the form of

one-tenth of the produce of local farms. The Award is accompanied by a large-

scale map. The names in these documents are often referred to in this book, but

the old field-names really deserve a separate work to analyse them.

The new Avonmouth Dock and the original nucleus of the settlement were

absorbed by the City of Bristol in 1894 (as part of Horfield ward), and both

Shirehampton and the rest of expanding Avonmouth became part of the City in

1904, with minor boundary adjustments since then. Both places are in postcode

area BS11. Both are now in the city council’s Avonmouth ward, which also

includes the southern end of Lawrence Weston. For historical reasons to do with

the responsibilities of the Port of Bristol Authority, the city also included the full

width of the river Avon from the historic harbour to the Severn. Below Horseshoe

Bend, the river and even the water and mud in the pills on the Somerset side are

currently reckoned as part of Avonmouth ward. The ward boundaries and

subdivisions can be seen on the City Council’s web-site at

www.bristol.gov.uk/WardFinder/pdfs/avonmouthmap-high.pdf.

This book deals with names in historic Shirehampton and Avonmouth, and those

areas west of the M5 which have been added in recent years to Avonmouth ward.

It also includes Lawrence Weston, but only the part which is presently (2011) in

Avonmouth ward, i.e. the area marked C on the map just mentioned.

8

Local geography and local words

The dominant landscape feature of the area is Penpole Ridge, which fittingly has

the most ancient name in the area. It has served as a quarry of limestone for

building from time immemorial, as a lookout point, and as a promenade for the

local rich people, namely the “squires” of King’s Weston. The great house at

King’s Weston, though outside Shirehampton, has had a huge effect on the area,

since its last private owners also owned much of the land, controlled much of the

available work, and gave support, land, and money for important ventures such as

the first Avonmouth docks, various parks, places of worship, public amenities, and

the Shirehampton war memorial.

The other main feature is mud, adjacent to the Avon and Severn. The oldest maps

of our area show Shirehampton surrounded, except on the north where Penpole

Ridge squats, by muddy riverbanks and marshland, and this is reflected in the local

place-names. Two words for land subject to saltwater flooding are very particular

to the Severn area, and we have had both of them: warth and dumble. Saltmarsh is

land that is overflowed twice a day by the high tide, and its plantlife is specially

adapted to saltwater conditions. There are no true saltmarshes in Shirehampton or

Avonmouth because of the peculiar tidal conditions in the Avon within its present

banks. The tide falls and rises so strongly that it would scour any saltmarsh plants

away. The original marshlands have been enclosed by sea-banks built over the

centuries so that they are no longer overflowed by the tide. Traces of these can

still be found on older local maps. Outside these banks there is grassland which

used to be used for grazing, and which is overflowed only by the highest of high

tides, not twice daily. The local name for this is (or was) warth or warthland,

sometimes confusingly called wharf, from the Old English word for ‘shore’, waroð,

and on old maps we find Shirehampton Warth, Great Warth and Hungroad Warth,

along the Severn and the Avon. In later documents these are often called moor. The

warthland has been enclosed by banks in stages, and there used to be a field called

Warth Ground in Avonmouth stranded between the older and the newer sea-bank.

There is potential for confusion because a wharf or landing-place for cargo might

well be on the warth, like the coal wharves along the Avon which supplied West

Town’s long-gone industries.

Another word local to the Severn estuary is dumble or dumball. This seems to have

meant land similar to the warthland, but subtly different in some way. In parishes

which have both, like Slimbridge, the dumble is mainly level ground extending

further out into the river, and it may include some true saltmarsh. Shirehampton

once had its Dumball Island. It is called The Dung ball Island on the first 1" Ordnance

9

Survey map in the early 19th century! This was once separated from the land called

Great Warth by the original deepwater channel of the Avon, and it disappeared

finally when the channel silted up and the Royal Edward Dock at Avonmouth was

built partly over its site, in the 1900s.

Other dialect words belong to the marshland, like pill ‘saltwater creek’, gout ‘sluice

or drain’, probably one which kept the sea out of ditches but allowed them to drain

into the sea when the tide was low, or ‘culvert’; and rhine/rhyne (pronounced

“reen”) ‘drainage ditch’. Inland, splott is a general word for ‘plot or small patch of

land’, and tyning is ‘enclosure’, often one made by fencing in part of the medieval

common fields. (Tine in meant ‘enclose’ locally into the 18th century.) Leaze is a

widespread local word for ‘pasture’, originally grassland for grazing as opposed to

mowing (but later used for both), and it has been used in street-names throughout

the Bristol area. On the coast, a swash is ‘a body of quickly or forcefully moving

water’, applied here to a new channel cut by the Avon.

Some local field-names: Wamps and Whores and Wars

Not all local names are easy to explain, then, and some contain local words which

are now lost. In the Shirehampton Tithe Award of 1840-1 there are quite a few

strange names, mostly field-names. The strangest and hardest of all to explain is

probably Wamp Hills. This was a strip of land on the bank of the Avon, on the

riverward side of the old artificial sea-bank, at West Town. The name was there in

1760 and now it has gone forever, but it was where the Avonbank Industrial Estate

now is, more or less under the motorway bridge. No hill is to be seen there, of

course, so what did it mean? Wamp does actually exist as an English word – an old-

fashioned word for ‘wasp’. But that is a regional word belonging to the Lake

District. There is an old West Country word want which means ‘mole’ – usually

called an unt or oont in Gloucestershire – and some people still say this. So ‘mole

hills’ looks like the answer to the name, but why it should turn out as wamp here

rather than want is a mystery. Since this land must have flooded occasionally with

the highest tides, any moles would have needed salt tolerance and flippers. There

was also a field called Wamp Hill in Henbury in the seventeenth century, so the

exact shape of the word may be a local dialect peculiarity.

There was land called Oars, next to Wamps. This was almost certainly from an Old

English word for ‘a bank’, ōra – it was also next to the old artificial bank of the

Avon, on the dry side – but in documents from 1687 to 1711 it turns up as The

Oare, The Wore and even, in 1687, The Whore (all pronounced the same, as “ ’ore” in

a traditional Gloucestershire accent).

10

Another possibly deceptive name is War Hills, a field close to the buildings of the

former Sunnyhill Farm where Clifford Gardens is now, appearing as Warr Hill in

1677. This may contain a lost word for ‘earthwork’. But the form Worralls found in

ratebooks of 1797 and 1800 may be an alteration of this, since the surname Worrall

is recorded locally.

Brief history of 20th-century development

Shirehampton had a very long history as a farming community, and then also as

something of a retreat for the moderately rich (as revealed in the quote from

Chilcott’s Descriptive history on the title-page). There was a small and isolated

industrial community at West Town by the later nineteenth century, producing

bricks and glass. The balance changed forever with the establishment of the docks

and the community of Avonmouth from 1877 onwards, and both places began to

expand. After 1900, Shirehampton was in the forefront of the Garden Suburb

movement aimed at creating decent and well-designed housing estates.

Shirehampton was to have been the first of this new type of planned place in

Britain. In the end, only Passage Leaze and a few nearby houses were built on

these worthy principles because the First World War intervened. After the war,

Bristol City Council was under pressure to provide many new housees, partly as

“homes for heroes” and partly because of slum clearance in the city centre. These

were less ambitiously planned than the pre-war ones, though still with a generous

amount of land per house, and a great deal of building took place at Sea Mills and

Shirehampton. There was further emergency expansion after World War II in the

form of prefabs and BISF steel-framed houses, in an area for a while locally called

Tin Town. The prefabs have, 65 years later, nearly all been cleared, but many steel

houses survive, sometimes in disguise.

Starting the book

Armed with these examples and fortified with these ideas, we can now explore the

wealth of local names to be found in Shirehampton and Avonmouth.

Headings for names in Shirehampton are in bold, those in Avonmouth are in bold

italic, and those in Lawrence Weston are in bold italic underlined. The boundary

between Shirehampton and Avonmouth is traditionally the line of West Town

Road, and on the north side of Avonmouth Road I have assumed the M5 is the

boundary. Except where noted, the area covered by both together is the same as

that of the ancient tithing of Shirehampton. Where this touches another built-up

area, the Lawrence Weston estate formerly in Henbury parish, the boundary

11

includes the point where King’s Weston Avenue becomes Long Cross. Cross-

references to other entries are also in bold, bold italic, or bold italic underlined.

Since 2009 it has been Bristol City Council’s policy to leave apostrophes out of

street-names wherever they are written in capital letters, and therefore on all street-

signs, on the grounds of “neatness”. I have ignored this decision mentally

throughout; but then I have not spelt the names in capital letters. (The only real

historical difficulty is King’s Weston versus the single-word form Kingsweston, both of

which have tradition behind them. Preferably never Kings Weston, but that’s what

we often meet!)

Acknowledgements

Thanks for information and/or access to documents are due to Bristol Record

Office, John Edwards, David Hoey, Professor Peter Malpass, Sid Nicholls, Gil

Osman, Cedric Rich, Nora Roberts, and Martin Ryan; to Dr Simon Draper for an

idea about the origin of Hampton; to Dr David Thomas for previous

encouragement; and, for permission to reproduce material from Shire newspaper

and web-site, to the Editors. Where copyright in illustrations is known, it is

acknowledged; all others are either the author’s own or of unknown copyright

status. This booklet is meant to be something for everyone’s interest, not an

academic work, so I have not put detailed references or footnotes in the text. It has

been properly researched, though, and all my sources are given discreetly in the

bibliography at the end.

I’m a relative newcomer to Shirehampton, having lived here only since 2006, and

other people must know its history better than I do. I’m a keen learner, and if I

have made any mistakes in this book, email me at richardc.yb@gmail.com.

Richard Coates

Shirehampton and the University of the West of England

13 November 2011

12

The main local place-names

Shirehampton

Shirehampton is recorded as Hampton in 1284, 1303, 1327 and 1455. This name is

almost certainly from Old English hām-tūn ‘home farm, major farm’, ‘one unit in a

large and complex agricultural estate with multiple functions’, the large estate in

this case being Westbury-on-Trym. Less probably, the first part could be hamm

‘land hemmed in on several sides’ (as Shirehampton is hemmed in by Penpole

Ridge, the river Avon and the marshland along the Severn); this word is the one

found in the name of Ham Green, situated between its streams near Pill on the

Somerset side of the Avon.

The original site of Shirehampton farmhouse may have been where the manor

house used to be in the High Street – roughly opposite where the Co-Op now is –

till its demolition in 1936-7, and it was sometimes known as the Farm House; but it

is known that the house now called The Priory (see Priory Road) was in later times

a major estate centre too. Both of these are candidates for the site of the original

farm complex, but not what was later called Shirehampton Farm at the bottom of

Lower High Street. The whole estate was a detached part of the parish of

Westbury-on-Trym, forming part of the lands once called Bishop’s Stoke (which also

included, as a separate estate, what is now called Stoke Bishop). Westbury had been a

royal estate in the time of king Offa of Mercia, and Offa granted Bishop’s Stoke to

the church (which eventually became the cathedral) of Worcester in about 795 A.D.

It reverted to royal hands, and then in slightly murky circumstances fell into the

hands of Berkeley abbey – or rather it fell back, because they had once owned it.

The Berkeley monks gave the Bishop’s Stoke estate, among others, to king Alfred

of Wessex in 883 in exchange for certain privileges, and the king entered into an

arrangement which eventually put the land back under the control of Worcester.

The name of Shirehampton does not appear in any of these transactions, but the

fragment of the document of 883 shown on p. 13 contains a description in Old

English of the boundaries of the land, which unmistakably include those of

Shirehampton: …. of afene streame eft uppe þæt in hricgleage þonn of

hrycgleage þæt on penpau of penpau þæt in sæferne stream …. (‘From the

river Avon again up to Ridge Wood, then from Ridge Wood to Penpole, from

Penpole to the river Severn’).

13

Detail of British Library manuscript Cotton Tiberius A. xiii, folio 51v (downloaded in 2008

from a University of Toronto web-page no longer available).

The relevant passage is in lines 3-5. I have expanded the abbreviations in the transcription above.

Shirehampton was separated from the rest of Westbury by a strip of Henbury

parish, namely the Weston estate (‘west farm’), which was divided into Lawrence

Weston and King’s Weston, in part of which Sea Mills now also stands.

The first part of Shirehampton’s name is more of a problem. It was once thought

to be first recorded in a manuscript of William of Malmesbury’s history of

Glastonbury abbey, copied in the thirteenth century, but that claims to reproduce a

document written as early as 854 A.D. In the history, the name is written

Scearamtone, and it has been suggested that this is Shirehampton. But, in the original

document on which William’s account is based, we find the place-name written

Cerawycombe, among a list of names from further south-west, and it is not clear

whether William’s Scearamtone is a very bad miscopying of Cerawycombe, or

something worse: a forgery supporting an attempted land-grab by Glastonbury

abbey. A mistake seems more likely, since Shirehampton did not have its current

full name at this period; it was still just Hampton. So this name in William’s account

probably does not refer to Shirehampton at all. Even if it did, his spelling looks

faulty, too, because we do not find another spelling without an <n> in the middle

till 1486, when Sherehampton appears.

In later medieval documents, we find Shernyhampton in 1325, 1394, and 1420,

Shernhampton in 1410 and Sherynhampton in 1440. These spellings suggest that the

first part of the name is from the medieval version of Old English scearn ‘dung’ or

scearnig ‘dungy’. Sherehampton is found in 1486, and this, Sheerhampton, Sherhampton, or

Sheerehampton are the most usual spellings from 1570 until the later 17th century,

but Shyrehampton and the modern spelling Shirehampton appear occasionally: in 1551,

14

1570 and 1672. Edward Creed wrote his will at Sheershampton in 1647. This all

makes it pretty clear that the new name of the place was pronounced “Sheer

Hampton”, and that the pronunciation with “Shire-” must be a more recent twist

in the story based on the minority of spellings in the record. It may be very local;

while Shirehampton was regularly being inscribed on memorials in the village in the

18th century, it was being written Shirhampton on those in Westbury church.

Taken all together, these spellings suggest that the name may have been

deliberately changed. The first word, which became sharn(y), was falling out of use

in 1500 or so. It is mainly confined to Scotland after the seventeenth century, and

it may have been replaced in our place-name because people came to consider it

both alien and unpleasant. The newly-developed form of the name seems to

include sheer, which people may have felt was an improvement, but this word did

not mean ‘thin and delicate’ or ‘clear or pure’ until nearly a century after the 1486

record, and it had no other meaning which was obviously applicable at that time.

Sheer in the sense of ‘steep’ (as in “a sheer drop”) is a new word dating only from

about 1800 and the poet Wordsworth is the first to have used it; so that is also not

what we find in the name. This opening part seems to have been changed to shire

‘county’, possibly by or on behalf of Henry VIII’s courtier Sir Ralph Sadle(i)r, into

whose sticky hands Shirehampton eventually fell after the dissolution of the

monasteries, in 1548. (It had previously belonged to Westbury College.) Although

parish clerks were still writing Sheer - or Shere- in 1700, Shire- is the form of the

name which has won out. Shire once, like sheer, also meant ‘clear or pure’, but in

that sense shire no longer existed by the sixteenth century except in some northern

and Scottish dialects.

Sharn originally meant ‘(cow-)dung’. Place-name scholars sometimes assume,

without any serious justification, that words like this could sometimes also mean

‘dirt’ more generally, or ‘mud’. If that applies here, Shirehampton could have been

named from its extensive coastal and riverside marshlands (including the site of the

later Avonmouth). Otherwise it may at some time in its history have been a farm

specialized for grazing cows, and required to provide a supply of dung to fertilize

the fields of some other manor, e.g. the main manor at Westbury, but that seems

unlikely. Carting dung for the lord of the manor was a customary service, which

means that tenants were obliged in common law to do it, so there would not have

been anything remarkable enough about doing it to create a name that referred to

it unless the stuff was to be taken somewhere else. Probably the name just meant

‘dungy’, but it may originally have implied ‘rich and fertile’ rather than ‘dirty’. Since

barnyard dung on a farm was enough to manure only about 6-10% of its land in

15

those cases where we have information, perhaps the lands of Shirehampton’s lord

of the manor were unusually well blessed among the Westbury lands in that

respect, by supporting many cattle (as well as sheep) on the marshland grazing.

