Glynne Crescent in the suburb of Spreydon, Christchurch

Glynne Crescent in Spreydon – Named after Mary, Baroness Lyttelton, née Glynne, (1813-1857). Mary was the wife of Sir George William Lyttelton, 4th Lord Lyttelton, Baron of Frankley (1817-1876). He was a member of the Canterbury Association from 1848. Several streets in this area have names associated with the Lyttelton family because they were formed on Rural Section 76, 700 acres on the “Lower Lincoln Road, Heathcote Bridge” purchased by Frederick Spencer, 4th Earl Spencer (1798-1857) and Conway Lucas Rose (1817-1910). Spencer’s interest in the land was passed on to his nephew, the Hon. George William Spencer Lyttelton (1847- 1913), the 4th son of George William Lyttelton, 4th Baron Lyttelton (1817-1876). First appears in street directories in 1950.

A reasonable amount of information from the library website and nothing that I can add about the name of the street. I found a wee snippet from Papers Past dated 1889 and it was a copy of an article from an English paper dated 1839. The article was about the double wedding of Mary Glynne and her sister Miss Glynne. Mary married Lord Lyttelton and her sister married William Gladstone who later became Prime Minister. For the article not to use the sister’s name but to refer to her as Miss Glynne she had to be the eldest sister. Mary died in 1857 and Lord Lyttelton remarried in 1869. I couldn’t find anything about this street on Papers Past yet most the houses were built in 1940s with one house dating from 1910 and another from 1920. The houses built in 1940s and 1950s were obvious state houses and there were ads for carpenters to work on Government houses in Spreydon. Some houses were in reasonable condition. There is a wee park here with a playground. The houses didn’t really stand out for me as they were typical looking for state houses of that era. Even the two older houses didn’t stand out as I would have expected. There are new houses being built for Kainga Ora which is the name for the Government dept that used to be Housing Corp and previous to that was called State Housing. The houses that were demolished to make way for the new houses were really nice looking tidy houses on decent sized sections.