Following my recent discovery of Lordswood Lane and Chilworth Drove – bridleways that used to be more important routes – I had a look at a map and found that there are more of these than you might think. Or more than I thought.
For example, White Lane runs from Twyford in the vague direction of St Catherine’s Hill, and Silkstead Lane and Shepherd’s Lane can be found near Compton and Otterbourne. Even the pathways that lead through Boyatt Wood may follow routes that predate the houses. The footbridge over the railway at the end of Archers Road may even be a legacy of an access route that is older than the railway.
History of Road Names
The names that are given to thoroughfares can give us a clue to the history of travel and navigation.
Back in history, before even the Romans arrived, the Ancient Britons had “Ways” to provide their long distance routes across the country. Two such examples, Harroway and Portway still exist as green lanes and restricted byways across the north-east of Hampshire. Sections of these lanes have been subsequently absorbed into more modern roads, but Harroway is still preserved in the name of one of the schools in Andover.
Then the Romans arrived with the imposition of Streets and Ways (and an occasional Road). The Fosse Way ran between Exeter and Lincoln; Ermine Street ran between London and York. However, owing to a (unusual for the Romans) lack of documentation, many of the Roman roads were not actually named until several centuries after the end of Roman Rule in Britain
Road Naming Convention
Gradually, road names appear to have settled on the following convention:
- A Road was a route outside a town, leading towards another town, and generally given the name of the town it was leading to (before signposts were invented, this was how travellers know they were heading in the right direction. A “Road” was suitable to ride a horse along, and the word’s “road” and “ride” share an etymology. Shakespeare did sometimes spell “road” as “rode”. But then Shakespeare also spelled his own name four different ways, so although he wrote some great plays, I’m not sure he is necessarily a leading authority on contemporary spelling.
- A Street was similar to a road, but only within a town. In Whitchurch, Winchester Street, London Street and Newbury Street become Winchester Road, London Road and Newbury Road when the boundary of the original town is reached. To add to the confusion of delivery drivers, the house numbering on Newbury Road resets to 1, but on London and Winchester Roads it continues from the preceding Street.
- A Lane was a byway that meandered through the countryside and didn’t really go from anywhere to anywhere. A good example of a meandering lane is Cutbush Lane, Southampton which once ran between Chartwell Green and Bitterne (though not necessarily the most direct route between Chartwell Green and Bitterne). Much of this lane has been overlaid with the Townhill Park housing estate, but it’s original course can be traced through the remaining bridleways and no-through roads – and its name seen in local features.
I should stress that these are only rules of thumb – and that other names are also used, though not as commonly (for example, A Drove was a wide route, used to drive animals to market). There are probably many examples where the rule is breached. I’m also only talking about established routes running from place to place, not more recent residential streets. Town planners have their own nomenclature, and no one is suggesting that Derby and Grantham Roads in Eastleigh ever went anywhere near those towns.
Local Examples
In Winchester we have Romsey Road, Stockbridge Road, Andover Road, Alresford Road, and Petersfield Road which all lead towards their respective place names (though Petersfield Road was severed by the Winchester bypass many years ago).
These routes don’t keep the same name throughout their length. The place name is specific to where you are and where you are heading. For example, a “Manchester Road” in Leeds may well be “Leeds Road” by the time you get to Manchester – because then it is the road from Manchester to Leeds, not from Leeds to Manchester. And there would be other localisations en-route. For example, Southampton’s Winchester Road changes to Chilworth Avenue* in Bassett; back to Winchester Road on the hill towards Asda; then becomes Bournemouth Road as far as the Hursley Road junction; and finally, Winchester Road again.
* I suspect that Chilworth Avenue is a later amendment to Chilworth Road, intended to make it sound more attractive to house purchasers. And why doesn’t the road start off as “Chilworth Road” as it leaves Southampton? Well, quite simply because medieval long-distance travellers didn’t really care about Chilworth – they wanted to get to Winchester. Such is true today – though the “long” distances are further. The signs at M3 Junction 9 tell me the A34 goes to Newbury, Oxford and The Midlands, but makes no mention of Sutton Scotney, Whitchurch or Litchfield.
Road Name Changes and Mysteries
Dew Lane, Eastleigh is a very short stretch of road running parallel to Leigh Road. But originally, this lane included what is now Leigh Road and Romsey Road.