When a place-name acquires a new extra element like this one, it is often to

contrast it with a nearby place in the same county that has a similar name. In this

case, the only serious candidates are Minchinhampton and Meysey Hampton, both

of which get their additions in the 13th century. By contrast, Rockhampton, a

parish only about 13 miles away, just north of Thornbury, had its “Rock” even in

its earliest mention, in Domesday book (1086), so it was less likely to provide the spur

for the renaming of our Hampton a couple of centuries later.

Shirehampton is now generally known to its inhabitants by the abbreviation Shire,

but the writer does not know since when. It may be relevant that there was a Shire

Farm in the Woodwell Road/St Bernard’s Road area in 1942. Shire Gardens

appears after World War II. The older simple form Hampton is revived in the name

of Hampton Corner.

Avonmouth

The first development here was a Bristol Corporation landing stage built in about

1860 and known as Avon’s Mouth, but the present name was used in the title of the

Port and Channel Docks Bill

(Avonmouth Dock) debated in

Parliament in early 1863. The

Avonmouth Hotel (depicted)

opened in 1865 in conjunction

with the terminus of the Bristol

Port and Pier Railway and closed

in 1926. The hotel appeared in

the 1864 prospectus as the Avon-

Mouth, and the station carried the

name of the hotel as one word.

The site of this hotel was

opposite the mouth of the Avon as it was then, some way north of its present

mouth, and the name was fully appropriate. It was successively transferred to a

nearby farm on the marshland (mapped at 6" to the mile by the Ordnance Survey

(OS) in 1879; previously Rushes Farm – a mistake for Bushes – on the OS 1" old

series map, 1807-30), then to the nucleus of the new development of housing

including the present Gloucester Road, Queen Street, East Street and Meadow

16

Street named on the 1880s OS 25" map. The new dock which was finally opened

in 1877, and this small new village, were transferred from Gloucestershire to the

City and County of Bristol in 1884, because the city owned the port. Dock workers

referred to the new place as The ’Mouth, and spoke of going from Bristol down the

’Mouth. An older hotel in this area had been called (Hooper’s) Marine Hotel at River’s

Mouth, but it was the railway’s hotel that won the battle of the names.

There are apparent mentions of Avonmouth in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle under the

years 915 or 918 (in different versions) and 1052, but the context makes clear that

the chronicler is simply referring to the mouth of the Avon, not to a named farm

or village. There is no connection with the later name except a shared accurate

description of the place.

Most of modern Avonmouth was carved out of Shirehampton parish, but along

the bank of the Severn it has expanded to include factories built in far-flung parts

of the former parishes of Henbury and Redwick & Northwick.

King’s Weston (or Kings Weston or Kingsweston) and Lawrence Weston

Within Henbury parish at the time of Domesday Book (1086) there was a settlement

in the west called Weston ‘west farm’, farmed for the king himself, which was

eventually divided into two holdings, King’s Weston and Lawrence Weston. King’s

Weston is first recorded in 1248; it still remained in the hands of the king of this

time, Henry III. Lawrence Weston appears in 1274, and was named from the

dedication of the church or chapel there, which itself was due to its connection

with the former St Lawrence’s leper hospital near Lawford’s Gate in Bristol. The

present Anglican parish church of Lawrence Weston is St Peter’s. Lawrence

Weston is widely known locally by the abbreviation El Dub.

Sea Mills

The name of Sea Mills has caused plenty of puzzlement. It would be easy to think

that it simply meant ‘sea mills’, watermills driven by the tide. There are some places

with the same name where the meaning is exactly that: by the river Camel in St

Issey in Cornwall, and on a creek close to Portsmouth. But if you wanted the tide

to turn your mill, you would not build it a quarter of a mile up such a narrow little

side-stream as the river Trym, which is where the mill was. The river Avon would

be a bad place to put a tidemill anyway because of the huge range of the tides – if

you built it in a place where the millhouse would not flood, your wheel would be

left high and dry for too much of the time, which would not be good for business:

17

unless you had one of a giant size that engineers could not have created in the

Middle Ages, and unless you could shift the Avon mud which would keep clogging

up the works. Worst of all, it is not really near the sea, even the Severn Sea. So we

should look for a different theory of the origin of the name.

Sea Mills is first recorded in a document in Latin in 1411 as molendin’ voc’ Semmille

meaning ‘mill called Semmille’, then a couple of times more in the fifteenth century

as Ceemulle and Ceemille. The most widespread idea, thanks to the place-name

specialist Hugh Smith, is that it might have meant ‘saye mill’, a mill where saye, a

kind of superior serge cloth, was made. This is what local books and web-sites now

say. Why Professor Smith, and all the other people who still support the same

suggestion, thought serge cloth was made in watermills, I have no idea. It wasn’t. It

was made in people’s living-rooms with family labour. The water-driven loom was

not invented till the late 1700s. If that were not bad enough for the theory, it is

only in 1779 that we find a spelling Say-Mills, and the earlier spellings just do not

point this way at all. The theory must be wrong.

By far the most likely is that is that the first word is seam, an old word for the load

that a single packhorse could carry. You could have a seam of grain, e.g. oats,

which in many places meant eight bushels, or a bit over 500 pounds (230 kilos), in

medieval English measures. So most probably this mill, driven by the river Trym,

was a place like most mills where grain was taken for grinding, but where there was

some limit on the amount that was taken on at one time: just one horseload.

There are some other names which seem to point in the same direction. Various

mills were called Peck Mill, including ones in Street and Charlton Adam in

Somerset. A peck was another measure, a quarter of a bushel, amounting to about

16 pounds (7 kilos) of grain.

Sea Mills was also the site of the Roman port and military station Abone (the early

form of the name of the Avon), and fields on its site had the name Portbury,

meaning something like ‘fortification by the port’ in Old English, just like Portbury

over the river in Somerset.

The River Avon

Avon is simply from the word for ‘river’ in British Celtic, the language spoken in

Britain before English. It gave its name, in the form Abone, to the Roman

settlement at Sea Mills, and it survives in the Welsh word afon, still meaning ‘river’.

Horseshoe Bend is a self-explanatory name for the great bend in the Avon south

of Shirehampton Park. For Hung Road, see below.

18

The street-names of Shirehampton

(including some other interesting local names)

A date given in a heading is a rough indication of the age of the street in question.

It may be the date of the adoption of the street by the Highways Department, and

not necessarily the date of the first buildings.

Alma Villas: see Station Road.

Antona Drive and Antona Way: see The Portway.

Austen Place (2002/3)

The reason for this name is no longer known to the agents for the developers of

these flats on the corner of The Ridge and The High Street. Perhaps it

commemorates Jane Austen because she mentions nearby King’s Weston House

and “Blaize Castle” in chapter 11 of her novel Northanger Abbey. One of her

characters calls Blaise Castle “the finest place in England”, a local compliment

worth immortalizing her here for. But there have also been ratepayers called Austin

in Westbury since at least the 17th century.

Avendall: see Barwick House.

Avonwood Close

A fancy name of about 1970 combining the river-name perhaps with that of

Woodwell Road, which runs parallel to it at its closed end.

Back Lane (lost): see St Mary’s Road.

Bank Cottages (lost): see Old Park Road.

Barracks Lane (1933)

The lane existed in the 19th century, but I have found no early name. It leads to

the former Barracks Cottages (whose site is now embedded in the trading estate in

Avonmouth Way near its junction with Third Way), which are marked by name

on an OS 6" map of 1903-4. That makes it virtually certain that the barracks in

question were those of soldiers manning the early-19th century battery close to the

19

old mouth of the Avon, which was later

converted into archery butts and rifle range.

Although the lane peters out long before it

reaches them, its name must refer to the

barracks marked next to the battery on the

oldest OS 1 map (left). The name does not commemorate the presence here

during the First World War of the Remount Depot of British and Empire cavalry,

convenient for departure from Avonmouth Docks to the Western Front. This

camp was spread widely over the flat land south and west of Penpole Point. But

the name is obviously older.

Barrow Hill Crescent and Barrow Hill Road (1928)

Built in the 1920s, Barrow Hill Road and Crescent recall Barrowhill Farm, whose

old red stone farmhouse is still standing in Grove Leaze. Between the farmhouse

and West Town Road, this farm had some fields simply called Barrow Hills, which

seems to suggest that there were once barrows or ancient burial-mounds there,

unless the word simply refers to a barrow-shaped hill. The shape of the crescent is

dictated by the presence of a worked-out claypit (in the access to which there used

to be a drill hall) and its spoil-banks, and the ground is very disturbed, making it

impossible to tell whether there really was ever a barrow there. However, the hill is

clearly discernible, and visible on recent Ordnance Survey maps as a low bump

about 25 metres in height north of the farm buildings, where Barrow Hill Crescent

stands. See also Old Barrow Hill.

Barwick House

Several sets of council dwellings erected after World War II were given (perhaps

not with great tact) the surnames of men and women responsible for collecting the

poor rate in Westbury parish in the 17th century. These include the tower block

Barwick House, Grumwell Close, and Wasborough. Other names also derive

from the Westbury poor book: Avendall, the tower block Sedgewick (House),

and Walcombe, after people who were among the payers of the poor rate, and

Rutland, after a vicar and his wife who established a charity for the parish poor.

The city housing manager Mr Harris “agreed to these names”. The dwellings form

part of the Penpole Estate. It is not really clear from the Westbury poor book

what the correct form of two of these names is: we find Avendall and Arendall, and

Grummell, Grumnell, and Grumwell. By the end of the book (1700) we usually find

Avendall and Grumwell.

20

The Batch (lost)

A lost name for The Green. Batch is a

local word whose origin is not known for

sure, but it may be a regional relative of

the word back used to mean a slope or

small hill, as in the Somerset dialect word

emmet-batch for an ant-hill. The word is

common in Somerset place-names like

Chelvey Batch.

Our Batch: an illustration from François

Baron’s “Recollections”, 1890s.

(By courtesy of Mrs Nora Roberts.)

Beachley Walk (1933)

Named after Beachley in Gloucestershire, where there was, from 1924, the Army

Apprentices School, and now the permanent headquarters of the 1st Battalion The

Rifles; it is also where the western pier of the first Severn Bridge stands.

The Bean Acre (1919)

Bane Acre was an old field-name, perhaps just meaning ‘the bean-field’. It was

recorded as Bane Acre in 1772, but what land it refers to is not clear on this map. In

1822 it was a patch of land that embraced the junction of what became Lower

High Street and Barracks Lane, but by 1841 it was an enclosed piece of land in the

angle between these ways. “Bane” is on record as an older Gloucestershire

pronunciation of bean, but it is perfectly possible that the word is really bane

meaning ‘ruin’ (as in the bane of my life). Land surrounding a road-junction is

obviously not best-quality farmland. It turns up as Bean for the first time in 1841.

There was once also a Bean Acre House here.

Bradley Avenue and Bradley Crescent (1887-8)

Bradley Crescent and Bradley Avenue were among the first streets to be developed

in “new” Shirehampton after the creation of the docks at Avonmouth, beginning

21

in about 1887-8. They carry a continuation of a name that covered several old

fields (collectively called Great Bradley): Bradley, from the Old English *brād + lēah

meaning ‘broad glade or clearing’, ‘broad wood’, obviously dates from when space

for what became the Shirehampton manor farm was first established amid the

ancient woodland which once covered England. This name is recorded from 1720.

Bradley Crescent was for long, like the field, locally just called Bradley. The name

also survives in the 18th-century Bradley House, High Street. Part of Bradley was

once known as The Donkey Field because the donkeys from Weston-super-Mare

beach used to spend the winter here.

The twin terraces of Bradley Crescent are more or less straight. But it is called a

crescent because it originally included the part of what is now Springfield Avenue

that joined the new terraces to Station Road, before the full length of Springfield

Avenue was developed as a road.

Broadleaze (1997)

A modern name, apparently meaning ‘broad meadow’. But it is not on the site of

an old field of this name. The name seems to have been borrowed from Broad Leys,

recorded in the 1840-1 Tithe Award as part of the warthland next to Broad Pill in

what is now Avonmouth. That, or part of it, was also called Wamphills (see

Preface).

Bucklewell Close (2000): see Woodwell Road.

Burford Grove: see Cotswold Estate.

Burnham Road (1926)

Possibly named after Burnham-on-Sea in Somerset, though this is uncertain; for

another Somerset name, compare Portbury Grove.

Cedar Row

Built on the plot of the demolished Oldfield House near the top of Park Hill, and

named from a conspicuous tree which is still there (November 2011).

22

Cerney Lane and Charbury Walk: see Cotswold Estate.

A current Bristol City Council standard-issue street-sign.

Chelwood Road (1929)

Probably named after Chelwood near Pensford, Somerset, seeing that Chelwood is

only a few miles from Corston in the same county and that Corston Walk leads

off this street.

Church Lane (lost; 1871)

Perhaps the footpath backing the houses on the western side of Bradley Crescent.

Church Road (about 2013)

A newly named alley beside the Cotswold Community Centre, perhaps from the

occasional use of the Centre for religious services.

Church Leaze (before 1937)

‘Church meadow’. Built on part of Chapel Paddock on which Bradley Crescent

was also laid out. The street-name is made to look ancient – it was not an actual

local field-name, unless Chapel Paddock was informally renamed by local people

using the word church when Shirehampton gained parish status in 1844 and this

new name did not appear in the records.

Churchdown Walk: see Cotswold Estate.

Clifford Gardens (1958)

23

Named after the de Clifford family who were “squires” of King’s Weston, using

the revived ancient Baron de Clifford title, from 1776-1832, before the Miles

family. It was they who first enclosed Shirehampton Common to form the Park.

By an odd coincidence, Clifford was also the surname of the owner of Sunny Hill, at

the bottom of Park Hill, in the early 1900s.

Coaley Road (1927): see Cotswold Estate.

Corston Walk (1929): see Chelwood Road.

Cotswold Estate

Planners of 20th-century mass housing developments often used names of places

in their street-names. Those of Shirehampton contain many references to other

parts of the country. Most of these are on the Cotswold Estate (first mentioned by

that name in 1937), and they mainly commemorate places in the Gloucestershire

part of the Cotswolds: Cerney, Churchdown, Coaley, Dursley, Evenlode,

Kemble, Nibley, Northleach, Stow, Stroud, and Winchcombe, along with

Burford just over the county boundary in Oxfordshire. Charbury seems to be a

mistake for Charlbury, deeper into Oxfordshire and only on the very edge of the

Cotswolds. The earliest name is Dursley Road, dating from before the First World

War, and Coaley Road and Nibley Road, referring to places close to Dursley, were

added in the inter-war period. But much of the development has taken place since

World War II, with the most recent buildings at the eastern end of the estate

replacing prefabs. The other names are suggested by the earliest ones.

The “Gloucestershire” theme was also taken up during the first developments in

the Barrow Hills area: we find Beachley and Fairford. But this “local” theme was

widened to take in a couple of Somerset places in the Bath area, Chelwood and

Corston, not to mention the North Somerset Portbury and maybe the more

distant Burnham.

Cottonwick Close (2015)

This newly developed close behind The Lamplighters pub is named from a

description of the pub’s builder in Chilcott’s Bristol guide of 1851. Mr Toy is called

“a contractor for lighting half the parishes in Bristol”, and a “worthy distributor of

oil and cotton-wick” (for oil-lamps).

Crowley Park, houses in St Mary’s Road

Perhaps named after the same person as Crowley Way.

24

Crown Terrace: see West Town Road.

The Daisy Field

At the corner of The Portway and Station Road, this open space had spoil

deposited on it when the adjacent station goods yard was being excavated, hence

the steep bank part-way along it. The field was also used in the 1920s by the

contractor who built The Portway, and a siding from the station yard is shown

leading into it, across Station Road, connecting with the contractor’s own works

railway. Oddly, such a line still appears on an OS map of 1970 (6"), which I cannot

explain. The field is shown as a “recreation ground” on the corresponding map in

1974. It was politicized in 2010 when Bristol City Council wanted to sell off the

land for development and reverted to calling it Portway Tip, despite its own

signboard labelling it The Daisy Field (p. 23). I suppose it gained its current name

from the marguerites in the bank on its northern side. The favoured local name is

of uncertain age, but it was used by Ethel Thomas and others in 2002.

If the original plan for the Garden Suburb had been completed around 1910-4,

trim houses of the kind seen in Passage Leaze would have appeared on The

Daisy Field; see also Grove Leaze.

Dursley Road (1905-6): see Cotswold Estate.

