Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Finding Out the Name of my House
Like all of the houses on my street, my house had a name (probably on a botanical theme) etched into a plaster plaque but this has long since been rendered/painted over.
I would love to find out the original name and possibly reinstate it. Can anyone advise on how I could find out the original name?
Thanks.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by RMW
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When we had all the paint stripped off our brickwork and the bricks restored and repointed (by Stuart Horn, who incidentally I would certainly recommend - https://www.stuarthornbrickwork.com), they also restored the plaque at the front which it turns out had just been filled in. Ours had the construction date. You’d never have know there was anything there, so it was a nice surprise; next door had the house name already and the other side asked Stuart’s team to do his, which it turned out had… nothing under it. Long story short, if you’re lucky, you might find the name is hidden in the plaque. Not sure if someone like Stuart might be able to advise, or you might find a decorator would be able to take a look. Good luck!
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Thank you so much for that! Hadn't realised that some plaques actually be empty. Stuart Horn's work looks impressive-seen some terrible examples lately on my street of houses being repointed in cement as opposed to lime. Will check him out.
Rose
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Permalink Reply by Hugh
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Some late Victorian and Early Edwardian terraced houses had house names etched on to the front bay plaque or otherwise displayed, but not all.
A house very near to my own is an example of one that did. It led me to uncover not only the history of that house but also something of the neighbouring four (including to my surprise my own), all of which were put up by the same builder.
I have no evidence that mine ever had anything etched on the plaque or displayed anywhere else. It was however given a name by the first occupant (1896-1903), but I only discovered it because the resident was in the local paper and gave his address including the name with which he had christened my house. I have no evidence of the name having been taken up by subsequent occupants.
Many late 19th /early twentieth century houses were named by their owners, but the names seem often to have been considered as having been related to the occupant as much as the house. So they were often short-lived and discarded by subsequent occupants, even throughly covered up as in the case of my neighbour's and RMW's.
The names were really very much an affectation, thought by occupants to add an extra air of respectability. It wasn't unusual for them to recall themes redolent of country cottages. (Mine for example was called 'Ingle Nook').
After the first war, names for urban terraced houses were fast going out of fashion and fell out of use, often being covered up where they had been etched on to a building's facade or scratched off where painted on to a transom window.
As I said, not all houses had individual names, but it was common for each terrace to be given a name by the builder which became, for a short while, part of the postal address. Those that had terrace names tended not to have individual house names.
Another source that sometimes shows house and terrace names in the earlier editions is Kelly's Directory. For example, the 1902 edition for Wood Green shows that the as yet to be completed Boundary Road included:
- Goswell Terrace
- Boundary Villas
- Fulton Villas
- Northcott Terrace
Each terrace was numbered separately and numbering ran in whichever direction the builder decided. Goswell Terrace, on the north west side ran north to south from 1 to 15. Next door was Boundary Villas, which ran south to north from 1 to 6.
As you can imagine, it was a recipe for postal and navigational chaos. For this reason, Inner London had been abandoning street and terrace names progressively from the mid nineteenth century. Before long Wood Green and the other boroughs that now make up Haringey had followed suit.
A further source you might use for your research are the census returns. Both they and Kelly's are included in Ancestry. Sufficient local newspapers are now included in the British Newspaper Archive to make that a worthwhile investment.
As for Boundary Road, my knowledge of it is slight, but it was apparently part of a small estate bought by the British Land Company. Like the Ladder it was sold off piecemeal to speculative builders (read more about how they worked in my book Abyssinia ) and built up as Boundary Road, Mannock Road, Sirdar Road and Westbury Avenue. The earliest occupant of Boundary Road seems to been in situ on by 1901. Some building activity happened in the first half of the noughties, but the real push seems to have been between 1906 and 1915.
A builder called Bragge was very active on the road between those dates. Below is an ad he placed in the Hornsey and Finsbury Park Journal in 1915.
On a quick skim of the papers, I found one Boundary Road house with a name in a 1905 advert again in the Journal.
Hope that gives you some food for thought.
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