Brougham St – formerly Going’s Road and Pound Road, Lord Brougham Street and Lord St Leonards Street. Sydenham Crescent Road and South Crescent Road were incorporated into Brougham Street. . Named after Henry Peter Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux (1778- 1868). Going’s Road was the section of road east of Colombo Road through to Gasworks Road (later Waltham Road). First mentioned in the Star in 1877 in a report of a meeting of the Heathcote Road Board. Pound Road was the section of what is now Brougham Street west from Colombo Road to Montreal Street. Named after the animal pound there. Lord Brougham Street (section east of Colombo Road) and Lord St Leonards Street (section west of Colombo Road) are both first mentioned in the Star in reports of meetings of the Drainage Board held 1882. Lord St Leonards Street was probably named after St Leonards in Sussex. Re-named Brougham Street in 1889. Brougham was a British lawyer and politician who became Lord Chancellor. Sydenham Crescent Road was re-named South Crescent Road on 7 March 1904 and was later incorporated into Brougham Street.
A huge amount of information from the library website. This is a very long street and is now a major thoroughfare. The road carries a large number of trucks as it goes from the Southern Motorway and joins Opawa Rd leading to the business area in Hillborough and also many trucks go to Lyttelton.
At the Opawa St end I had to take a short detour as there is no footpath. I am then able to use a walkway that eventually joins a footpath. On one side there is mostly businesses and on the other side there are a few houses. There is 2 or 3 blocks of empty land where there used to be a large number of social housing flats. These were badly damaged in the earthquakes.
This street covers three suburbs.In the Sydenham area there are still businesses on one side with a couple of exceptions. One is a tiny church called St Nicholas Rocor Orthodox church and the other is a set brand new apartment complex. The apartments are brightly coloured but everyone I have spoken with agree that these apartments don’t look safe.
Sydenham Park is in this area. Opposite the park is a pile of rubble that used to be a church. This church was demolished by mistake as it was the old Post Office on the other side of Colombo St that supposed to have been demolished. As I get closer to home there are less businesses and more houses.
There is a large retirement complex which is fairly new and this replaced an old historic building. It is still called Nazareth House and google research says that it started as an orphanage in the early 1900s and became a rest home later. I had an ancestor die at Nazareth House in 1913.
As you get closer to the motorway it is mostly housing but there is Addington school on one side and the Samoan Addington Seventh Day Adventist church on the other side of the road.
With further research I found an article in Papers Past dated 1882 and it was about drainage issue. It was asking if Lord Brougham St was synonymous with Going’s Road and the reply was yes. Going’s Road was mentioned as early as 1875. On an Ancestry website I found William Going who came out in 1855 with his family. There were two sons Thomas and George who were farming in South Christchurch in the 1850s and 1860s. I suspect that Going’s Road was named after this family.
Lytteltonwitch's Walking the streets of Christchurch Project 