Ellenborough Lane (lost; on some street-maps till 1998): see Pembroke Road.

Elm Villas: see Station Road.

Ermine Way: see The Portway.

Evenlode Gardens: see Cotswold Estate.

Fairford Road (1928)

From the east Gloucestershire market town.

25

Flowers Cottages, at the northern end of Meadow Grove (1900s or earlier?;

lost)

These cottages, close to the Bank Cottages or Row Houses, were there before

Meadow Grove existed as such. There was a family called Flower in Shirehampton

from the mid-19th century, so the name is probably from the surname.

Gas Lane (lost)

A street of this name at The Lamplighters is noted in a document of 1893. The gas

company owned land south of the railway and covering what is now the western

end of Dursley Road, and that is where I suspect Gas Lane was.

Gower Court

The reason for the name of this development near to the Powder House is not

known. Probably it recalls the peninsula in South Wales, a popular mass tourist

destination for Bristolians in the mid-20th century. (If so, does it also recall the

Campbell’s tourist paddle-steamer Glen Gower that used to ply on the river between

the wars, with its sisters the Glen Avon and the Glen Usk?) It could be from a

surname, but that is locally uncommon.

Grainger Court

Grainger Court, like the local Grainger Players, takes its name from Harry

Grainger, a well-known youth leader in

the 1940s and 50s.

The Green

A self-explanatory name for the heart of

the ancient village. On the southern side

was a terrace of four Georgian houses

simply called The Terrace, whose position

is now occupied by part of The

Parade. See also The Batch.

Grove Leaze or Groveleaze (before

1916)

Grove Leaze crosses the position of an old field called Long Grove; the trees of the

long grove must have disappeared early. For leaze, see Passage Leaze. A separate

Grove Pill is also found in local documents. Grove Leaze was planned as part of the

26

same estate as Passage Leaze, but the OS 25" map (1916) shows it forking into

North Grove Leaze and South Grove Leaze west of Passage Leaze. This was maybe

even staked out, but it never finally happened. Modern Grove Leaze runs straight

between the two intended “prongs”.

The image is from a Hepworth postcard showing the junction of Grove Leaze and Portway in the

late 1920s; note the white wooden “Grove Leaze” street-sign on its post.

Grumwell Close (1965; lost)

Now renamed Oaktree Court. See also Barwick House.

Hampton Corner

These flats stand on the plot of the former Priory House, demolished in 1972. The

name contains the older simple name of Shirehampton itself.

Hermitage Close (1966)

This commemorates the demolished house called The Hermitage and the adjacent

Hermitage Cottages, which fronted onto the High Street. It is not known for certain

when or why the house got its name. It was possibly suggested quite late in its

existence by the presence of the old tithe barn across the road, locally believed to

be associated with a priory and therefore vaguely religious and medieval, or by the

church directly opposite. Or perhaps the owner wanted to emphasize his or her

wish for privacy.

The house was apparently Victorian with an earlier core. If the name goes back to

the early 19th century like the lost house, as seems possible, it may be because

hermitages were fashionable in ideas about landscape at that period. They were put

in the wilder parts of private parklands as places of solitude where the owner and

his guests could “commune with the Forms of nature”, to use the poet

Wordsworth’s phrase. Wordsworth describes a meeting with a “solitary” or hermit,

he wrote a poem about a hermitage, solitude often features in his poems, and his

poem “The Prelude” was to have been a prelude to a longer poem called “The

Recluse”; is it too much to connect this house-name with his stay at Chapel House,

across the road, in 1798? Even if it is too much, Wordsworth’s ideas lasted long

enough to have influenced a later owner.

The High Street

27

A widespread name for a main commercial street. It is often uncertain when it was

first applied, but it is often found for the first time in the 15th-16th centuries, i.e.

after town guild records first began to be kept in English. Its age in Shirehampton

is uncertain; in 1701, the Bristol Corporation of the Poor acquired property in

“Shirehampton street”, so it did not get its present name till later. The part of it

below Old Barrow Hill, which descends towards Avonmouth, has become since

World War II (or earlier) Lower High Street. See also Shirehampton Road.

Home Ground (1999)

Home Ground was a field-name which recurred several times locally, always for the

enclosure closest to a farmhouse. Here, it was the large paddock closest to the

house called Wylam House after a place in Northumberland, which was renamed

with more local relevance as The Wyelands just before its rebuilding in 1904-5, and

is now called The Wylands.

Hung Road

This was originally called Hung Road Lane, the lane that led to Hung Road, and

Hung Road itself was the name of a stretch of the river Avon, first mentioned in

documents of the early 16th century. It was a roadstead or sheltered anchorage.

Because the huge range of the tide here did not always permit sailing ships to reach

the historic port of Bristol, they had to wait for the water to rise until there was

enough depth to make the journey, towed for centuries by the “hobblers” or teams

of oarsmen from Pill on the Somerset side. While waiting, they needed to be

moored, and most local writers on the subject seem to think that that is how Hung

Road got its name: as the tide fell, the ships were left suspended or “hung” and

kept upright by ropes from their masts to bollards or rings above them on the

riverbank. Others think they were simply left to rest as the tide fell, and were said

to be “hung” as they hit bottom on the mud and maybe tilted over. The first idea

sounds more plausible. But somehow it seems not quite right – Hanging Road

28

would be expected; it was not the road which was hung but the ships. Perhaps the

best interpretation is ‘roadstead where ships need to be hung (rather than

anchored)’. The name contrasts with King Road (see King Road Avenue).

The long-gone Hung Road Cottages, by the river, included the Lamb and Flag public

house. They also seem to have been called Myrtle Cottages (see Myrtle Drive).

Jim O’Neil House: see Kilminster Road.

Kemble Gardens: see Cotswold Estate.

Kilminster Road

From the surname of a local farming family, originally deriving from

Kidderminster in Worcestershire. From the 19th century, they ran a small farm,

rather oddly called T Farm (apparently from the shape of the orchard plot

adjoining it). The site of the farmhouse is now buried under First Way. On one of

their fields was built Jim O’Neil House, sheltered accommodation named in 1979

after a Scot who worked at the former Portishead power station and was a

prominent union activist, a member of the executive of the Electrical Trades

Union who was later an elected local Labour city councillor.

King’s Weston Avenue or Kingsweston Avenue or Kings Weston Avenue

(1919)

An early example (soon after the First World War) of council building, named

from the estate of the local great house in Henbury parish, in the direction of

which this road leads. Much of the estate’s land was in Shirehampton and in what

became Avonmouth. The later squires were great benefactors of the area, and in

particular were responsible for developing the port of Avonmouth. The current

spelling varies between one word and two, even on street-signs opposite one

another.

29

Lamplighters Marsh

Lamplighters’ Hotel from the Station Road side, in the 1930s. Source:

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2363/2056127357_1372db07ac.jpg (Creative

Commons 2)

Takes its name from the house originally called Lamplighter’s Hall. This was a

former ferry-house referred to as “the Old Passage House (now built new by Mr

Swetman)”, indicating that it was rebuilt for the businessman Joseph Swetman, in

the 1760s; it was offered for sale as a public house in 1768. Amongst Swetman’s

trades was the supply of lamp-oil to several Bristol parishes; oil obviously ran in his

blood because Swetman descendants were lighthouse-keepers in Canada in the

early 19th century. The house was later Lamplighters’ Hotel, and latterly just The

Lamplighter’s, The Lamplighters, or, unofficially, The Lamps. The modern official area

of the “marsh” stretches right up to embrace The Daisy Field, which was never

marshland, and also the playing-field formerly called Brick Yard Ground, as well as

the true former marshland downriver from the pub.

Lamplighters appears on 19th-century maps as a name for the whole group of older

houses near the pub, and the stretch of what is now Station Road there is

occasionally Lamplighters’ Lane.

The Lawns

The Lawns is an example of a house-

name which has become a street-

name (or rather the name of a group

of dwellings), but the name of the

now-demolished large house (The

Lawn) comes from some local field-

or paddock-names which were there

before it was. The word lawn

originally meant an open glade in

forest land, but came to be used in

the names of less wild places used

for recreation. The house also gives

its name to the surviving Lawn

Cottages, dated 1629 on a datestone

30

but not looking their “age”.

Layfield Allotments

The name preserves or revives that of the Lay Common Field recorded in 1745,

Lays Field in the 1840-1 Tithe Award, though most of that lay north of where the

railway now runs, i.e. where Tynings Field now is and further north still. Lay

might be the old word meaning ‘fallow, uncultivated’.

Lower High Street

Self-explanatory. See High Street. First so named officially as late as the 1954

revision of the OS 25" map, but the words can be seen on a postcard of the early

1900s, maybe not as a name but just meaning ‘the lower part of High Street’.

Markham Close (1945)

A development of prefabs after the Second World War. Probably commemorating

Martcombe (also spelt Markham, as in Markham Farm) across the Avon between

Easton-in-Gordano and Abbots Leigh, which is visible above Pill from this site;

but there are other possibilities, including a surname. The prefabs were demolished

in 1979, and eventually replaced by a park-and-ride site.

Mead Close

A development off Penpole Place, said by Veronica Smith to be named after a

committee member of the Broadcasting Employees’ Housing Association who

built it.

Meadow Grove (1927)

There is a field called The Meadow along the Avon near here on the Tithe Award

map of 1841, but this street-name was probably chosen simply to sound pleasant.

It was mapped as Meadow Road in 1938, but that may just have been a mishearing.

Merriman’s Road (1919, but completed much later)

This surname is on record in Westbury, and known elsewhere in Gloucestershire,

but it is uncertain why it was used here.

Myrtle Drive

31

From the still-standing house dating

from 1796 called Myrtle Hall and its

vanished Myrtle Farm by the river, which

presumably takes its name from the

sweet-smelling

plant sacred to Aphrodite/Venus and

serving as a symbol of love in the

ancient Mediterranean cultures. There is

also a Myrtle Cottage in Pembroke Road.

They tie in with the 19th century’s

fashionable love of evergreen plants.

Nibley Road (1935)

See Cotswold Estate. The former

125 Nibley Road was the first

Bristol Aeroplane Company

“Airoh” prefabricated house ever

built in Britain after World War II.

Nigel Park (1962)

A developer or builder is free to name streets, within certain limits. This is named

after Nigel, son of the builder Tappenden, whose yard was in Stoke Bishop.

Northleach Walk: see Cotswold Estate.

Oaktree Court (was Grumwell Close (1965); contains Avendall, Rutland,

Wasborough)

Grumwell Close (name lost, but still occasionally cited in addresses) enshrines a

surname found in Shirehampton since the 17th century, often spelt Grummell. For

the individual buildings mentioned, see under Barwick House. Part of this area, at

the end of Grumwell Close east of the underground reservoir and now covered by

the latest Oasis Academy Brightstowe playing-fields, is marked as Shirehampton West

32

Camp on a map of 1954 (25"). The close is now called Oaktree Court, and there are

in fact two oaks at the turning area (see picture), now savagely cut back (2012).

Oare Lane (1711; lost)

Noted in 18th- and 19th-century documents, associated with land called The

Oare(s), probably from an Old English word meaning ‘banks’. See the Preface.

Old Barrow Hill

Leads to the former Barrow Hill Farm, but it is not quite clear why it is “old”.

Perhaps it is a simple recognition of the fact that this road, at the High Street end,

had a short terrace of three houses already by 1904, by contrast with Barrow Hill

Road. But the whole thoroughfare, Barrow Hill Road plus Old Barrow Hill, is

called Barrow Hill Road on the OS map of 1921 (6").

Old Park Road (1927)

This name preserves the name of a field called The Park shown on the Tithe Award

map of 1841, on the south side of the High Street, between West Town Road and

what is now Old Barrow Hill. It was never a formal park, but by the end of the

19th century it included allotments, and there was a Long Park on the opposite side

of the High Street (Long Paddock in 1772). Park originally meant ‘enclosed ground

stocked with deer for hunting’ and then also ‘large open area for recreation’. In

several parts of England, the word came to be used for small market gardens and

allotment grounds. Before the new houses were built, the ground called The Park

was shown as an orchard on the Ordnance Survey 6" map of 1888. Most of the

orchard had gone by 1904, and allotment gardens are marked there on the revision

of 1921. The Park lay behind a row of cottages which used to be called The Row

Houses or The Bank or Bank Cottages, and which were replaced by bungalows (strictly

speaking, in Lower High Street), shortly after the Second World War. These

points provide the reason for Old Park Road: it is the road built on the “old park”,

in whichever sense. Documents of the 1930s mention “Old Park and New Park

Allotments”. The resemblance to Park Road is accidental.

Old Quarry Rise (1962) and Old Quarry Road (1925)

Named from limestone quarries in Penpole Ridge here, belonging to the King’s

Weston estate, which provided stone for many local walls and some buildings.

Orchard Crescent

33

An orchard is enclosed by the

crooked line of this street on the

1841 Tithe Award map. Until it

was developed, this appears to

have maintained the name Back

Lane which formerly attached to

the whole of St Mary’s Road. The

line of Orchard Crescent was cut

off when a new, more southerly,

alignment for St Mary’s Road was

created in the 1920s.

Orchard Leaze in Park Road

(2011)

A development near, but not on, the site of a former orchard (of Park Hill Farm?)

For leaze, see Passage Leaze; there was no field named leaze here.

The Orchards

May be self-explanatory, but there was a trader in the adjacent High Street in the

early 20th century called Edward Orchard, a saddler.

The Parade

A word often used to mean ‘row of shops’, especially in 20th-century planners’

terminology, as here; originally a road where the moneyed classes would ride or

drive in order to be on display. See also The Green.

Park Hill (about 1905) and Park Road (1904)

Named from Shirehampton Park; Park Hill continues the name of Park Hill

Farm, whose 18th-century farmhouse still stands at its southern end. The two

streets appear on 19th-century maps. Park Hill leads into Shirehampton Road,

with which it formed and still forms the main road to Clifton and beyond, and the

only one before The Portway was built in the 1920s. Park Road was on the map

certainly by 1840, and had its name by 1904 at the latest. It was originally just a

lane leading off The Green for a short distance, petering out into a footpath into

the Lower Park. It was not a through road of any description. Apparently it was

earlier called Scott’s Lane, after the family who once ran the former Greyhound inn,

destroyed by bombing in 1941. But some early records (from 1871) refer to

properties including The Greyhound as being in Park Place, which must refer to the

34

group of early houses at the Green end of Park Road and other demolished ones.

The modern road was laid parallel with part of the original lane to connect with

The Portway in about 1926.

Park Hill includes a terrace of three dwellings once called Claremont Villas,

including a common Victorian name for houses. It commemorates a house in

Esher, Surrey, bought by the Earl of Clare in 1714 and named from his title, with a

punning reference to one of several places called Clermont in France. This house

was especially in the news in the early 19th century when occupied by Princess

Charlotte, and was much visited by her cousin the future Queen Victoria, who had

a life interest in it. The name was therefore often copied in street- and lesser

house-names in the 19th century.

Passage Leaze (1907)

There is a reference in 1794 to “Lower Passage Leaze in the common mead”, and

an earlier simpler reference in 1711. Passage Leaze was a large open area stretching

from the present Springfield Avenue towards the Avon. That accounts for its

name: it stretched as far as The Lamplighters Hall inn, where the ferry used to

cross to Pill, and passage was the word used in old Gloucestershire for ‘ferry’. Leaze

is also a local word, meaning ‘meadow’, and it appears in several local names which

have since become street-names, like Church Leaze, or have provided a model for

new street-names, like Grove Leaze. The street was one of the earliest expressions of

the “garden suburb” movement. Planning started in 1907, and building took place

1909-14; the houses have some features typical of the Arts and Crafts movement.

Pembroke Avenue (1932) and Pembroke Road

The older street, Pembroke Road, an ancient lane, was part of what was previously

called Back Lane, a typical name for an access lane parallel with a village high street.

In Pembroke Road there used to be a row of cottages called Ellenborough Place and

Ellenborough Lane, no doubt named after the first (and only) Earl of Ellenborough

who was a Tory politician and controversial Governor-General of India from

1842-4. Pembroke Road and Avenue themselves probably commemorate the

prominent Earls of Pembroke, but an actual Shirehampton connection is yet to be

discovered. The landowners of King’s Weston were Tories, and the street-name

probably commemorates the 13th or 14th Earl, both Tory politicians in late

Victorian and Edwardian times. (The dissolute and exiled 12th Earl is unlikely to

have inspired the name.) Ellenborough and Pembroke are also place-names, but it is

normally the aristocratic titles taken from them that inspire street- and house-

35

names before the general use of place-names for streets on new estates after the

First World War. There seems to be no connection with the Pembroke Colleges in

Oxford or Cambridge.

