Orchard Street
Looking
through an A-Z for Bournemouth, you’d be hard pressed to find any streets. Plenty
of roads, avenues, drives, crescents and closes, but there is only one street –
Orchard Street. This runs between Commercial Road and Terrace Road, dating from
around 1850.
The
name “Orchard” has two possible derivations. One is that there may well have
been an orchard here and one of the boundary tracks later became the site for
Orchard Street. Another is that the name Orchard has associations with the
Tregonwell family in the villages of Orchard Portman and Orchard Wyndham in
Somerset.
So
why are there no other streets in Bournemouth? In the 1850s, as Bournemouth was
beginning to develop into a town, the word “street” specifically referred to a
paved area in a village. Hence, for this expanding town, roads were felt more
appropriate than streets.
Peter Kazmierczak, Senior Heritage Librarian,
Bournemouth Libraries
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