Courtenay Street in the suburb of St Albans, Christchurch

Courtenay Street in St Albans – Codlings Lane and Grafton Street. Formerly Codlings Lane. Named after Thomas Codling (1810?-1892). Re-named Grafton Street and then Courtenay Street. Probably named after William Reginald Courtenay, the 11th Earl of Devon (1807- 1888). Codlings Lane never appears in street directories. First appears in the Star in 1873 as “Codling’s”. Codling, a civil engineer, was living in Church Road (later Rutland Street) in 1890. Grafton Street is first mentioned in The Press in 1887 when a petition signed by 220 residents asked for a bridge over the creek at the north-east end of Grafton Street. First appears in street directories in 1892. Re-named Courtenay Street on 7 March 1904. Courtenay was a director of the New Zealand Company and on the management committee of the Canterbury Association from 1848.

A reasonable amount of information from the library website. Papers Past only had one mention of Codlings which was in 1873. Sounds like Thomas Codling was involved in building some of Christchurch’s early bridges. He died in 1892 aged 82 after a long and painful illness. There were several Grafton Streets including one in Sumner and another off Ferry Rd. When the street was renamed in 1904 along with many other streets it was said that the committee selected names of counties and towns in the old country. There wasn’t a town in the UK called Courtenay but three towns included the name. In 1946 part of the street was renamed Roosevelt Ave. I checked the map from 1912 and Courtenay was a much longer street. The street back then had a big kink in it and looked like the shape of the letter L. Courtenay St runs off St Albans St and only a slight narrowing of the street where they meet shows that it is a different street. The oldest house is from 1915 plus several were built in 1920. The rest cover most decades from then to now. A pleasant street but thought that the modern houses looked out of place amongst the wooden villas. But we all know that I dislike most modern houses.