My best guess is that the name of Back Lane was replaced by that of a house

standing in it. Ethel Thomas mentions a Pembroke Villa, perhaps named after the

11th or 13th Earl, which is the present 2 Pembroke Road.

Sign on a segment of railing that survived melting down for munitions in World War II.

Penlea Court (1972)

An infill development, named after the large house on the site dating from about

1760. The name itself is obscure; it might commemorate Penlee Head in Rame,

Cornwall, though there are similar minor names elsewhere. On the other hand, it

might be due to the fact that it was, loosely speaking, between Penpole House and

Bradley House.

Penpole Avenue (1905), Penpole Close (1955), Penpole Lane (ancient way),

Penpole Park (1990s), and Penpole Place (1955)

These rather scattered streets all contain the ancient name of the ridge which

shelters Shirehampton on the north. It was named in British, the Celtic language of

Britain before the English invasion, as *pennos pāgī, which by the time of the

invasion would have become *penn pǭɣ, a natural source for the English name.

This must have referred

originally to the viewpoint

at the tip of the ridge,

Penpole Point, for it

means ‘head or end of the

country’; the second word

is related to the county-

name Powys in Wales. The

view is today obscured by

trees and shrubbery, but

earlier pictures show a

spectacular wide panorama

past Portishead, into

Monmouthshire and well

36

up the Severn. The name is the oldest-recorded name in the area, because it

appears as pen pau in a ninth-century document relating to the boundaries of a

detached part of Westbury parish (see Preface). Later, it seems the second part was

confused with the English word poll, also meaning ‘head’ (as in poll tax). Penpole

Lane skirts the ridge on its southern flank. Penpole Avenue is one of the earliest

streets in the late-19th century expansion of the village. Penpole Close is on the

site of a vanished large house called Pen Pole, which took its name directly from the

ridge and its end. Penpole Place may earlier have been called Steepy Fields, a

name currently attached to a modern house there. Penpole Park is a recent (post-

1992) street and name.

Penpole appears, through a common misunderstanding, as Pinfold or Penfold, in some

documents, e.g. one recording the beating of the bounds in 1790 and an act of

Parliament in 1811.

The view justifies the name: the view from Penpole Point (from a painting dated 1904, artist

unknown), published in Shire (June 2008) by courtesy of Anthony W. Mitchell.

Penpole Estate

Penpole Estate is the name given to the City Council estate which developed around

The Ridge, including Grumwell Close and the buildings there, Barwick House

and Sedgewick House, as well as The Lawns.

The name Penpole was used after the First World War for new council housing

(schedule 1925), alongside Shirehampton. The exact distinction is not clear, but Old

Quarry Road was on Penpole Estate, so the dividing line was probably Lower

37

High Street. More recently, Penpole seems to mean the area described above,

around The Ridge but still north of (Lower) High Street, which was developed 30

years later.

Portbury Grove (1927) and Portbury Walk (1927)

Named for Portbury in Somerset, just across the Avon from here and a little

downriver; compare Burnham Road. Portbury was also an ancient name for fields

in Sea Mills where foundations of Roman buildings were excavated in the 1920s

(see Preface), but I guess that that probably did not give rise to the street-names.

Portway or The Portway (1919)

Bristol’s planners had a neat idea when they conceived and built a new main road

connecting the city to the docks at Avonmouth between 1919 and 1926: they

called it The Portway, ‘the way to the port’. But in doing this, they reused a name

with a long history. Portway is a name of Anglo-Saxon origin meaning ‘the way to

the (market-) town’, which is used in various parts of England for important early

tracks serving as long-distance routes, especially Roman roads, and especially the

one from London to Dorchester and on to Weymouth. A factor influencing the

choice of name must have been the unearthing of the remains of the Roman dock

at Sea Mills by the construction work for The Portway, as well as the foundations

of a Roman building which can still be seen exposed on the corner of Sea Mills

Lane and The Portway.

Using an ancient name for a new road was an idea that could also be drawn on

when naming other local streets. So in the shadow of the elevated section of the

M5, and just off The Portway, we have Ermine Way, Watling Way, Stane Way,

Maiden Way, and Akeman Way – Ermine Way and Watling Way (1956) in

Shirehampton and the others in Avonmouth (1955). Following the Roman theme

of The Portway, they commemorate the Roman roads Ermin Way or Street

(Gloucester – Silchester in Hampshire) and maybe also Ermine Street (London –

York), Watling Street (A2 and A5 Dover – Wroxeter in Shropshire), Stane Street

(London – Chichester), Maiden Way (approaching Carvoran on Hadrian’s Wall in

Cumbria) and Akeman Street (London – Cirencester), and they are all tied together

by the theme word way, which replaces the original word in some of the names. In

the same group of streets is Pilgrims’ Way (commemorating the long-distance

track along the ridge of the North Downs). The reason for Leeming Way (1955)

is more obscure, but Leeming is a village in North Yorkshire astride a Roman road,

Dere Street, which forms part of the A1, which was locally called Leeming Lane or

38

Street. Antona Court and Antona Drive belong here too, but for the wrong

reason. Antona is a place-name found in one manuscript of the works of the

Roman historian Tacitus. In 1920, during the building of The Portway, the amateur

historian Arthur Savory published a book called Grain and chaff from an English

manor, in which he wrongly guessed that this Antona might be Aldington near

Evesham in Worcestershire, on a Roman road (Ryknild Street) which headed for

Bourton on the Water. So it was probably included among the “Roman” street-

names of Shirehampton simply because it was in the news.

Council development of the north side of The Portway itself took place from

1927-30, starting at the Avonmouth end, with private housing around 1930 on the

south side between Station Road and Valerian Close. Ermine Way, Watling Way,

Akeman Way, Leeming Way, Maiden Way, Pilgrims’ Way, Antona Drive, and Stane

Way are made up of BISF steel-framed houses built from 1947 onwards, and there

are some other houses of this type in Avonmouth Road, St Mary’s Road, West

Town Road, The Portway, Portview Road, Catherine Street, Page’s Mead and

Marsh Street. Where a street of BISF houses was entirely new, it was given a

“Roman” name.

See also the separate entry for Watling Way.

Powder House Court

A new (2009-10) development of houses on an old prefab site in Old Barrow

Hill. It commemorates the Merchant Venturers’ gunpowder store, built before

1769, whose cottage and quay still exist by the Avon just downriver from

Horseshoe Bend.

There is or was an old stone dated 1770, lost in the undergrowth on The Portway,

which reads “ ... P.H. Bristol” (the first letter is worn away and the <B> also lost).

It has been suggested that this may stand for “(???) Powder House”, and belong on

the boundary of the land originally associated with the Powder House. In that case,

it may well have been moved more than once because of railway and road

construction. However, I wonder if it is really “ST.P.H.” for St Peter’s Hospital, the

Bristol almshouse which owned land in Shirehampton in the late 18th century. A

raised <T> seems visible to me on the picture in Ethel Thomas’s The continuing story

of Shirehampton.

Priory Gardens and Priory Road (1906)

39

Priory Gardens is

off the High Street.

Nearly 300 years

ago, the

Gloucestershire

scholar Sir Robert

Atkyns

misunderstood an

entry in Domesday

book and concluded

that the Abbey of

Our Lady at

Cormeilles in

Normandy must

have had a daughter house or priory in Shirehampton. Domesday says that

Cormeilles had a priory at “Chire”. Some historians suspected as early as the 1870s

that Atkyns was not right. They had proved by 1913 that “Chire” was really the

small village of Kyre near Tenbury Wells in Worcestershire. The monks of

Cormeilles had all their properties west of the Severn, at Chepstow, Newent, Kyre,

and near Bromyard, and had never owned land at Shirehampton. Unfortunately

this correction went unnoticed in Shirehampton. The house which became the

vicarage in 1889 has some medieval features inside it, and it was widely believed

that they must have been remnants of the original non-existent priory. It had

already been renamed The Priory by 1883. This house ceased to be the vicarage in

1951, and when it was sold off in 1972 a small infill housing estate was built in the

garden, which is now Priory Gardens. There is also Priory Road linking Springfield

Road and Severn Road, and there was once Priory House (61 Pembroke Road,

demolished in 1972), supposedly also in the priory’s grounds.

The Priory today.

In the 1960s, a piece of stone from the alleged priory was taken to Cormeilles and

exchanged for a carved fragment of the ruined French abbey which is now

mounted in St Mary’s church, but sadly it is there under false pretences.

40

There is a local belief that the fifteenth-century converted Tithe Barn (“Tythe

Barn”) next to Priory Gardens is a building of the supposed priory, but it could

really just be the barn of the old manor of Shirehampton, whose farmhouse was no

doubt the Manor House on the opposite side of the High Street or perhaps The

Priory itself. If it really was a tithe barn, it would have been there to receive the

farm produce due to Westbury College, which owned the tithes of Shirehampton

until the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1544. (The Sadleir family received the

tithes of Shirehampton after the Dissolution; they must have passed into other

private hands sometime after the Sadleir family’s interest ceased about 1664, but

they were in the hands of a clergyman in 1841.)

The story that the house called The Priory was an old religious house was probably

sparked off by the fact mentioned above that there is medieval structure within the

existing building. But there is nothing to connect it to a specific medieval religious

house. On Isaac Taylor’s map of 1772, the grounds of what became The Priory are

labelled St Peter’s Hospital, which evidently held land adjacent as well because

several fields are said to belong to St Peter’s, including the one containing the Tithe

Barn. This is St Peter’s Hospital in Bristol, also known as The (Bristol)

Corporation of the Poor, and also as The Mint, founded in 1696. The Corporation

acquired a “mansion house” in Shirehampton in 1701 from a private individual, Mr

Page, and if Taylor’s later map represents their interest correctly, the “mansion

house” is not the manor-house but The Priory, and the Tithe Barn must be

included among its “barns, stables, and out-houses”. St Peter’s must still have

owned it in 1790; lands in Shirehampton belonging to The Mint are mentioned

several times in documents of that year and 1797.

41

The Ridge

On the south side of Penpole Ridge, up to the end of which it runs.

Rising Sun Apartments, in Pembroke Road (2009-10)

Converted from the former pub of that name.

Riverside Close

Built in the early 1980s in the grounds of the former Powder House, the Merchant

Venturers’ magazine (gunpowder store) on the bank of the Avon (see Powder

House Court).

The Row Houses (lost): see Old Park Road.

The Rush Pool

A former pond on Shirehampton Road, in the Park, where horses, and cattle being

driven on the hoof from Avonmouth, could drink; now filled in but marked by a

plaque on a nearby wall. Rushes must have grown there.

Rutland: see Barwick House.

Ryeleaze (2010)

42

A name not directly continuing the ancient field-name on the spot as many names

in ‐leaze are: this was built on the fields Home and Lower Close of Myrtle Farm.

But there really was a Rye Leaze nearby: a pasture sown with rye-grass (Lolium

perenne), a rich fodder grass regarded as too coarse for modern lawns, but which

was highly regarded by the agricultural improvers of the 18th century.

St Bernard’s Road (1931)

A Roman Catholic parish of St Bernard (of Clairvaux) was established at

Shirehampton in 1903, and its dedication eventually became attached to St

Bernard’s Road and to the primary school in Station Road. St Bernard (1090-1153)

was a monastic reformer, initiated the cult of Mary, persecuted the scholar Peter

Abelard, and preached the Second Crusade.

St Mary’s Road (1931) and St Mary’s Walk (1929)

The former was previously part of – or most of – Back Lane, and it kept the old

name till the 1920s (see also Orchard Crescent and Pembroke Road). It is now

named from the church dedication. There had been a chapel in Shirehampton

since the 16th century and it became a full parish in 1844. The original chapel, in

existence by 1510, may have been dedicated to St Michael as it was in 1848

according to Samuel Lewis, but he may have been out of date by a few years. The

change of dedication to the Virgin Mary may have come with the building of the

new place of worship in 1827, or with full parish status in 1844.

The church’s previous status was remembered in Chapel House in the High Street,

which used to stand where the Co-Op now is and was rented by Dorothy and

William Wordsworth in 1798. The name of the meadow nearest the church was

picked up in the street-name Church Leaze, but the land was Chapel Paddock

before that.

St Tecla Close (2011)

The name of this newly-built street commemorates the small rock in the Severn off

Beachley which can more or less be seen from the site. It must be inspired by the

fact that Beachley Walk is nearby. The name of the rock has varied over time

between St Twrog, St Tryak and St Treacle. The Welsh saint’s name Tecla appears on

the rock for the first time as late as 1830.

The Savoy, in Station Road (2003)

43

A name for the flats built on the site of the old Savoy cinema. The name of this

chain commemorates the famous Savoy Theatre in London, which was built on a

site off The Strand originally granted to a 13th-century Duke of Savoy, on which

the Savoy Chapel still stands.

Scott’s Lane: see Park Road.

Sedgewick House: see Barwick House.

Severn Road (between 1904-20)

From the river, apparently for no special reason since it cannot be seen from here.

Severn Way

This is a national waymarked long-distance walking trail which meanders through

Shirehampton: along Penpole Ridge, down The Ridge and Lower High Street,

then along West Town Road, and finally along the north bank of the Avon in the

direction of Bristol city centre. It also enters Avonmouth from the north, and

follows the railway, eventually emerging into Lawrence Weston Road before

linking up on Penpole Ridge with the Shirehampton sector.

Shamrock Villas, in the High Street

A short terrace next to Waverley Road, named from the symbol of Ireland,

popularly thought to represent the Holy Trinity; there are three villas in the row.

Shire Gardens (1959)

Contains the present shortened name of the village used by many residents.

Despite its adoption by Bristol City Council in 1959, the earliest clear evidence for

the roadway I have seen is on a map labelled in Russian derived from Soviet spy

satellite imagery dating from 1974 (interesting also for being the earliest to mark

the nature reserve (zapovednik) here; unfortunately, that’s really the playing-fields

south of Avonmouth Road). The name Shire Gardens appears on maps after about

1970.

Shirehampton Park

Now also the name of the golf club which has its course in the southern half of the

Park. Partly in Shirehampton and partly in King’s Weston tithing of Henbury

parish, this park was originally the Little Park of King’s Weston House (the Great

Park being the one which sloped down to what is now the site of the Lawrence

Weston estate). The Little Park, bisected by Shirehampton Road, was created in

44

roughly its present form in the mid-18th century. The golf club was founded in

1904, and the part of the Little Park which hosted it was donated by Philip Napier

Miles to the National Trust in 1918.

Shirehampton Road

The track from Clifton was widened in 1704 so that wheeled vehicles could use it,

which resulted in increasing numbers of well-off visitors to the fashionable spots

that King’s Weston and Shirehampton had become in the later 18th century. The

section of the road through Shirehampton Park, being on the private property of

the lords of King’s Weston, was a private road, and the three lodge houses built for

the men or women who manned the gates are still in existence. Most of this road,

private or public, was eventually turnpiked around 1760 (as far as the Pill ferry in

1762; it was all called “the new road” in 1789), but its turnpike status was abolished

in 1867, as with all other toll-roads in the Bristol area. The iron “milestones” that

can still be seen along the road probably date from around 1762. The lodge houses

remain, and gates protected the road through the park till the early 20th century.

This entire road was naturally called Shirehampton Road, but the same name was also

used for the road into the marshes which was a continuation of the High Street

and which eventually became Avonmouth Road. Where it passed between the

houses and shops of the village, it was called Shirehampton Street (see The High

Street), in a typical rural English naming-pattern.

Springfield Avenue (1911) and Springfield Lawns

Springfield Avenue recalls a

field and the house built in it

in the early 19th century,

both called Springfield. No

spring is marked in it on old

maps, but there is a pump

marked beside the house.

The new development called

Springfield Lawns was built in

the extensive garden of this

house in 1978.

Station Road

The road leads from the

45

village centre to the station (originally also the headquarters) of the Bristol Port and

Pier Railway, opened in 1865 and still open.

The houses on the west side between Springfield Avenue and Pembroke

Avenue formed, with Springfield House, a row still separated from the rest of

Shirehampton by open ground in the 1880s; they included Alma Villas (after the

Crimean War battle of 1854) and Elm Villas. The street-name was eventually

extended in scope to take in the row of older houses beyond the railway, at

Lamplighters, previously known as Lamplighter’s Lane.

