Van Asch Street in the suburb of Sumner, Christchurch

Van Asch St – formerly Queen Street. Named after Gerritt van Asch (1836-1908). Queen Street first appears in street directories in 1914. Re-named van Asch Street on 1 September 1948 when 120 streets were re-named. Van Asch was the first principal of the School for the Deaf in 1880.A small amount of information from the library website and I can add nothing extra about the name of the street. I can see why the name of the street was changed as there were so many Queen Streets in New Zealand including 2 or 3 in Christchurch. Papers Past had thousands of entries for Queen Street mostly for the one in Auckland. The obituary for Gerritt van Asch said that he was the principal of the Deaf and Dumb Institute at Sumner until 1906. He arrived in New Zealand in 1879 and had studied teaching methods for the deaf in Europe and England. After he retired in 1906 he took an extended trip with his wife to Europe where he died in his birth country of Holland. The Deaf and Dumb Institute is now called Van Asch College and in on this street. The street runs from Colenso St to Paisley St with St Leonards Park splitting the street in half. The earliest entry on Papers Past that I found for this street was in 1898 where a resident was fined for wandering cattle. The houses here date from 1940 onwards with several built in 1950s. There are also several modern houses from between 2000 and 2020. A mixture of styles but none were especially notable but the bright yellow house that I thought belonged on Paisley St possibly has it’s address on Van Asch St.