Kensington Avenue in Mairehau – Named after Kensington, a district of west and central London, England within the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Named because it runs off Westminster Street. First appears in street directories in 1923.
A small amount of information from the library website and nothing that I can add about the name.
The entries in Papers Past in the 1920s were mostly birth notices and flooding issues. There were also sections for sale in the late 1920s. There were complaints about the state of the road which seemed to relate to the flooding issues plus in 1942 there were complaints about cows on the street. In 1952 there was a letter to the editor saying that there wasn’t a need for another shop in the area as there was already a shop on the corner of Kensington Ave and Westminster Street. In 1958 the 19 residents of the street requested that the trees on the street be removed. This was declined and the trees are apparently hornbeams. I had to google them as I hadn’t heard of these trees. In 1959 it was proposed to build a library and in 1961 the new children’s library was opened. In 1964 the adult section of the library was opened. There wasn’t many entries in the 1970s and the 1980s.
I came onto the street through a walkway beside the library and there are still trees lining half of the street. Most of the houses on this street were built in the 1920s and the 1940s with only about six houses built in other decades. Many of the older houses on the street are lovely but the house that really stood out for me was painted in a Christmas theme. Near the Westminster St end of the street there is a drain which is the drain which caused the flooding issues in the 1920s and the 1930s. The building that used to be a shop is in very poor condition.
Lytteltonwitch's Walking the streets of Christchurch Project 