Steepy Fields

Now a house in Penpole Place (which is certainly steep as streets go around here),

formerly perhaps a name for the land itself. The word steepy is occasionally found in

literature from the 16th century onwards.

Stolen Paradise (lost)

Not a scene from austerity Shirehampton.

During the Second World War, many temporary camps for the use of the armed

forces sprang up. At the end of Grumwell Close, east of the underground

reservoir, there was one marked as Shirehampton West Camp on a map of 1954 (25").

The site is now (2011) covered by Oasis Academy Brightstowe’s playing-fields.

This contrasted with one further east, in Shirehampton Park. There was another

in Avonmouth. These last two were retained for use by the Army. But once West

Camp (also known as Penpole Camp) had been vacated by American troops in 1946,

it was “liberated” by local people, mainly demobbed soldiers’ families, desperate

for housing. They called it Stolen Paradise, probably an ironic reference to Louis J.

Gasnier’s wartime Hollywood film of that name (Condor Productions, 1940/1),

though there had been an earlier Italian film called in English The stolen paradise

(1917).

46

Stow House in Nibley Road: see Cotswold Estate. Stroud Road: see Cotswold Estate. Sunnyhill Drive (1966) This development of low blocks of

flats recalls the substantial house Sunny

Hill and adjacent Sunnyhill Farm (also

known as Long’s Farm), formerly on

this site on the north side of the

bottom of Park Hill.

The Terrace: see The Green.

Tynings Field

This includes an ancient local word for

‘enclosure from a common field’, from

Old English ty ning. The name is used

here for allotments. See also Layfield

Allotment.

Valerian Close (1945)

H. C. W. Harris, the former City housing manager, reports the clue to this name:

that names were not selected for streets consisting of prefabs if they were of a kind

that might otherwise be used for permanent streets. A theme of this area was the

Roman presence in Britain (see The Portway and the suite of names recalling

Roman roads), and, exceptionally, two prefab streets were named after militarily

successful Roman emperors – an important consideration in 1945. Hadrian Close is

47

off The Portway near Sea Mills station, opposite the exposed foundations of a

Roman building; it was named after the 2nd-century emperor whose lasting impact

on Britain was the Wall which bears his name. Valerian Close in Shirehampton, on

the other hand, commemorates a 3rd-century emperor who had no known

connection with Britain but spent his time fighting the Persians, and nobody has a

good word for him. But this name has a local appropriateness because red valerian is

the name of a red- or pink-flowered plant which escapes from gardens and grows

freely on walls and rough ground in this area.

Walcombe: see Barwick House.

Walton Road

Walton Cottage survives by the corner of Severn Road; judging by older maps, the

street-name was there well before the house. The nearest place it might recall is

Walton-in-Gordano on the outskirts of Clevedon in Somerset, though there are

many other candidates; it might also be from a surname. Prefabs were built on the

eastern side of this street after World War II.

A house next to The Terrace on The Green was called Walton House, but whether

there is any connection between it and this late-19th century street is not known.

The house is mentioned by that name in connection with a family called Walton in

an essay published in 1839, though it is not clear to what extent it is fiction. The

essay may have inspired the house-name, or vice versa.

Wasborough: see Barwick House.

Watling Way

See Portway. But Graham Weekes wrote to Shire newspaper in February 2008 to

say that Watling Way “was named after a man called Josser Watling who played

football for Avonmouth before he became a Rovers Player”.

Waverley Road (after 1870s?)

Waverley, the title of a novel by Sir Walter Scott (1814) and the surname of its hero,

often found its way into local names, especially house-names, through Scott’s huge

popularity. Scott’s influence is also responsible for the house called after another of

his English heroes, Ivanhoe, 23 Station Road. In Shirehampton, there was a house

called Waverley at the corner of Pembroke Road, maybe the one which appears on

the OS 6" map in 1883, and Waverley Road is called after it but not named on the

map. By 1903, the house seems to have been replaced by the terrace of three now

48

standing at the corner. Or the name might have been that of what is now a shop

on the opposite corner.

Wellington Mews

Originally named from the adjacent large house built for a local family with the

surname Willington. John Russell Willington, then of Fulligrove Cottage, is recorded

as “sometimes called John Russell Wellington” in the London Gazette in 1857. The

house-name, and therefore that of the Mews, has been altered as if patriotically

recalling the famous Duke, and the owner may have jumped on the bandwagon.

Mews originally meant ‘row of stables, usually with living-space for grooms above’.

West Town Road (sometimes and formerly West Town Lane)

West Town is ‘west settlement’, the westernmost hamlet in the original tithing of

Shirehampton before the creation of Avonmouth. It is a name of the same origin,

but of a later time, as the Weston in King’s Weston. In its known history, West Town

was an industrial settlement, including a brick- and tileworks in about 1840, and an

ill-recorded glassworks which was succeeded by a lead- and ironworks. Situated on

the bank of the Avon, it included Victoria Road, Victoria Terrace, Crown

Terrace, Glass Street and Avon View Terrace. The settlement was transferred to

the new parish of Avonmouth in 1917.

Concern was raised in the Shirehampton parish magazine of December 1890 that

this settlement suffered from “the want of a proper name”, and the imaginative

suggestion of Riverside was made. Nonetheless the place seems to have been known

as West Town in 1861, still by the time the West Town Mission was established in

1885, and always after that until most of West Town was flattened in the blitz of

16-17 January 1941 and never rebuilt as a community.

This road is the one by which West Town could be reached from the High Street.

The alternative name West Town Lane was sometimes used in mid-20th century

documents, at least for the end nearest the river, though not on Ordnance Survey

maps.

Winchcombe Grove: see Cotswold Estate.

Winchester Buildings (lost), in Station Road (1907)

An unexplained name for the row of shops by the Public Hall, mentioned by Janet

and Derek Fisher in one of their postcard captions, but no longer in use. The

architect of the buildings, Frederick Bligh Bond, was also an archaeologist and

49

occultist, and claimed to have had spirit contact with an early medieval sub-prior of

Winchester, “Brother Symon” (among other long-dead monks) when deciding

where to excavate at Glastonbury Abbey (1908). Might this account for the name,

and also for its dumping? A long shot. But the Church did not approve of Bligh

Bond’s ghostly doings when they tackled him about them in 1921, and dismissed

him from the excavations.

Woodview Close (after 1992)

Close to the now-wooded southern slope of Penpole Ridge.

Woodwell Road

There is a lot of confusion involving the well-name or spring-name from which

this street derives its own, and the one found in Bucklewell Close.

According to Ethel Thomas, Bucklewell Close contains the name of the spring from

which a stream flowed whose former course is followed by Woodwell Road. She

mentions a steel plate set into the pavement in Woodwell Road between St

Bernard’s Road and The Portway which once marked its position. But this

cannot be right. There were two separate wells (or springs), Wood Well and Buckle

Well. Wood Well was where Mrs Thomas states, and a well is clearly marked there

on 19th-century maps. Adjacent fields on both sides of the lane were called Wood

Well. But 19th-century maps show Buckwell as a place-name near Horseshoe Bend,

beyond the end of Woodwell Road, and Angela Thompson Smith calls the hidden

spring (actually two), in an almost inaccessible cave near here, the Buckle Well. The

spring is first mentioned by name in 1790; I have never found it marked on a map.

The researchers of the Bristol Springs and Wells Group also think that that the

hidden spring is the Buckle Well, and correspondence in Shire newspaper in 1976

and 2010 supports this.

These facts suggest that Buckle Well was originally just called Buckwell, which

became obscured in pronunciation to Buckle (just as original “Gorewell” in Devon

has come to be called Gorrell, and Cromwell in Nottinghamshire used to be

pronounced “Crummle”); and that it had an explanatory extra well added to it (as

early as a document of 1790 which contains other mistakes). It may have been

‘buck well’, i.e. a well associated with male fallow deer or roedeer, and we might

compare it with three places called Hartwell ‘stag well’ in other parts of England.

There was a hamlet called Buckwell, in Wellington, Somerset (and still others). So it

is unlikely that the local suggestion that you have to “buckle” to get into the cave

can be right.

50

(The) Yellow Brick Road

A name used by some local people for the concrete path across Lamplighters

Marsh, taken from Victor Fleming’s musical film The Wizard of Oz starring Judy

Garland (MGM, 1939).

*

Two ancient Shirehampton house-names: Avenhouse and Fulligrove

Shirehampton used to be a tithing of Westbury-on-Trym parish. In the 17th

century, payments to poor people of Shirehampton by the parish of Westbury were

recorded in the parish “poor book”. The names of those from whom the money

was collected were also recorded. Among the columns of donors in the

Shirehampton section, year after year, are not only named persons (see Barwick

House above), but Wirkhouse and Avenhouse. Why would money be due from a

workhouse (set up under a law of 1601), since these were lodgings for the poorest

of the poor, those unable to support themselves? It must have been because the

work of the inhabitants generated some revenue for the parish, usually amounting

to about £15 a year. Avenhouse is more of a puzzle. Was it ‘Avon House’, named

from the river, as seems most likely? If so, where and what was it, exactly, and how

did it make money for the parish? It is mentioned still in rent-books from around

1800, though with the modern spelling of the river-name. Was it the house so

called near Lamplighters? If so, on what basis did it pay rates? Or was it the place

involved in Avonhouse Grounds, at the later site of Avonmouth’s Marine Hotel? Or

was the name a reference to the place called Aven mentioned three times in the Old

Testament in a not very positive light (Ezekiel 30:17, Hosea 10:8 – “Aven, the sin

of Israel” – and Amos 1:5)? Typically, whatever it was, it contributed £16 a year to

the parish.

In the same “poor book”, we find a reference to Fulligrove in 1695, and there is an

even earlier reference in 1638. This property still exists, by the Woodwell Road

railway bridge. How old the present building is is not known. Apart from here I

have found the name only as a very rare surname, of unknown origin and extinct in

Britain, so the house-name may be from the lost surname. There the mystery rests.

51

The street-names of Avonmouth

(including some other interesting local names)

Most of modern Avonmouth is built within the old Shirehampton tithing, but at

the northern end small parts of the parishes of Henbury and Redwick &

Northwick have been annexed.

A date given in a heading is a rough indication of the age of the street in question.

It may be the date of the adoption of the street by the Highways Department, and

not necessarily the date of the first buildings. The roadways of the dock estate do

not seem to have ever had official names, though some of the lines and sites of the

former dock railway system had unofficial ones like The Smutter.

Ableton Lane

This road gets into the book by the skin of its teeth; the northern boundary of

Avonmouth runs along the middle of part of its southern end. It contains one of

the oldest place-names in the district, which belonged to a vanished farm (later

called a meadow) in Redwick & Northwick parish originally named Old English

*Apuldorhamm, ‘appletree water-meadow’, worn away and misunderstood till it

gains its present form. The industrial development of what became the

AstraZeneca works has obscured much of the lane, but the name is still found at

the northern end in Severn Beach, where the original farm was.

Akeman Way : see Portway.

Anthony Post (lost)

This object was recorded in 1610 near the mouth of the Avon. It has now

disappeared; it may have been Roman, and it may have been a milestone. Or not.

Atlantic Road (about 1975)

A reference to the ocean, or perhaps more specifically a tribute to the Atlantic

merchant convoys sailing from Avonmouth in World War II, as Veronica Smith

suggests.

Avon Gorge Industrial Estate, in Portview Road

Avon Riverside Estate, in Victoria Road

52

Avon View Terrace (lost): see West Town Road.

Avonbank Industrial Estate, in West Town Road

Avonbridge Trading Estate, in Atlantic Road

These five names make self-evident, and not all precisely accurate, references to

the nearby river. Avonbridge TE is in the shadow of the M5 bridge. Avon Gorge

IE is nowhere near the Gorge.

Avonmouth Dock

For the choice of this name for the original 1877 dock and the eventual settlement

and suburb, see the Preface. But it was originally (in 1864, when an Act of

Parliament was first obtained) known officially as the Bristol Port and Channel Dock,

and the earliest deposited plans of a previous scheme in 1852 say Kingroad Harbour

(see King Road Avenue).

Avonmouth Road (1904)

A renaming, when Bristol absorbed the whole area in 1904, of the furthest

extremity of what was Shirehampton High Street, forming the main road into and

out of Avonmouth before The Portway was built. It seems that within

Avonmouth itself it was once called Shirehampton Road (see McKenna postcard

image).

53

Avonmouth Trading Estate, in Fifth Way

Self-explanatory.

Avonmouth Way and Avonmouth Way West (1965)

Self-explanatory; but it also runs across the lands of the former Avonmouth Farm.

The original line has been partly absorbed by Crowley Way.

Ballast Lane

No easy explanation is available for this name, first on maps in 1903, especially

since it runs on the marshes, leading between the ditches called Kingsweston Rhine

and Shirehampton Rhine to a former pump house, rather than on the dock estate.

The marsh cannot have been a source of ballast (stones or crushed rock to stabilize

ships). Most likely the name just meant that the lane was laid with stone (of

whatever source) to keep walkers’ feet dry, and that that was unusual in the

marshes. But now it is just a track, and vehicle access is blocked off.

Barracks Cottages: see Barracks Lane.

Barton’s Lane (lost)

The lane leading to T Farm (Kilminster’s) in the early 1900s.

Bewys Cross or Bewy’s Cross

This historic, possibly 14th/15th-century, stone cross-shaft and plinth, stands in

the grounds of The House in the Garden at King’s Weston, but it belongs to

Avonmouth, being marked at a point south of Elbury Gout, the mouth of one of

the coastal rhines, on Donn’s map (1769). It is marked as Bevis Stone on Taylor’s

map of 1772, and we can pin down its position to a point now in Royal Edward

Dock. Local tradition says that, in the 12th century, sailors showed their gratitude

to God for their safe return by leaving donations to the church at the cross, and

there is a hole in one of the steps which is said to have received their coins. It was

moved to King’s Weston sometime after 1787. The name is obscure and has been

confused with Bewell’s Cross in St Michael’s, Bristol, but it may recall the medieval

legend of the knight Sir Bevis of Hampton – which is Southampton, not

Shirehampton.

Bonner’s Lane (lost)

Named after a local farmer (though it is not a local surname); out in the marshes

near where the Royal Edward Dock now is, and long gone.

54

Bristow Broadway

This extension of the A4, bypassing the centre of Avonmouth, was known as The

A4 Trunk Road (Avonmouth Relief Road) in the ministerial order (1992) which

allowed it to be built. It is now named after Alderman Ernie Bristow, who died

early in 2002, and whose surname comes from the ancient form of Bristol. He was a

docker and union official, then a long-serving Labour councillor, firstly for

Shirehampton ward on the former Avon County

Council from at least 1987-9 before representing

Avonmouth on Bristol City Council from 1995-9,

when he retired from ward politics. He was

particularly well known for his support for the fire

brigade, so the name is especially appropriate

seeing that the Avon Fire Authority central stores

are in nearby Nova Way. He campaigned for this

road to be built.

Cllr Ernie Bristow. Photo published in Shire, February

2002.

Broad Pill

‘Broad creek’; the last creek on the starboard side for ships heading down the

Avon, and once the site of an oil terminal; on record since 1741.

Cabot Park, in Poplar Way West

An industrial estate whose name

commemorates the 15th-century Bristol

explorers John and Sebastian. The site of the

former Madam Farm (whose name perhaps

meant ‘meadow riverside land’ ).

55

Catherine Street It is not known who the Catherine of Catherine Street (built about 1920 somewhat

apart from the rest of Avonmouth) was, but it has been suggested that she had

some connection with Jefferies, the former Avonmouth ship repairers (a person

named Catherine Jefferies being buried in undated graveplot 1438 in the cemetery

in St Mary’s Road, Shirehampton). Another candidate might be the much-loved

district nurse Catherine Court, active from 1903 to 1937.

Chittening Road: see Chittening Trading Estate.

Chittening Trading (or Industrial) Estate, in Smoke Lane / Chittening

Road

The site of the First World War mustard gas factory, whose name incorporates a

place-name existing before industrial development, formerly in the parish of

Redwick & Northwick, which is recorded as Chitnend and Chitnends Warth (i.e.

Chittening Warth) in 1658. It seems to have meant ‘chit’s end’, where chit meant

‘the young of an animal, whelp, kitten’. It is also seen in Chittening Road.

