What’s in a name? Poets find their place in estate’s roads
» IF you live in Benhall, or have visited that estate on the west edge of Cheltenham that was built in the late 1950s/ early 60s, you may have noticed that the roads are named after Gloucestershire villages. All, that is, except one.
Stanway, Coberley, Turkdean, Bisley, Bibury, Whittington and other such roads are complemented by Robert Burns Avenue. Now why should that be?
Well the story goes that when the adjacent and earlier St Mark’s estate was built the decision was made to name its road after poets.
So there’s a Milton Road, Byron Road, Shelley Avenue and Kipling Road, a Shakespeare Road, Tennyson Road and Wordsworth Avenue. All English men of letters.
This fact did not go unnoticed by a Scots member of Cheltenham Borough Council when the time came to name roads in Benhall. He pointed out that the omission to recall Scotland’s national poet was doubly insulting because Rabbie Burns had notable links with the town, as his two sons retired to Charlton Kings and members of his family are buried in St Mary’s parish Church there.
That’s why Robert Burns is found among all the county villages as you drive into Benhall from the A40.
St Mark’s has its own place in history. After the First World War, the Prime Minister Lloyd George famously declared that Britain needed homes fit for heroes. There was an acute shortage of housing, a situation exacerbated by soldiers returning from five years of conflict.
New housing estates sprung up all over the country, but one of the first was St Mark’s in Cheltenham. To accommodate the development, in 1919 the town council bought 115 acres from Herbert Unwin, who lived at Arle Court, with a loan of £10, 500 from the Local Government Board.
Tennyson Road was the first of the new estate and by January 1921 ten houses were finished and ready to be lived in.
This area to the west of the town had been the site of an earlier building spree.
In the middle of the 19 century the Cheltenham and Gloucester Freehold Land Society planned a private estate centred on Libertus Road.
At that time the right to vote depended on land ownership and the society’s intention was to increase the number of freehold home owners to enlarge the electorate.
Take a walk along Libertus Road today and it is plain to see where the detached Victorian villas of the original estate give way to the smaller scale, brick built houses of St Mark’s.
The preferred style of housing development in the homes for heroes era was the garden suburb, built on the edge of town, intended as a gradual process from urban on one side to rural on the other.
Consequently the roads of St Mark’s were lined either side with grass verges and planted with trees. This remained the case until the 1960s when people began to park cars on the verges, which were consequently tarmacked over.
Most of the houses had three bedrooms and were intended for families to live in. By the standards of today, the density of housing was sparse, about 12 per acre and the community created was designed to be self contained. St Mark’s had its own recreation ground, a row of shops, a neat terrace of alms houses, but for some reason no pub.
The majority of the estate was built in the 1920s and the houses show an arts and crafts influence. They are of different styles, some semi detached, some terraced, while having an architectural unity and are well built with good sized gardens. The estate appeared on Pathe newsreels shown in cinemas up and down the country and was considered a model of its kind.
Half the houses were owned by the council, half were sold freehold and the roads were all named after poets, with the exception of Wasley Road, which is at the bottom of Kipling Road.
Silas Wasley owned the patch of land that now bears his name and older residents of St Mark’s may know that at the lower end of Milton Road is a small wood, which was once called Wasley Brake, though the name’s long since fallen from use. When Silas Wasley sold the land for building it was on condition that this spinney was left as a small haven for wildlife.
By the time building work finished in the early 1930s, some 600 homes had been built. The tranquillity of the estate was shattered in December 1940 when a Luftwaffe bomb fell at the junction of Shelley and Spencer Roads. By good fortune the device came down on a patch of green and nobody was killed.
However, a large crater was left and the impact caused the fronts of four houses in nearby Kipling Road to collapse.
In May 2001 St Mark’s estate became the most recent of Cheltenham’s six conservation areas. It’s quaintly called the Poets’ Conservation Area, perhaps because the St Mark’s conservation area didn’t sound grand enough. Whatever the name, this distinctive quarter of the town deserves its designation.