History on Your Doorstep

by Carole Holt

Have you ever walked down a road and wondered about its name. Does the name of your road tell you something about the history of your neighbourhood? Names of roads are usually given at the same time that houses are built, so in a way they encapsulate a time period. For example our house was built in1911 and most of the houses in our area were built between 1896 and 1912. The names of the roads may mean nothing to the people who live in them now, but about one hundred years ago they must have been very important.

So armed with a pen and notebook I started to look at the names of roads in my area, names like Abinger, Spurgeon, Roberts and Rebbeck. Just what was the connection?

I started with Abinger Road; Pokesdown is now one of the outer suburbs of Bournemouth, but when the road was built Pokesdown was a village in its own right with its own small town hall and parish church of St James. The name Abinger comes from a group of villages called The Abingers in Surrey, the tiny village of Abinger on Abinger Common is said to be the oldest village in England, as it has been inhabited since the Stone Age . But how did I know that Abinger road was taken from the name of the village? That is because the village of Abinger has a very old Norman church called St James and in the Victorian times it was the in-thing to connect yourself with something old, and this brings me to the connection and also the name of another road.

The Shelley's of Bournemouth lived in Boscombe Manor and they adopted Bessie Florence Scarlett, her son Captain Robert Shelley Scarlett was born at the Manor and in 1903 he inherited the Scarlett family barony with the title Lord Abinger. The first Lord Abinger built Inverlochy Castle in the West Highlands in 1863 and Queen Victoria spent a week there and loved the place. So now we know how both Abinger and Roberts Road came into being.

Spurgeon Road was named after Charles Haddon Spurgeon a great non-conformist minister of the 19th century who would preach to crowds of up to10, 000 people in London. He also started Spurgeon College, but what his connection was with Pokesdown or Bournemouth I could not find out . I also failed to find the connection between Rebbeck and the road it was named after. But looking back I am pleased with what I have found out. When these roads were named, the people they were named after were alive, walking about just like you and I are now. It is like naming a road today after a famous person and then in a hundred years or so, wondering just who the person was and why the road was named after them. For what is so obvious today, can be a forgotten memory tomorrow. Looking for history on your doorstep can be great fun as well as a peep into the past of where you live.