The estate, on some of the fields of the former West House Farm, includes:

Bank Road

Parallel and close to the flood-bank or wall of the Severn.

Green Splott Road or Greensplott Road

Splott is a local word for ‘plot, small patch of land’; the name recalls Green Splott

Farm. Compare Red Splott Gout nearby in the marshes. (Gout means ‘culvert’ or

‘sluice’.)

Worthy Road

Worthy is a south-western word meaning ‘enclosure, smallholding’, and here it

recalls the name of a former nearby farm in Redwick & Northwick parish which

had been on record since 1241.

Chittening Warth

The warthland, or grazing-land overflowed from time to time by the Severn, at

Chittening; see Chittening Trading Estate.

56

Clayton Street (perhaps previously Clayfield Street) (before 1879)

The earlier name (or one used perhaps mistakenly, in 1882) may speak for itself;

clay was extracted from the riverside land for brick- and tile-making, but not

exactly at the site of this street, which is close to the present station (formerly

Avonmouth Dock ). The actual origin of the current name is unknown, but since

the Midland Railway began running goods trains via a new link to their main

system to and from the docks when they opened in 1877, it may commemorate the

Midland’s carriage and wagon engineer at that time, Thomas Gethin Clayton.

Plates on the Royal Hotel, Avonmouth.

Collins Street (1904)

George Collins as a member of Shirehampton parish council in an

indistinct 1904 photo. (From Shire on the Web.)

George Collins was the first traffic manager for Avonmouth

Docks, and a church organist. He chaired Shirehampton

parish council in 1902 and was present at the laying of the

foundation stone of the Public Hall in 1903.

Cook Street (?before 1912)

Named after William Cook, who lived at Hallen but was, like Mr Collins, a

Shirehampton parish councillor in the early 20th century. The northern end of

Cook Street was previously called Penpole View.

Crooks Marsh

The place-name is on record since 1496, and incorporates a surname recorded in

Henbury parish earlier still.

57

Crowley Way (about 1992)

Named after Andrew Crowley, the Labour Bristol City councillor for Avonmouth

ward elected in 1983 and 1984 who campaigned for an Avonmouth bypass.He died

in 1987. See also Crowley Park.

Crown Terrace (lost): see West Town Road.

Davis Street (1904)

George Davis of Burlington House, the oldest surviving house in the part of

Lower High Street which is now Avonmouth Road, was a Shirehampton parish

councillor in the early 20th century, and was present at the laying of the foundation

stone of the Public Hall in 1903. The odd-numbered houses in Davis Street were

informally known as Robinson Row when they were inhabited by employees of the

animal feed merchants John Robinson.

East Street (1880s)

The easternmost street in the small original nucleus of Avonmouth west of the

railway.

Elbury Gout

A culvert with a sluice in a drainage ditch, named after an Elbury which appears in a

document as early as 1299 (as Elleberge), and perhaps meaning ‘mound with elder

tree(s)’. It is close to a field called Home Barrow close to the former Kingroad Farm

farmhouse and the two names may refer to the same thing.

Evelyn Lane

The first commercial ship to enter the new dock in 1877 was the s.s. Evelyn, and

that probably inspired the name. If not, then named after a person unknown; a

developer or builder is free to name streets after friends or relations.

Farr Street (?before 1904)

Some of the names dating from around 1900 in Shirehampton and Avonmouth

have a hint of commercial interest about them. Farr Street is named after James

Farr of Barrow Hill Farm, who ran a carrier service to the city; but he had also

been a Shirehampton parish councillor.

58

Fifth Way, First Way, Fourth Way, Second Way and Third Way

American-style naming most common in England in the inter-war years, but post-

World War II here and without the typical American gridiron street pattern. First,

Second, and Third date from 1968-9, Fourth from 1979, and Fifth from 1981.

Fire Station Lane

Self-explanatory. The previous fire station was in Green Lane; the fire service

stores are in Nova Way.

First Way, Fourth Way : see Fifth Way.

Glass Street (lost): see West Town Road.

Gloucester Road (before 1879)

Local patriotism. Refers to the county in which Avonmouth sat before it was

incorporated into the port, city, and county of Bristol in 1884.

Green Lane (?before 1904)

The even-numbered houses were once called Elder Villas; they had been built for

officers employed by Elder, Dempster Lines, but a new name, reviving an old one

for an unmetalled track, was used when Elders sold off their interest.

Hallen Marsh

The village of Hallen is not within the present boundaries of Avonmouth, but the

marshland historically belonging to it is, and so is Hallen Farm. The name is on

record since 1498, in Halenende, which perhaps originally meant ‘end (of the parish)

at the hales’; hale has a number of meanings in place-names including ‘streamside

meadow’ and ‘corner of a parish’. It is nothing to do with the Welsh word for ‘salt’,

halen, as is sometimes said.

Haslemere Industrial Estate, in Third Way

Recalls Haslemere in Surrey, for unknown reasons. There are a number of such

estates nationwide with this name, but I do not know whether they are or were

linked commercially. I have been unable to establish any connection with the

former large independent property company Haslemere Estates (1958-86), which

in any case specialized in refurbishment and restoration; but Haslemere Estates is

now wholly owned by a Netherlands-based general commercial property company.

59

Hoar Gout

The name of a culvert with a sluice, in the drainage channel called Mere Bank Rhine;

it is now attached to some reservoirs near the sewage works. It might contain the

same word seen in the field-name The Oars, meaning ‘(sea-)bank’, found in

Shirehampton (see Preface); or it is possible that the first word is Old English hār

‘grey, lichen-covered’. It is a little way from the nearest of the sea-banks, so the

name may refer instead to the bank formed by the lane which crossed the rhine

here, or to Mere Bank itself (see Mere Bank Road).

I suspect that gouts were originally sluices allowing the marsh-water in rhines to

drain into the sea, but that some, like this one, became stranded inland as the

marshes were reclaimed bit by bit from the Severn.

Holes Mouth

The name for a small pill running across the foreshore at the end of the Mere Bank

(see Mere Bank Road), nearly lost in Avonmouth’s dockland reclamation. It is

recalled by Holesmouth Junction, on the railway north of St Andrew’s station, and it is

still marked on some large-scale maps close to Smoke Lane. Holes Mouth is the

point at which the local authority boundary swings out into the river Severn

towards Denny Island, as opposed to hugging the shoreline; in the time of the

mapmaker Donn (1769), the Avon flowed into the Severn as far north as this. The

name seems to have meant ‘mouth of or at the hollow’, but at this distance in time

it is not clear why.

Imperial Smelting Corporation estate, in St Andrew’s Road

The company had a complicated business history, but its estate road pattern with

several unusual names seems to have been laid down when it was trading under the

ISC name. The site finally closed in 2003. The estate incorporated land of the

former Cowley Farm.

Acid Road

A major by-product of zinc smelting is sulphuric acid.

Boundary Road

Cadmium Road

Cadmium is found in some zinc ores, from which it needs separating by industrial

processes.

60

I.S.F. Road

The Imperial Smelting Corporation Ltd had here an ISF Smelter complex. ISF is

from the initial letters of Imperial Smelting Furnace (a blast furnace for zinc

production), whose method produces ferro-silicate slag, used in asphalt.

Retort Road

A reference to retort furnaces. The company perfected its ISF vertical retort to

replace the previously standard horizontal retort.

Spar Road

Spar is a general word for zinc carbonate or calamine. Calamine was once mined

around Bristol (especially in the Mendips and Clifton Downs), which is the

historical reason why the zinc industry grew up in this area.

Stores Road and Workshop Road

Zinc Road

The company’s main product at this site was what it called primary zinc.

International Trading Estate, in Jubilee Way

Self-explanatory.

Ironchurch Road : see St Andrew’s Trading Estate.

Island Trade Park, in Neale Lane/Bristow Broadway

Perhaps this recalls the former Dumball Island (sometimes unflatteringly mapped

as Dungball), which was bought by Bristol Corporation in 1860. It was in the

process of being washed away by the sea when its position was incorporated into

the first Avonmouth Dock. It was still partly there in 1888 (OS 6" map), but

permission to reclaim the Old North Channel (the old mouth of the Avon) was

obtained from the Board of Trade in 1892, and this action absorbed the island into

the mainland. Despite this, the remnant of the island was still named on the OS 6"

map in 1903-4. This area was formerly the northernmost promontory of Somerset,

but the Avon broke through the adjacent marshland in the late 18th century to

create Swash Channel, which made Dumball into an island and eventually,

around 1875, united it with Gloucestershire.

61

Alternatively, the estate’s name may be a simple reference to its situation,

marooned between two M5 slip-roads and Bristow Broadway.

Jubilee Way

Named in the year of the Silver Jubilee of Elizabeth II, 1977.

Jutland Road

Recalls the indecisive naval battle of Jutland on 31 May – 1 June 1916, often

viewed as a British victory because it severely damaged the German high seas fleet

as well as the British one, and because the German fleet never engaged the British

fleet directly again.

King Road Avenue

This recalls King Road, the roadstead or anchorage in the Severn off the mouth off

the Avon. King Road looks straightforward – ‘king’s roadstead’ – but King’s Road

with -s might be expected, and this only occurs in three abnormal records. If the

name is really ancient, because of the way Old English grammar worked it could be

‘kings’ roadstead’, i.e. referring to more than one king, or to royalty in general.

It looks as though another consideration may have influenced the name of this

short dual carriageway. By historical accident, King Road provided a good name for

a grand approach to the new Royal Edward Dock complex.

Somewhere around this spot must have been the Aveneorde mentioned in Bristol’s

charter of incorporation (1373). This might have been “Avonroad”, perhaps an

older or alternative name for King Road, but it was more probably a name for a

vanished coastal feature, meaning ‘Avon Point’ in Old English (see Nelson Point).

King Street (by 1904)

It could not have been given this name before 1901 because we had a queen till

then, and it is adjacent to the Royal Edward Dock, opened in 1908. But it forms a

pair with the earlier Queen Street, which it meets at right-angles. It may not be

irrelevant that the future Edward VII had been a friend of Sir Philip Miles, cousin

of King’s Weston “squire” Philip Napier Miles and Conservative MP for East

Somerset (1878-85). There may also be a hint of an allusion to C. J. King and Sons,

the tugboat company operating in the docks.

62

King’s Weston Lane

Formerly the main way into the marshes from King’s Weston, now crossing the

M5 and M49 on a bridge.

Lawrence Weston Road

Formerly the main way into the marshes from Lawrence Weston, now crossing the

M5 on a footbridge and going under the M49 in a short tunnel.

Leeming Way : see The Portway.

Lescren Way

After Lescren Holdings Ltd, of Towcester, Northamptonshire, incorporated 1977,

a firm specializing in industrial property redevelopment and having interests in

Avonmouth.

Motorways still do not attract names, but the elevated section across the Avon,

opened in 1974, is called Avonmouth Bridge. >> Motorway Distribution Centre.

Maiden Way : see The Portway.

Marsh Street (1935-8)

Self-explanatory. The whole of Avonmouth is built on former marshland, both

saltmarsh and warthland.

McLaren Road

Martin McLaren was Conservative MP for Bristol North-West between 1959-66

and 1970-4, and the road is named after him.

Meadow Street (before 1879)

One of the earliest streets in Avonmouth, presumably from a use of the land it was

built on, though none of the fields hereabouts is named as a meadow in the Tithe

Award of 1840-1.

63

Mere Bank Road or Merebank Road

Crosses the line of an ancient embankment in the marshes whose name means

‘boundary bank’, formerly said to be a Roman road. But it was not the northern

boundary of Shirehampton tithing, as Hugh Smith, the editor of The place-names of

Gloucestershire, guessed; actually, it divided lands of Henbury hundred from a

detached part of Lower Berkeley hundred in 1769, but both areas were fully in

Henbury parish. The bank is accompanied for its whole length by the ditch called

Mere Bank Rhine, which may be the same as what was called Meereditche in 1611.

Mitchell’s Gout A culvert with a sluice named after Mitchell’s Farm (Rockingham Farm), which

was disturbed to accommodate the Henbury Loop railway line in 1910. A Mitchell

family appears in local records in the 18th century.

Moorend Farm Avenue

Refers to a farm in the marshes. A nearby farm in Hallen is on record as Moorhouse

or Moor House Farm since 1830, and Moorend Farm Avenue is approached from

the east by Moorhouse Lane. In this road is St Martin’s Industrial Park.

Napier Road (?before 1904) and Napier Square (1900) (not adjacent)

From the surname of the mother of the last squire of King’s Weston. His paternal

surname was Miles, which is commemorated in the Miles Arms pub in Avonmouth

Road. Their coat of arms used to be displayed on the sign, with a punning Latin

motto: “Labora siccut

bonus miles”, ‘Work like

a good soldier (or like a

good Miles)’, a partial

biblical quotation (from

the original Latin of 2

Timothy 2:3). [Siccut

should be sicut, but that is

what it said on the sign.]

The one-sided Napier Square

in the shadow of large dock

buildings in winter.

64

What was ever square about the terrace called Napier Square? It may have been the

east side of a once-planned square, but then some of the rest was taken for the

original line of the Great Western Railway’s Avonmouth and Severn Tunnel

Railway before it was diverted in 1903 to accommodate the site of the new Royal

Edward Dock. Large dock buildings now loom over the “square”.

Neale Lane

Named after W. G. Neale, whose books At the Port of Bristol and The tides of war and

the Port of Bristol, 1914-1918 were published by the Port of Bristol Authority in 1968

and 1976.

Nelson Point

This, the last little promontory to starboard as you descend the Avon, is

presumably named after the victor of Trafalgar (1805). It is mentioned in a

newspaper report in 1881, but not named on OS maps till 1916. It may have been

the Aveneorde mentioned under King Road Avenue.

Nova Way

The Avon Fire Authority stores were established here, and the name is Avon spelt

backwards. >> Nova Distribution Centre.

Pack Gate Roundabout

This is close to the site of the vanished marshland farm called Packgate from 1819

and on maps in later years Pag Gate. Perhaps from a gate wide enough to allow a

loaded (pack)horse through?

Page’s Mead (1938)

Pages Mead runs through the position of a field

called Pages in old documents such as the Tithe

Award of 1840-1. A Mr Page held land in

Shirehampton in 1701.

Penpole View (lost): see Cook Street.

Pilgrims Way : see The Portway.

The Polygon, in Fourth Way

The reason for the name of this set of industrial

65

units is not obvious. It may be loosely due to the irregular pentagon shape of one

of the units and the associated car park (in both cases a rectangle with the south-

eastern corner lopped off), but that seems rather unlikely. There is a street of the

same name in Hotwells, Bristol, a curving terrace, and perhaps this name is

inspired by that.

Poole Street (before 1914)

Frank Poole, a commercial reporter, was a Shirehampton parish councillor in the

early 1900s, and was present at the laying of the foundation stone of the Public

Hall in 1903.

Poplar Way East and Poplar Way West

Poplars were often planted in rows as windbreaks for houses in open country,

especially flat lands. Here, they gave their name to the former Poplar Farm in

Lawrence Weston, and the street-names and Poplar Roundabout commemorate

the farm towards whose site they lead.

Portview Road (1905)

Originally known simply as Port View; overlooks the original Avonmouth Dock.

Portway Roundabout : see The Portway.

Queen Street (by 1879)

Mapped in 1879 (OS 6") as part of the village nucleus including also Gloucester

Road, Clayton Street and Meadow Street; a patriotic and deferential reference to

Victoria.

Red Close

This is marked and named off Atlantic Road

on the A-Z Premier street-map (2006), but not

indexed. I have seen no other reference to it,

and it was not there in November 2011.

Richmond Terrace and Richmond Villas

(?1900s)

Built by the Bristol Docks Company for its

workers, but the exact reason for the choice of

name is unknown. It may commemorate the

66

7th Duke of Richmond, who assumed the title in 1903. He had previously been a

Conservative MP and an Ecclesiastical Commissioner (1889-1903), and there was a

slight family connection with the “squire” of King’s Weston; Philip Napier Miles’

maternal grandfather, the military historian Sir William Napier, had been aide-de-

camp to Richmond’s grandfather the 5th duke in the Peninsular War (1807-14).

Richmond Villas are the north side terrace in this street.

