Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
Housing estates’ final link across the fields
The 1874 Ordnance Survey map shows Forty Acres Road as a short lane that served a few houses and, later on, a large nursery complex.
Completely separate from it at this time, was the late Victorian/ Edwardian Beaconsfield Road development that had grown up round the St Stephen’s Pathways.
The two were soon joined together as further housing schemes spread across the area.
Later still, in the 1960s, Beaconsfield Road would be extended northwards to connect with St Stephen’s Hill.
The first of the above pictures shows the ‘new’ mid section of Forty Acres Road in March 1967.
To the right is the junction into Beverley Road. On the left is the hedge and distinctive fir trees that mark the boundary of G. Mount & Sons Ltd – nursery and wholesale florists.
By the late 1960s, Mount’s greenhouses had been cleared for residential development of the area.
The second picture dates from 1987 and shows part of the premises of Canterbury Auto Electrical Ltd, near the junction with Whitstable Road.
This is the truncated part of a once, much larger Victorian period house that stood in the corner of a sizeable garden plot. What fate befell the house is unknown, but it would be partly demolished and then converted into the premises for Solly and Vane, who ran a fleet of ‘fly’ vehicles. A fly is a small single-horse-drawn carriage.
The garage complex was demolished shortly after this photograph was taken and the site redeveloped for housing