Beechworth Avenue in the suburb of Somerfield, Christchurch

Beechworth Ave in Somerfied – Named after Beechworth, a town in Victoria, Australia.Francis Stanley “Frank” Sullivan (1905-1981) and his son, James Warwick Sullivan (1929-2001), of F. S. Sullivan & Co Ltd, built many of the houses in this street in the 1950s and were permitted to name the street. They named it after Beechworth in Australia because Francis Sullivan’s mother had been born Lavinia Paull in Beechworth in Victoria in 1874. She died in Christchurch in 1932. When she and her husband, James Osborne O’Sullivan (1867-1927), moved to New Zealand they dropped the “O” from their name. Frank Sullivan enjoyed making this family link with the street he and his son helped create. First appears in street directories in 1957. Information supplied in 2015 by Penny Lancaster, granddaughter of Frank Sullivan.

A reasonable amount of information from the library website. The library put this street in the suburb of Spreydon but official websites have it in Somerfield. Real estate agents put it into Lower Cashmere.

Not much information on Papers Past. There were ads for houses in 1958 and 1965. A few death notices. I checked older maps for this street and it was possibly developed on land where there had been a market garden. The map from 1958 show it as a Cul de Sac and Stanbury Ave didn’t exist. The street is a short one that runs from Rose St to Stanbury Ave. The houses are mostly only on one side of the street as there is the Ultimate Care Rose Court on the other side. I couldn’t find out when the care home was built but it looks fairly modern. It actually looked really nice with lovely gardens. Most of the 10 houses on this street were built in the 1950s and they looked pleasant enough. There was one on the corner of Beechworth Ave and Stanbury Ave with a letterbox that looked like an old posting box from the UK. The house also had a very high fence around it. When I checked street view it didn’t have a high fence but did have a lovely garden with plenty of trees. I think that the trees have gone.