Rockingham Works

From a farm demolished to accommodate the works, but still marked on maps in

the 1980s. The farm was a relative latecomer on the marshes. Its name is

connected with the Marquess of Rockingham who was Whig prime minister in

1765-6 and 1782 and his family. A Rockingham lady married into the Southwell

family of King’s Weston House in 1729, and that explains the name given to a new

farm at about that period. The name also appears in Rockingham Close off

Kingsweston Lane, on the site of the former Home Farm, not far from King’s

Weston House.

Royal Edward Dock (1908)

Named after, and opened by, King Edward VII, who had also turned the first sod

in 1902. The Canadian passenger ship RMS Royal Edward began sailing from

Avonmouth in 1910.

St Andrew’s Road (?before 1906)

Avonmouth’s first Church of England chapel, built in 1893 and dedicated to St

Andrew, became a full parish church in 1917. Before the permanent chapel, in

1883, there was a corrugated iron church in Clayton Street, then Richmond

Terrace, with the same dedication. This dedication was copied to St Andrew’s

Road, then to a trading estate and an office block, and to the railway station on the

estate. Andrew has watery connections as the patron saint of fishermen, but that

does not really suit Avonmouth well. >> St Andrew’s Gate, St Andrew’s Gate

Roundabout.

St Andrew’s Trading Estate, in Third Way

Includes Ironchurch Road, which seems to refer to the first chapel of St Andrew

(see St Andrew’s Road), but it is right out near Smoke Lane, not in the village

centre near the church-site. The connection must simply be a historical

reminiscence through the name of the trading estate, which includes that of the

67

local patron saint. There was another iron church, a mission chapel in West Town

Lane, but it has left no traces in names.

St Anthony’s Traveller Site (1999)

St Anthony of Padua (or Lisbon), a 13th-century Franciscan friar, is the patron

saint of all travellers – and lost articles.

St Brendan’s Court and St Brendan’s Way

From 1924 till 1956 Avonmouth’s Roman Catholics had a wooden church, and

from then till 2004 the permanent building of St Brendan’s, dedicated

appropriately to St Brendan of Clonfert – he is said to have navigated the Atlantic

in search of Paradise or the Isle of the Blessed. The name survives in those of a

trading estate and the new M49/M5/A403 roundabout, as well as in St Brendan’s

Way and Court. The church was demolished in 2009. >> St Brendan’s

Roundabout, St Brendan’s Trading Estate in Avonmouth Way West.

St George’s Industrial Estate, in St Andrew’s Road

Presumably just from the patron saint of England, as if in answer to Scotland’s St

Andrew, to whom Avonmouth Church of England parish is dedicated.

St Martin’s Industrial Park :see Moorend Farm Avenue.

Second Way : see Fifth Way.

Severn Road

Runs down from Hallen to the river, and appears as Chittening Street on the earliest

local OS map.

Severnside Trading Estate, in St Andrew’s Road

Self-explanatory. The estate includes the following streets:

Burcott Road and Dean Road

Both may be of local significance, witness Burcott near Wookey, Somerset, and

Dean House nearby in Redwick & Northwick parish. But the local reason for both

names is unknown; both might be surnames, and there are other places called

Burcott and Dean. (See image on next page.)

68

Humber Way

Most likely from the river dividing Yorkshire from Lincolnshire, though there are

other English rivers with this name. There was a long-lost Humber flowing into

the Avon near one of its sources at Hawkesbury, but that name has not been heard

since the Middle Ages.

Smoke Lane (named by 1972)

Veronica Smith has suggested that the name refers to the most visible product of

local heavy industry. But it seems possible that it is a joking alteration of Stowick,

the name of an ancient tithing of Henbury parish; the lane runs north-east towards

the site of the farm which gave its name to this tithing.

Smyth’s Close (1961)

A field of this name is shown at the right place on the Tithe Award map of 1841,

and it has been re-used as a street-name here. Other names indicate the interest of

a Lady Smyth in warthland on both sides of Broad Pill. She is not mentioned in

Ethel Thomas’ histories of the area, but Smyths of the gentry family of Long

Ashton with an interest in land in Shirehampton are on record in the later 17th

century.

Square Oak

A feature in King’s Weston Lane consisting of a square enclosure with earth banks,

growing with oak trees. It is marked on older maps, but not named till 1903 (OS

25") and no longer named after the 1970s. It is still there.

Stane Way : see The Portway.

69

Stuppill Gout

A gout is a sluice or culvert. Stubbhill appears in a document of 1678, but there is no

hill anywhere near, and the name probably meant ‘tree-stump pill’, where pill is the

local word for a saltwater creek.

Swash Channel

The Swash is the channel which formed the new main mouth of the Avon in the

19th century and divided Dumball Island (see Island Trade Park) from the rest of

Somerset. This regional word means ‘body of quickly or forcefully moving water’,

and was applied here to the new channel formed by such difficult water before it

became the main one.

Third Way : see Fifth Way.

The Triangle

(Disused) name for the land between Avonmouth Road and St Andrew’s Road,

occupied by Avonmouth Park.

Victoria Road and Victoria Terrace

Obviously named after the queen, but note that this area of West Town housed the

Crown Brick Works and the Crown Bottle Works, and there may have been more

than a hint of advertisement as well as patriotism in the street-name. See also West

Town Road.

70

Wall Croft Lane (lost)

In the early 19th century, a farm lane leading northwards off what is now

Avonmouth Road, named from a field named from one of the local sea-banks.

Washingpool Lane

This is mainly an unmade track in the marshes, east of Chittening Road. Washing

Pool Farm is recorded in the Henbury Tithe Award in 1839, and the name must

allude to sheep-washing. A farm of this name also exists in Almondsbury.

West Town Road

See Shirehampton section.

Willment Way

Contains a fairly uncommon but definitely West of England surname. But it is very

probable that it commemorates Pioneer Willment Concrete Ltd, whose HQ is

perhaps significantly Napier House, West Byfleet, Surrey (see Napier Road).

Willment Bros were ready-mixed concrete suppliers.

Yara Trading Estate, in St Andrew’s Road

Named after the Norwegian Yara chemical company. In about

1980, Yara took over Fisons who had a fertilizer plant here,

importing nutrients and dispatching liquid nitrogen and

sulphur.

71

The street-names of the part of Lawrence Weston in

Avonmouth ward

(including some other interesting local names)

This area of the estate of Lawrence Weston was historically in the tithing of King’s

Weston in Henbury parish, not actually in the original Lawrence Weston which is

further north-east, centring on Lawrence Weston Road. The new estate was built

up on the south-east side of Long Cross first in the 1950s, and the flats north-west

of Long Cross from the 1970s. Most of its street-names are from around these

dates. Some of the smaller roads are later infills. It is locally known as El Dub.

Badenham Grove

Named after the family of Roger de Badenham, who was granted a manor at

King’s Weston by Henry III in 1222.

Bangrove Walk

I have not found any mention of Bangrove in old documents. There was a Banfield

and a Bangley Wood in the former Henbury parish, where Bangrove Walk was

situated, and that Banfield is used in a street-name elsewhere in Lawrence Weston.

If it is like the Bangrove in Teddington near Tewkesbury, it may be ‘berry wood’,

and the original pronunciation will have been “bane grove”; or it may actually be

copied from the Teddington name. Woodland near this site is marked on maps

throughout the period 1880-1970 until it disappears under sports fields and then

slip-roads for the M5/M49 junction.

Barrowmead Drive

From a field-name recorded in the Henbury parish enclosure award in 1822, Barrow

Mead, meaning ‘barrow or mound meadow’. The “barrow” or mound in question

must be The Tump.

72

Boon Villas

Named after the archaeologist George C. Boon. In 1948-50 he excavated the site

of the Roman villa whose foundations are exposed in Long Cross and which is

usually called King’s Weston Villa. The street-name is a double compliment.

Broxholme Walk

From a Lincolnshire surname. A man named John Broxholme, about whom

nothing else is known, was granted land in Lawrence Weston by Henry VIII in

1546.

Hallards Close

From a field- and orchard-name containing a surname, but the 19th-century

documents say Stallard rather than Hallard. The “St” does look rather like an “H”

in one clerk’s handwriting, but it really was Stallard and the current name is based

on a mistake. Stallard is well recorded in the Bristol area and Hallard is rarer.

Henacre Road

Appears to combine the names of the pre-war nearby fields Hencroft(s) and Nine

Acres, just beyond a small patch of moor where this street was built. Otherwise it

could be literally from a field called Henacre. I have found fields called Henacre in

old documents in other Gloucestershire villages, e.g. in Ham & Stone and

Minsterworth, but not here. Like Bangrove (Walk), the name seems to have been

copied from elsewhere in the county.

Hopewell Gardens

Hopewell is another field-name of 1822, possibly meaning ‘spring where hops were

found’; there is also a rare surname Hopewell , from the Nottingham area, which the

original field-name might include. There are two Old English words hop, meaning

‘enclosed valley’ and ‘enclosure in marshland’, but they do not apply here.

Humberstan Walk

From the surname (originating in the East Midlands) of Giles Humberstan, a 17th-

century resident of Henbury.

King’s Weston Lane : see Avonmouth section.

73

Long Cross

From a field-name, probably the same as the Long Croft ‘long houseplot and

enclosure’ recorded in 1803 and 1822. One copy of the 1822 document includes

Upper Long Cross along with Long Croft, and this clerk’s mistake must be the source

of the street-name.

Mancroft Avenue

From a field-name probably meaning ‘the plot/paddock used in common (i.e. by

everyone)’, recorded first in 1642. There was a field in Shirehampton with the

similar name Manlands on which no tithes were payable, presumably because it too

was used in common.

Middleton Road

This was built on land belonging to the manor of Bishop’s Stoke (i.e. Stoke

Bishop) in Westbury, which was inherited by Lord Middleton through the Smyths

of Ashton Court in the early 18th century.

Moor Grove and Moorend Gardens

These refer to the moor or marsh at the edge of which Lawrence Weston lies.

Moor Grove is recorded as woodland in 16th-century documents.

Playford Gardens

At least two poor women called Playford received charity from Westbury-on-Trym

parish in the 17th century. That does not look very relevant (the area was not in

Westbury), but H. C. W. Harris states that it is the source of the street-name, and

he probably suggested it, so we must believe him.

Sadlier Close (1966)

Commemorates the Tudor courtier and diplomat Sir Ralph Sadleir (as it is usually

spelt), who acquired a great deal of land in this area in the 1540s, including the

manors of Stoke Bishop, Henbury, Westbury and Shirehampton, after the

Dissolution of the Monasteries.

St Lawrence Court

After the saint of the long-vanished medieval leper hospital called St Lawrence’s

Hospital, near Lawford’s Gate, Bristol, which owned and gave its name to Lawrence

Weston and hence to this row of modern dwellings.

74

The Tump

From a Gloucestershire and south-west midland dialect word for ‘mound’, which

is what this is: a small hill dropping away steeply on its north-west side towards the

grounds of the local school.

Windcliff Crescent or Windcliffe Crescent

From yet another 1822 field-name,

which was spelt earlier, in 1803, Wind

Clift. The “crescent” is no more than

a slight curve. The spelling is different

on signs on the two sides of the

street. This may well be copied from a

cliff of the same name in St Arvan’s

near Chepstow, which in its day – the

late 18th century – was a well-known

tourist attraction on the Piercefield

estate and only about 11 miles from

here as the crow flies. Perhaps the

squires of King’s Weston hoped that

their cliff in Penpole Ridge here

would rival the better-known one as

an attraction. The land seems to have

had the simple older name of Hill Top.

75

Sources

Drafts of parts of this book were published as a series of articles in Shire newspaper

in most months from March 2008 to September 2009. The originals can be read

online via http://www.shire.org.uk. Some improvements have been made since

their first appearance.

All hyperlinks mentioned were successfully tested in August 2011, though some

sites are behind a paywall.

Paper and electronic publications (including items placed on the web after

paper publication)

Archer, Steve (2003 and updates) Surname atlas. CD-ROM. Dartford: Archer

Publications. [A mapping of the 1881 census data.]

Atkyns, [Sir] Robert (1712) The ancient and present state of Glostershire. London.

Barrett, William (1789) History and antiquities of the City of Bristol. Bristol: William

Pine.

Bettey, J. H. (2004, online 2009) Smyth family (per. c.1500–1680). Oxford Dictionary

of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, online at http://www.

oxforddnb.com/view/article/71874, accessed 28 January 2011.

Bigland, Ralph (1889), ed. Brian Frith (1995) Historical, monumental and genealogical

collections relative to the county of Gloucester, part 4: Uley-Yate, with introduction and

indexes. Bristol: Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society

(Gloucestershire records series 8). [Includes Westbury on Trym.]

Bone, Ian (2001) Community profile of Shirehampton, January 2001. Shirehampton:

Public Hall Community Association, online at http://hall.shire.org.uk/profile.htm,

accessed 19 July 2007.

Boon, George C. (1967) Kings Weston Roman Villa. Bristol: City of Bristol Museum

and Art Gallery. [Second edition 1976.]

76

Bristol & Avon Family History Society (undated) 1891 census index, vol. 2: Barton

Regis, Bristol North and East suburbs. CD-ROM. [Pieces 1987-1990 cover north-

west Bristol.]

Bristol City Council Planning Department (undated; 1977?) Shirehampton : a

conservation study. Bristol. [The brief history of the village is a disgrace.]

Bristol City Council (undated) Choosing a street name. In “Street naming and

numbering register”, available online at http://www.bristol.gov.uk/ccm

/navigation/housing/land-and-premises/street-naming-and-numbering-register/,

accessed 19 July 2010.

Bristol Mercury and Daily Post, 15/10/1881 [on wrecks in a storm at Avonmouth].

Bristol Times, weekly supplement of the Evening Post. [Contains images, reviews,

reminiscences and articles of historical interest not mentioned separately here.]

Butcher, E. E., ed. (1932) Bristol Corporation of the Poor, 1696-1834. Bristol: Bristol

Record Society (publication 3).

Byrne, Eugene (2011) Stolen Paradise: civilian squatters in military camps in and

around postwar Bristol. The Regional Historian: journal of The Regional History Centre,

University of the West of England, Bristol 23, 31-36 [including extracts from an

interview with Tom Kirk].

Chilcott, John (1849) Descriptive history of Bristol, 8th edn. Bristol: Chilcott, esp. 403-

405 and 416.

Coates, Richard (2007) South-West English dumball, dumble, dunball ‘pasture subject

to (occasional) tidal flooding’. Journal of the English Place-Name Society 39, 59-72.

Coates, Richard (2008) Correction to The place-names of Gloucestershire, vol. 3 (EPNS

Survey vol. 40). Journal of the English Place-Name Society 40, 129-130.

Dewer, Paul (1995) From Celtic gods to smugglers’ rum. Source (new series) 3, 17-

19. [About Bucklewell.]

Draper, Simon (forthcoming work on words in ancient place-names).

Farrell, S. M. (2004, online 2009) Herbert, George Augustus, eleventh earl of

Pembroke and eighth earl of Montgomery (1759–1827). Oxford Dictionary of

77

National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, online at http://

www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/13026, accessed 23 December 2010.

Fisher, Janet, and Derek Fisher (1994) Shirehampton and Sea Mills on old postcards.

Bristol: Bygone Bristol.

Glass, Emily (2009) Archaeological watching brief of land at no. 38 Walton Road,

Shirehampton, Bristol, for Mr Philip Pinnell. Report No. 2060/2009. BHER No.

24645 Bristol: Bristol and Region Archaeological Services (report 24645), online at

http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/adsdata/oasis_reports/bristola1/ahds/disseminat

ion/pdf/bristola1-49047_1.pdf, accessed 23 December 2010.

Gray, Les (1986) Down by the riverside. Published in Shire, March 2008, now on

the web at http://www.shire.org.uk/shire.php?edition=434. [Memoirs in two

parts.]

Green, John (2009) Bristol and the zinc industry. Newsletter of the Retired Professional

Engineers Club, Bristol (March), online at http://www.rpec.co.uk/news12.html,

accessed July 2009.

Hack, Ralph (1980) Penlea: a little history of an old house. Shire, January 1980.

Hack, Ralph (1998a) Building of the Public Hall. Shire, April 1998, now on the

web at http://www.shire.org.uk/index.php?page=building_public_hall, accessed

frequently. [Notes added on the web-page from other issues of Shire. There is also

a version at http://www.shirepubhall.org.uk/.]

Hack, Ralph (1998b) The Wordsworths in Shirehampton. Partially reprinted in

Shire, March 2009, now on the web at http://www.shire.org.uk/shire.php

?edition=446.

