Long road to publication

Almost 50 years ago the former Oxford Lord Mayor set herself the formidable task of researching the story (or stories) behind the name of every road, square, lane and street in Oxford.

Today her long trek comes to the end with the publication of her new book The Origins of Oxford Street Names.

The book includes a mind-boggling index of some 1,455 Oxford streets, as she leads us through some 900 years of history from the earliest medieval lanes to culs-de-sac on the most recently built estates.

There are roads commemorating great men and women, and thoroughfares recalling past events and occupations.

There are romantic names (Love Lane, Bocardo Lane and Barbican Lane) and examples of modern practicality — streets in Blackbird Leys were alphabetically named after wild flowers starting with Andromeda and ending with Vetch.

The book has been produced with Nigel Morgan, who, as a chartered surveyor working in and around Oxford for 30 years, has an extensive knowledge of local roads almost to match that of his co-author.

Mrs Spokes Symonds, who has just celebrated her 85th birthday, says her curiosity in road names began when she as a young girl she came across Squitchey Lane in North Oxford, close to where she now lives in Davenant Road.

“As a child I thought it was named after the ‘squish, squish’ sound of boots on muddy ground,” she told me. But it was not long before she found out the name refers to the grass squitch, also known as couch or witch grass, much hated by gardeners.

She has been explaining the origins of this strange sounding lane to people pretty well ever since.

As a city councillor and a member of Oxford City Council’s highways committee in the 1960s, she was invited to help select names for many of the new estates then springing up round the city, and was especially well qualified for the job.

“I was lucky in the fact that my father was interested in local history and in his extensive library were all the books I needed to learn about the streets of Oxford in early times,” she recalled.

One of the biggest challenges was finding names for the new roads on the Blackbird Leys estate. For the nearby Horspath Road Trading Estate she was particularly proud of coming up with Pony Road, pony being the slang for £25, and Pound Way in the Cowley shopping centre.

She began assembling boxes of index cards of Oxford streets, which came in useful when she began appearing weekly on Radio Oxford in the 1970s with Andy Wright.

“People would telephone in to know why a particular street was so named,” she recalled. “When the broadcast finished, people would write to me, often with helpful information.”

A promise, made to herself, to convert all her research into a book on retiring from local politics had to be put off while she wrote six books on North Oxford and other parts of the city.

But she eventually faced up to the daunting task, which involved her and Mr Morgan spending hours going through council records and chasing leads.

The task was made all the more difficult because names frequently changed. Cornmarket, for instance, once had a dozen names to identify the various stalls from which people traded.

Catte Street was given its name as early as 1210, and was also known as the street of mousecatchers. The name was made ‘respectable’ and changed to St Catherine’s Street until the old name, with its early spelling, was revived in 1930.

Magpie Lane, off High Street, almost deserves a full book in its own right. In the 13th century it was known as Grope Lane (although the authors forbear from giving its full and altogether cruder name) in recognition of the fact that it was where the city’s prostitutes plied their trade.

It was to be repeatedly renamed before the city decided to revert back to the name it had in the 17th century.

When it comes to naming streets after living celebrities, Oxford has always played safe.

‘Dead is best’, except in very special cases, appears to have been the approach, confirmed by the city council’s highways committee in 1993.

At one time, it seems, there had been a real chance of a street being named after the then Oxford United owner Robert Maxwell, long before the world discovered he was a crook.

In 1986, a councillor suggested streets should be named after Oxford United players who had won the Milk Cup, but the council’s celebrity policy held firm.

Mrs Spokes Symonds reckons that ‘Big’ Ron Atkinson, the former Oxford United player who went on to manage Manchester United and Aston Villa, might also have had a road named after to him, until he made a remark on television, resulting in accusations of racism.

But at least one footballer is remembered in Hodges Court (named in 1993). Hodges was the scorer of the first goal when Oxford City Football Club won the Amateur Cup. They were fairly safe because that happened in 1906.

Some living celebrities, however, have been commemorated, including Sir Roger Bannister. Bannister Close is found near the university running track where Sir Roger became the first man to run a mile in under four minutes in 1954.

Sir Roger, along with Morse author Colin Dexter, will be among guests in the Town Hall today to mark the publication of The Origins of Oxford Street Names.

Snobbery of locals has clearly played a role in street naming, with Mrs Spokes Symonds dedicating a chapter to the subject.

In Summertown, for example, there was uproar when the city wanted to rename George Street to avoid confusion with the street in the city centre, after one Alderman Twining. Despite his 50 years of service on the city council, the alderman was connected with the Twining’s grocery shop.

“The feeling was that no one wanted to live in a street named after a man who sold tea,” writes Mrs Spokes Symonds. “As trade was not thought to be good enough for them, the residents proposed that the name should revert to one it had held in earlier years and the street became Middle Way in 1955.”

So many names, so many streets, yet Mr Morgan, who completed a masters degree in historic conservation at Oxford Brookes University, points out that some giants associated with the city have been inexplicably ignored.

J.R.R. Tolkien; historian Anthony Wood, Pre-Raphaelite Sir Edward Burne-Jones; artist and writer John Ruskin; and the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who helped give the world penicillin, Howard Florey, have all been overlooked.

So who would Mr Morgan like to see included?

“Tolkien and the great poet John Betjeman, who loved Oxford. And then, of course, there is Ann.”

lThe Origins of Oxford Street Names is published by Robert Boyd Publications (£11.95).