Incidentally, High Street in Eastleigh was originally “Tankerville Road”, after Tankerville Chamberlayne who had owned much of the land that the town is built on. This possibly explains why the Chamberlayne Arms lies on High Street, rather than Chamberlayne Road, which would seem a more logical location. But I digress.
Bournemouth Road is a bit of a mystery to me. It doesn’t go to Bournemouth – not directly, anyway. Wouldn’t it be more logical to call it Southampton Road or, at a push (given that the Templars Way is relatively new) Romsey Road. Maybe it was renamed to prevent confusion with Eastleigh’s Southampton Road, in a similar way that Winchester Road (Eastleigh) was renamed Twyford Road. The Working Mens Club in Twyford Road retained the name of “Winchester Road Club” for several years. It always made me think of The Winchester Club from Minder.
And have you ever pondered this anomaly?
If Southampton Road was the route by which you rode your horse to Southampton, it shouldn’t change to a Lane.
Of course, Eastleigh didn’t exist until the late 19th century. It probably wasn’t “Southampton Road” originally because a) it wasn’t a road and b) it didn’t lead from anywhere. My suspicion is that Wide Lane originally ran at least as far as the Home Tavern, where there was a junction with Bishopstoke Lane to the east and Dew Lane to the west. Incidentally, the late development of the town would also explains why while Eastleigh and Chandlers Ford have “Southampton”, “Winchester”, “Bournemouth”, “Hursley” and “Twyford” roads, none of those places have a corresponding “Eastleigh Road”
Really interesting, Chippy. Thanks!
That is really interesting Chippy. Thanks.
Excellent article, Chippy. (Of course roads can be named after people. Symes Road in Romsey is named after an ancestor of my husband’s family).
Of course. And as well as Tankerville Road, Eastleigh has Chamberlayne Road, Cranbury Road (after Cranbury Park), Desborough Road (who I think was the land agent), and Nutbeem (who was apparently the farmer of the Great Eastley Farm). More recently, we have roads named after Bill Luffman and George Ramond (long-standing councillors), Tommy Green (Olympic walker), Heinz Burt (musician) and Benny Hill (comedian). I did spend some time trying to find out who Anne Aling was, but it turns out that the word is annealing and is a process used in making wire!
There’s a road named after my great uncle in Kidlington. I know it is him, because he owned the land on which it is built. There’s a similarly named road in Oxford, but I have yet to find out whether it is connected or just coincidence.
Nice work on a fascinating subject, Chippy. Prior to the turnpike era (mainly 1700s), many of the local ‘roads’ would have derived from ancient tracks with colloquial names, connecting smaller settlements with each other and with the nearest market towns. Longer-distance routes, other than the likes of the ‘new’ Roman roads, were generally amalgams of short tracks, so often indirect. If you can find the early OS 1-inch maps that pre-date the railways, the ancient pattern of tracks is more evident, as are the turnpikes. Parishes were mainly responsible for local road maintenance until the county highways departments formed in the later 1800s. Some specific Chandler’s Ford points: the railway obviously disturbed the local road network. I reckon that dead-end stub facing the west side of the station once continued straight across onto what’s now Hursley Road. The railway and station would have required the road being cut and realigned to meet the east end of the (then) new railway bridge. Hence the bend near the old station entrance on Hursley Road. Terms like ‘bridleway’, ‘byway’, even ‘public footpath’ were legally formalised after the 1949 National Parks & Access to the Countryside Act set up the designated public rights of way system, but they no doubt inherited older definitions. Terms like ‘green lane’ and even just ‘lane’ tend to be popular descriptions and have no official status. The official categories of public rights of way are all ‘highways’ but restricted to certain types of traffic. The 1835 Highways Act is the bible for most legal issues and disputes relating to highway history. Planners (I’m one!) don’t really have our own nomenclature for various highways, but lean largely on their highway colleagues. Modern road names for new developments are often the result of decisions between developers and councillors, and sometimes local residents. Finally, Eastleigh grew from virtually nothing alongside Bishopstoke when the L&SWR moved its railway works from Nine Elms in London in the early 1900s. Hope that helps.
