Genealogy Chat

... When Shaftesbury Avenue was constructed in the Victorian era the development cut a swathe through a poor area of London that must have been like the Lockerbie disaster for residents. The same happened with Kingsway. Properties were demolished in vast numbers and little roads simply disappeared from the map. Monmouth street was one of these. However, a nearby group of roads radiating from Seven Dials was untouched but the developers decided to rename them. As the name Monmouth Street was now going spare, they renamed Great St Andrews Street accordingly. So if you were looking for an ancestor who lived in Monmouth street, the modern Monmouth Street would be a two-minute walk from the original site in Shaftesbury Avenue.

I noticed on another thread somebody asking if a London street still exists. Beware.... sometimes a street name can be transferred.

In my little town my house orriginally would have been on Old Parish Road, but the council put the street sign in the wrong place so that New Parish Lane became Old Parish Lane and Old Parish Lane now has a new name. Also the village name has been swapped with that of the villiage next door.

I've also come across an incidence of rebuilt housing. I found out from my mum's cousin that my great aunty Liz lived on Charles Street, Leicester. I'm at uni in the East Midlands so I thought I'd go and look it up. I had to confess to being faintly disappointed when I came face to face with the house itself. The said great aunty died in 1971 and I think that part of Charles Street was rebuilt at some point because the building style looked a bit 1970s pre-fab. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have been the actual house where she lived, although it was the right site. Aged 2, this said aunty lived with her parents on Mill Lane, Bottesford, Leics. When we visited Bottesford we looked for Mill Lane and ended up asking the post office (another tip - post offices will sometimes be able to help find a specific address as they have a list of them). It turned out that Mill Lane, such as it was, was now owned by a local landowner who apparently wasn't keen on visitors so we decided not to pursue further.