Penrith Ave in Somerfield – formerly Penrith Street. Penrith Street was named in 1937. Penrith Avenue first appears in street directories in 1940.
A tiny amount of information from the library website. Going by brief article in 1937 about naming of the new street it was called Penrith Street but it seems to have been known under both names of Penrith St and Penrith Ave from the beginning. Penrith is a town in Cumbia so it is easy to think that the street is named after this town. My personal feeling is that whoever came up with the name for the street made a mistake. I feel that the street should have been named Penwith after an area in Cornwall.
On Papers Past there were lots of death notices plus best street and garden competition entries. One real estate ad in 1979 caught my eye as it described the house being sold as an Historic Homestead. Most of the houses on this street were built in the 1930s and 1940s with about a dozen built more recently including a couple of ugly ones built in 2023. I ended up looking at old maps and a map of Spreydon dated 1912 helped plus ancestry website. I had another look at Papers Past but not looking for Penrith Ave or Penrith Street.
There are two older houses on Penrith Ave dating from 1915 and 1920. The map showed just two properties where the street now is sited. There is a slight kink in the street and that will be because of the boundaries of the two properties. The house from 1920 doesn’t stand out from it’s 1930s neighbours and I haven’t found out who originally owned it. The house on the corner of Strickland St and Penrith Ave is a different story. I thought that this house was on Strickland St and mentioned it when I walked Strickland St in January 2019. I wasn’t doing quite so much research into the history of the streets when I first started my street project. The house on the corner of Strickland St and Penrith Ave is gorgeous. The original owner of this house John Martin Mitchell died in 1929 in London aged 54. Edited to say that the obituary got his age wrong and he was 64 or 65 when he died and he is buried at St Agnes in Cornwall. His wife died a few months later aged 65. The address of the house those days was 71 Strickland St so I was partly right. It looks like after street was formed that the address became 49 Penrith Ave. John Martin Mitchell started the firm J M Mitchell and he sold furniture from his shop in Colombo St. Lots of photos and information on Papers Past when the shop was destroyed by fire in 1977. Also at 71 Strickland Street Mrs H S Mitchell ran Spreydon Rabbitry but she decided to give up rabbit farming in 1934. It was mostly Angora rabbits that she was breeding and they were bred for their wool. Note I haven’t worked out exactly where Mrs H S Mitchell fits into the family. John Martin Mitchell was from the Penwith area of Cornwall which is why I think that they got the street name wrong.
If they ever decide to open this house to the public during Heritage Festival I will be first in the queue. Looking at my photos I realise that there is an Art Deco house on this street but forgot about it as I got seriously sidetracked by the older house.
Lytteltonwitch's Walking the streets of Christchurch Project 