Thank for the additional information, Peter. I’d never thought about that bend in Hursley Road before, but I see what you mean. There is a more recent, but similar road realignment at the top of Otterbourne Hill, where the road now curves to the left (and then right at the mini-roundabout) where it used to go directly over the A33 (as it was then) directly to the Hocombe Road junction.
I do have a map from the early 1800s, and will have a look. It fascinates me how many modern roads can be traced back to much older tracks. The map is all in one colour though, which makes it difficult to distinguish between paths, tracks and roads! And I’m never to sure whether discrepancies are genuine historical differences or cartographic errors!
I did wonder whether Southampton Road/Wide Lane was realigned for the railway, but there is little evidence – I guess it may have shifted to the west a bit, but always seems to have been a straight road – at least north of Parkway Station. I think the section from Parkway station to Swaythling may once have been close to what is now the railway.
I also have a theory that once a right of way is established, it is so much legal complication to get it moved that planners find it easier incorporate it into the development. Perhaps, as a planner you can tell me whether I am correct 🙂
Also, there is a theory that the Romans didn’t set out to build long cross-country roads. They just built a lot of shorter roads from place to place that happened to connect up into a longer route. The Romans wouldn’t have called them “Fosse Way” and “Ermine Street”, but would have had different names for different sections of the routes.
In a more modern example, the A34 was never built from Winchester to Manchester. But when road numbering was introduced (in the 1930s?), a number of different sections of road were given the number “A34”.
What goes around comes around!
You’re absolutely right abut Hursley Road, Peter. I’ve compared maps of early and late 1800s. The later map – which is post-railway but pre-development of the area – the realigned junction sticks out like a sore thumb!
A lot of direct crossroads have been re-aligned and staggered by highway engineers in recent years, to increase safety by reducing conflicting traffic movements. This often leaves the old alignment as a stub or pull-off, still visible as an historical reminder. I suspect the Otterbourne/Hocombe case is one of these. (I spent my first 5 years in Hook Road hutments, so that end of Hocombe Road is familiar, and there is still a direct cross-roads onto Hook Road.) The early OS 1-inch maps were all in black print with, as you say, little or no hierarchical distinction between all the roads other than slight width variations (except for the turnpike toll roads, which are more obvious). The turnpike roads around CF are presumably just: Romsey-Hursley-Winchester (A31), Winchester-Southampton (A33) and Romsey-Southampton (A27). There may be a detailed book on the old roads of Hampshire; there is definitely one for Dorset by Ronald Good. If you have the urge to go down the huge rabbit hole (warren?!) of rights of way law, the standard reference work is ‘Rights of Way: A Guide to Law and Practice’ (Clayden & Trevelyan). It’s published by the Open Spaces Society and Ramblers Association – the two main campaigning groups for protection of RoWs – and by now is into its umpteenth edition. The Labour government’s 1949 Act was hailed as the great step forward in legal PRoW protection, but in first drawing up the ‘definitive maps’ in the 1950s, often more traditionally-used paths were lost or not registered than were protected. The parish councils were the primary agencies in deciding which routes to include, and were usually dominated by the landed classes who owned the land the paths crossed and who could veto any particular route. (One vast parish here in Herefordshire has no PRoWs mapped at all, simply because the parish was ruled by one feudal landowner!) The Countryside Commission/Agency spent years trying to improve the national network, and the campaigners to extend it to include ‘lost’ routes, but it’s a long slow and often futile grind. Once a route is on the definitive map, it’s certainly hard to divert it or even extinguish it without much (often justifiable) protest and cost to the applicant (again, usually the landowner). Nowadays, when planning applications for development are considered that affect a PRoW, any old, established routes will normally be incorporated as upgraded footpaths or shared-use paths. Highways departments will normally comment on any historical significance and status attached to a PRoW, and suggest this is recognised in some way, but the older staff who had that type of local historical knowledge are often long-retired. As your Boyatt Wood case shows, you can end up with a narrow, straightened, unsafe and intimidating corridor, partly because developers are reluctant to lose any land that might be used for more development. More enlightened schemes sometimes create wider ‘greenways’ or linear parks. The whole subject is a minefield!
I was exploring a new housing development this week, and not only have existing PRoWs been preserved, they are also protected with temporary fencing within the construction site.