Hack, Ralph (1999, 2000) History of the George Inn. Shire, December 1999 and

February 2000, now on the web at http://www.shire.org.uk/index.php?page

=george_inn.

Hack, Ralph (2006) The Great War, Remount Camp 1914-1918. Shire, November

2006, now on the web at http://www.shire.org.uk/shire.php?edition=418.

Hanks, Nick (2007) Bewys Cross, the Bevis Stone and Sir Bevis of Hampton: an

exploration of possible connections. Bristol and Avon Archaeology 21, 87-90.

78

Harding, N. Dermott, ed. (1930) Bristol charters 1155-1373. Bristol: Bristol Record

Society (publication 1).

Harris H. C. W. (1969) Housing nomenclature in Bristol. Bristol: Bristol City Council

Housing Department. [See Harris also in Unpublished documents.]

Helme, Judy, and Sue Davies, eds (1999) A Mouthful of memories: an oral history of

Avonmouth. Privately published.

Helme, Judy, and Sue Davies, eds (2001) Another Mouthful of memories: an oral history

of Avonmouth. Privately published.

Helme, Judy (2004) Shirehampton Public Hall 1904-2004. Shirehampton:

Shirehampton Public Hall Committee.

Higgins, David H. (2002) The Anglo-Saxon charters of Stoke Bishop: a study of

the boundaries of Bisceopes stoc. Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire

Archaeological Society 120, 107-131.

Higgins, David H. (2004) The Roman town of Abona and the Anglo-Saxon

charters of Stoke Bishop of AD 969 and 984. Bristol and Avon Archaeology 19, 75-86.

Hooper, Mike (2002) Shirehampton history. Shire, August 2002, now on the web at

http://www.shire.org.uk/shire.php?edition=367. [On the Garden Suburb.]

Hunt, J. M. (1990) Notes on the old stone crosses of the county of Avon. Avon

Past 15, 21-30. [Bewy’s Cross is depicted on the cover of this issue.]

Hunt, Stephen E. (2009) Yesterday’s tomorrow. Bristol’s garden suburbs. Bristol: Bristol

Radical History Group (pamphlet 8).

Johnson, James (1826) Transactions of the Corporation of the Poor, in the City of Bristol,

during a period of 126 years. Bristol: P. Rose [esp. 85-90 on the Shirehampton assets

of the Corporation].

Jordan, Spencer, Keith Ramsey and Matthew Woollard, compilers (1997) Abstract of

Bristol historical statistics, part 3: political representation and Bristol’s elections 1770-1997.

Bristol: University of the West of England. [Available in BRO, pamphlet 1693 (c).]

Latimer, John (1887) Annals of Bristol in the nineteenth century. Bristol: W. & F.

Morgan.

79

Lewis, Samuel, ed. (1848) A topographical dictionary of England, 7th edn. London: S.

Lewis & Co. [Also online at http://www.british-history.ac.uk/source.aspx ?pubid

=445, accessed frequently.]

Lomax, Frank, translator (1992) The antiquities of Glastonbury, by William of

Malmesbury. Llanerch: J.M.F. Books.

Macey, Mary (2009) Local people in street names. Shire, April 2009, now online at

http://www.shire.org.uk/shire.php?edition=447.

Maggs, Colin (undated [1975]) The Bristol Port Railway and Pier. Tarrant Hinton:

Oakwood Press (Oakwood Library 37).

Malpass, Peter, and Jennie Walmsley (2005) 100 years of council housing in Bristol.

Bristol: University of the West of England, Faculty of the Built Environment

Technical Report.

Mee, Arthur (1938) Gloucestershire. London: Hodder & Stoughton (The King’s

England).

Moore, John S. (1987) The Gloucestershire section of Domesday Book:

geographical problems of the text, part 1. Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire

Archaeological Society 105, 109-32 [esp. 119-120, dealing with former opinions on

whether Chire in Domesday book is Shirehampton and crediting A.S. Ellis with the

correct solution].

Orme, Nicholas, and Jon Cannon, eds (2010) Westbury-on-Trym: Monastery, Minster

and College. Bristol: Bristol Record Society (publication 62).

Parsons, Richard (1988) The story of Kings [i.e. C. J. King and Sons Ltd, tugboat

company.] Bristol: White Tree Books.

Robertson, J. Drummond, ed. Lord Moreton (1890) Glossary of dialect and archaic

words used in the county of Gloucester. London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trübner, for

English Dialect Society (publication 61).

Rudder, Samuel (1779) A new history of Gloucestershire. Privately published. [Revision

of Atkyns (1712).]

Sawyer, P. H., editor (1968) Anglo-Saxon charters: an annotated list and bibliography.

London: Royal Historical Society. [Relevant for Shirehampton and Stoke Bishop

are document 218: British Library manuscript Cotton Tiberius A. xiii, folio 51v;

80

document 1317: British Library manuscript Cotton Tiberius A. xiii, folio 58rv;

document 1346: British Library manuscript Cotton Tiberius A. xiii, folios 57-58.

Revised edn now online at http://www.esawyer.org.uk, accessed frequently.]

Seyer, Samuel (1821, 1823) Memoirs historical and topographical of Bristol and its

neighbourhood, 2 vols. Bristol.

Shire, and Shire on the Web at http://www.shire.org.uk/. [Community newspaper.

Contains reminiscences and articles of historical interest apart from those

mentioned separately here.]

Skilleter, Keith J. (undated) Bristol’s garden suburbs: a history of housing reform,

town planning and the Corporation’s ‘cottage estates’ 1890-1939. Unpublished.

Smith, A. H. (1964) The place-names of Gloucestershire, vol. 3. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press (Survey of English Place-Names vol. 40). [Note that Smith

mistakenly places Shirehampton in Henbury rather than in Westbury-on-Trym; see

Coates (2008) above.]

Smith, Veronica (2002) The street names of Bristol, 2nd edn. Bristol: Broadcast Books

“A solicitor” (1839) The benevolent madman (from “Curiosities of legal

experience”), anecdote in diary form, dates in “July”. Journal of Belles Lettres,

supplement to Waldie’s Select Circulating Library 14 (2).23-25 (3, 10, 17 December

1839), and previously in The Albion (October 1839). Available online through

Google Books. [Contains early mentions of events in Shirehampton centring on

Walton House by The Green.]

Sturge, Elizabeth, and Frederick A.S. Goodbody (1909) A garden suburb for Bristol.

Letchworth: Letchworth Garden City Press. [Promotional pamphlet.]

Taylor, C. S. (1913) Note on the entry in Domesday Book relating to Westbury-on-

Severn. Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society 36, 182-190.

Thomas, Ethel, ed. D. Archer (1977) The Avonmouth story. Dursley: Archer.

Thomas, Ethel (1981) Down the ’Mouth. Privately published.

Thomas, Ethel (1989) War story. Privately published. [The Second World War as it

affected Avonmouth.]

Thomas, Ethel (1993) Shirehampton story, 2nd edn. Privately published.

81

Thomas, Ethel (2002) The continuing story of Shirehampton. Privately published.

Thompson Smith, Angela (2006) Shire. Baltimore, MD: PublishAmerica.

Vincent, Mike (1979) Lines to Avonmouth. Oxford: Oxford Publishing Co.

Watts, Victor (2004) Cambridge dictionary of English place-names. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Wells, Charles (1909) A short history of the Port of Bristol. Bristol: J.W. Arrowsmith

and London: Simpkin, Marshall.

Wheeler, Anthony W. (1968 and other editions) The story of St Mary’s church,

Shirehampton. Privately published.

Wigan, Eve (1932) Portishead parish history. Taunton: Barnicott and Pearce, The

Wessex Press.

Wildwood, Annie (1995) The Source: Bristol Springs & Wells Group. Source (new

series) 4. Online at http://people.bath.ac.uk/liskmj/living-spring/sourcearchive

/ns4/ns4aw1.htm, accessed 22 December 2010.

Wilkins, H. J., ed. (1909) Transcription of the 'Poor Book' of the tithings of Westbury-on-

Trym, Stoke Bishop and Shirehampton from A.D. 1656-1698. Bristol: Arrowsmith.

Wilkins, H. J. (1920) The perambulation of the boundaries of the ancient parish of Westbury-

on-Trym in May, 1803. [Bound with other material, including Marmont’s map of

Henbury parish (1831).] Bristol: Arrowsmith.

[Wilkins also published other small pamphlets about historical documents of

Henbury and Westbury.]

Williams, Wadham Pigott, and William Arthur Jones (1873) A glossary of provincial

words and phrases in use in Somersetshire. Online at http://www.dr-

belair.com/Languages/English/Patois/Provincial-words-Pigott.htm, accessed 21

December 2010.

Winstone, Reece (1977) Bristol’s suburbs in the ’20s and ’30s. Privately published.

[Esp. images 3-27.]

Winstone, Reece (1985) Bristol’s suburbs long ago. Privately published. [Esp. images 4-

32 and 512.]

82

[Others of Winstone’s many picture-books have occasional historic photos

of Avonmouth and Shirehampton.]

Wood, James G. (1903, published 1905) The ‘Anthony Post’ at Avonmouth.

Transactions of the Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club, 196-197.

Wreford, J.K.R. (1854) Curiosities of Bristol and its neighbourhood. Bristol: M. Mathews.

[Reprinted Stroud: The History Press (2010).]

Unpublished original documents

Bristol Record Office (BRO), catalogue at http://archives.bristol.gov.uk/dserve/,

especially the following documents or document groups:

scattered documents about Shirehampton chapel/parish church;

St Michael on the Mount Without parish, Bristol; BRO document references

P.St M/CH/21/a-b and AC/WO/12/85, dealing with land at

Shirehampton; also P.St M/D/1/l;

17th- and 18th-century personal documents , BRO document references

AC/WO/12 in the sequence beginning AC/WO/12/10 and esp.

AC/WO/12/30 onwards (Ashton Court archive);

scattered documents about St Peter’s Hospital (a.k.a. The Mint);

Westbury-on-Trym enclosure act (1811), BRO document reference

12151/175 (a Miles document);

Henbury and Westbury-on-Trym enclosure award, BRO document reference

40597/1; also Westbury enclosure map (1822), BRO 37959/40; and

Westbury enclosure map and extracts from award dealing with various rates

([1814] 1822), BRO P.Hen/SD/7;

Shirehampton Tithe Award (1840-1, with map), bishop’s copy, BRO

document reference EP/A/32/34;

Henbury Tithe Award (1841, with map), bishop’s copy, BRO document

reference EP/A/32/22;

lease of Dunball Island (1862), BRO document reference 32173/68;

various documents about Avonmouth docks and church;

Shirehampton Garden Suburb prospectus (1909), BRO document reference

MS BristolPlans/numbered/62; see also BristolPlans/arranged/116 (1911);

83

Barton Regis Rural District Council: Shirehampton Parish Council minute

books, 1894-1903, BRO document reference 05042;

various documents of The [City] Engineer’s Department, highway adoption

notices;

housing records, schedule by area of council houses built under the Housing

Act (1925), BRO document reference 42098/1/4, 604-614;

records of the Miles family, BRO document collection reference 12151, esp.

/94-/239;

note also: Harris, H. C. W. (c.1969) “Notebook compiled by the author of

Housing Nomenclature in Bristol, H.C.W. Harris, 1969 relating to work

done for that volume”, BRO document reference 40702;

the Ethel Thomas Avonmouth collection (uncatalogued and not fully

available to the public), BRO document reference 42242/1.

Gloucestershire Archives (GA), catalogue available online at

http://ww3.gloucestershire.gov.uk/DServe/DServe.exe?dsqApp=Archive&dsqC

md=Index.tcl, especially the following documents or document groups:

lease of Avenhouse (1679), GA document reference D2957/329/142;

Westbury enclosure award, with map (1822), GA document reference

Q/RI/154;

messuages and gardens at Park Place, Shirehampton, GA document

reference D1606/Box 22/Bundle 3;

papers relating to sale of King’s Weston estate, GA document reference

D1405/4/137.

Somerset Record Office (SRO), catalogue available online at

http://www1.somerset.gov.uk/archives/Catalogs.htm, especially the following

documents or document groups:

Gore family accounts, SRO document reference DD\GB/152/54 [note of

Broad Pill].

The National Archives (TNA) at Kew, catalogue available online at

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/, search on Shirehampton:

84

note especially TNA chancery document C 131/44/10 (1394) referring to

John Weston of Shernyhampton;

Shirehampton Remount Depot: document WO95/69 Branches and

Services, Director of Remounts, 1914 August-1916 December;

many documents in BRO are also indexed and summarized on TNA web-

site.

For all of BRO, GA, SRO, and TNA, details are accessible online using Access to

Archives, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/a2a/.

A few documents used are in the writer’s possession, in other private hands, or

cited or reproduced in other publications:

perambulations of the boundaries of Westbury-on-Trym, 1790 and 1803,

reproduced in Wilkins (1920);

Shirehampton rate books, 1797 and 1800;

Baron, François (1823-99) “Recollections of my early days and sketches of

village life”, extracts taken by Alison Mary Stanes;

Bristol City Council (no date; after 1984) “Background information on the

Avonmouth area”, an internal document of the Monitoring and Research

Section of the Council’s Environmental Health Department.

Maps, published and unpublished

1769 Benjamin Donn’s map of the country 11 miles round the City of

Bristol, copy displayed in the Bolland Library, University of the West of

England;

1772 Shirehampton, by Isaac Taylor, reproduced in Glass (2009), also in

next;

1772 maps of Southwell family estates, by Isaac Taylor, Bristol Record

Office document reference 26570, unpublished;

1817-1830 Ordnance Survey 1" old series sheets, reprojected and published

by Cassini (2007) as “Bristol and Bath”, matching Landranger sheet 172;

1822 Enclosure Award maps: see Unpublished documents above;

1831 Henbury parish, by J. Marmont, reproduced in Wilkins (1920);

85

1841 Shirehampton Tithe Award map, with schedule including field-names,

bishop’s copy, Bristol Record Office document reference EP/A/32/34,

unpublished;

1863 plan of route of Bristol Port and Pier Railway, Bristol Record Office

document reference SMV/6/4/10/9, unpublished;

1979 H. A. Lane’s map (not an exact copy) derived from the Tithe Award

Map with field names, appearing as the endpapers of Thomas’s book The

continuing story of Shirehampton (2002);

2006 A-Z Premier street-map of Bristol, 8th edn;

2008 Bristol City Council Avonmouth polling districts, online at

http://www.bristol.gov.uk/WardFinder/pdfs/avonmouthmap-high.pdf;

note that all areas marked except C and the most northerly parts of A are

part of ancient Shirehampton and Avonmouth.

Many old Ordnance Survey (OS) maps referred to in the text, especially at 6" to

the mile and 25" to the mile in various editions, have been accessed online using:

Old-Maps, http://www.old-maps.co.uk/maps.html.

Current maps showing most of the streets mentioned can be conveniently viewed

using:

Streetmap, http://www.streetmap.co.uk/.

Some of these maps, along with others, and with aerial photos, are available on the

ambitious and informative new historical web-site “Bristol: Know Your Place”,

http://maps.bristol.gov.uk/knowyourplace/ (2013), which also includes user-

provided local information and images.

Other web-pages

http://www.shire.org.uk/index.php?page=history (contains articles of

historical interest by Ralph Hack, David Hoey, Kate Pollard, and Ethel

Thomas);

http://www.locallearning.org.uk/Avonmouth/streets.html (small item on

local names);

http://www.dalmura.com.au/genealogy/Willington/ (on Willington

/Wellington family history);

86

http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/bristol/hi/people_and_places/newsid_796000

0/7960730.stm (on the Council’s apostrophe policy).

The web-sites of commercial companies based in Avonmouth have also provided

historical information at the margin.

From a prospectus for local housing just before the First World War

87

One of the more exotic parts of the golf course in Shirehampton Park: a tribute to American

soldiers stationed in the Park during the Second World War

Most people use local names in speaking and writing without a thought for where

they came from – and that’s what they’re for, in the end: just to pick out particular

places. But they can also tell us a lot about the past of the community which uses

them, and many people are interested in that too. This is a book about names at

the western end of the City of Bristol, in the present Avonmouth ward.

*

Richard Coates researches and teaches at the University of the West of England,

Bristol, and is Hon. Director of the Survey of English Place-Names. He lives

in Shirehampton.