Maps

Before I embark on my lists, I am going to talk about maps and names. 

Mapping

         Our world is full of maps: maps of the world, street maps, Ordnance Survey maps, and more recently Google maps and the Sat Nav. But the most important maps, and the ones that come first, are the ones we carry in our heads, the ones that allow us to navigate our daily life.

         The paper map is quite a new invention. Or perhaps I should rephrase that and say that the widespread availability of paper maps is a recent phenomenon. There have been maps for centuries, but they were few in number. They were precious documents, and, on the whole, wildly inaccurate. The earliest maps of our own parish of Great Shelford date only from the 18th century and were drawn for the Cambridge colleges which owned the land. And the reason that maps took so long to arrive, and were so few in number, is that they are very difficult to draw.

         I discovered this fact when I decided to try and draw my own sketch map of Shelford. I found I couldn’t remember the village half as well as I thought I could. Is the High Street longer than Woollards Lane? Where exactly is the bend in Church Street? How long is Hinton Way? So I had to go out and look much more carefully. And as I tried to map further afield, I found that bits of my map didn’t join up. Shelford is not the shape I thought it was.

         Drawing a map, I discovered, needs tools and techniques. A lifetime of using Ordnance Survey maps had deceived me into thinking it was all quite simple. But the men who drew those early 18th century maps of Shelford that I mentioned were surveyors. They used a chain and a rod or pole. The chain – called Gunter’s chain – was 66 feet long. The surveyor selected two points. He stuck the rod in the ground at the first point, then his assistant pegged one end of the chain at the other point and advanced towards him, measuring, one chain’s length at a time, until he reached the surveyor. The two points, and the distance between them, were then plotted on the incipient map. Next, they took the first point again, and selected another, third point. They measured the distance between the two. Then, by measuring between the second and third point, they had a triangle: three points and their correct relationship to each other. Thus they continued, building up a network of triangles until they had enough points and measurements to make a coherent map. It’s pretty much what I did when, as one of my parish council duties, I had to measure the allotment site with my six-foot tape measure. Technologically simple, requiring a lot of walking, and a lot of patience. But it produced an accurate map.

         The rod and chain system, incidentally, gave birth to a system of measurement, too, which I (and maybe you too) learnt at school. 22 yards (or 66 feet) to 1 chain, 10 chains to one furlong, 8 furlongs to one mile.

         So mapping is about paper and exactness and pinning things down, and represents a move away from the old world of mental maps and into the written world: the world set down on paper. Once drawn, maps have a habit of becoming, in our minds, definitive: “The Truth”. Or so we like to think. But maps are as subject to error as everything else. You have to treat them with caution!

Navigating

         The newest bit of technology at our disposal is the Sat Nav. We get into the car, and we enter our destination into the Sat Nav, most likely as a postcode or an address. Then we get under way, and we follow the instructions it gives us, blind to our surroundings, the streets we travel along, the villages we pass through. All our attention is fixed on that final destination. We place absolute faith in its capacity to get us there. Unfortunately it doesn’t always live up to that trust: there are some striking errors in its digital maps, and we may end up driving the wrong way down a one way street, or driving round the wrong village. How bemused we then are, having no sense of the route we have travelled, or our current whereabouts. But that is the world of the car: a little bubble of isolation, wholly cut off from the geography around us. The world of the pedestrian is quite different.

         The pedestrian can follow roads or paths, or even cut across country. He or she is immersed in his surroundings, is part of them. If he’s lucky, he has a map. If not, and if he’s a stranger, he’ll probably have to ask the way. That is how it would have been for centuries, before the world of signs and writing and maps. Names and places, in that world, were held in the memories of villagers, and were carried on by use, passed from generation to generation.

         Maps, you see, are not just about measurements, they are about names too. To speak about, or even to think about a place, a feature, a building, we need a way of describing it, and if we speak about it often, it is likely to have a name. So, in my quest to draw a map, I began to look for the names that we give to our village landmarks.

Village Landmarks

         I decided to look through all the documents I could find to discover how the villagers, knew their way round, and knew who lived where, and who farmed what, before nameplates and directories and the internet came into being. So I began compiling a Glossary of Great Shelford Place Names.

         It soon became obvious that a lot of the time, the villagers just knew: it was common knowledge. You knew who lived where, knew who farmed what land. Or if you didn’t, then you knew a man who did. It was the fabric of your daily life, because it was an agricultural village and quite small. The old had a special place in this scheme of things. They were the repository of village knowledge, their memories stretched back a long way, and information had been passed down to them by the generation that preceded them. They could talk of that which had prevailed “time out of mind”.

         You can see this process at work when the enclosures started. When, in 1812, the Stapleford Enclosure Commissioners wanted to know where the boundary ran between Stapleford and Great Shelford - a boundary which is rather wiggly in character - they went to the old men of the village. Two Great Shelford men, Thomas Pratt who was 69, and William Wollard, about 65, both gave their account of the line of the boundary. Pratt described it, starting from Hills Road, and following a ditch which he thought was dug in the middle of a Mereway. And so his description proceeded. The boundary was quite clear, for all that there wasn’t a lot on the ground to define it.

         But let’s return to the subject of place names. It seems as if the villagers didn’t have great need of elaborate street names. Essentially the village was one long street, running from High Green along High Street and Church Street to the river crossing. This was the Street, or High Street or the Common Street. There was the road to the mill, Mill Lane, the roads to London, to Cambridge, to Stapleford and to Cherryhinton: London Road, Cambridge Road, Stapleford Road and Cherryhinton Road (or Hinton Way). Further afield, and bisecting the open arable fields, were Babrim or Babram (Babraham) Road and Haveril Road. That gave a reasonable basis for talking about the roads. The names were simply descriptive. Names, in fact, are often simply shorthand. Instead of repeating “the road leading to Cherryhinton”, you simply call it Cherryhinton Road. And this is how many names came about.

         The villagers didn’t seem to have much use for house names either. If you wanted to talk about a house, you identified it by its current and past residents. The written formula, typically, was: “a messuage (or dwelling) with all barns, stables, etc, heretofore occupied by John Mason, now or late John Peirson”. Thus you had all the information you needed to identify it. It assumed a high degree of local knowledge, both of people and places, on the part of those conversing.

         It was the land, whether arable or meadow, that had all the names. The practice of open field farming, with its accompanying common meadows, resulted in a complex pattern of landholding. Both arable open fields and common meadow were divided into strips, and tenants had their strips scattered in no apparent order across the fields. Thus it was very important to be able to identify who owned what. There were, too, a number of enclosed fields, usually called “the old inclosures”. The village needed to identify all these different lands.

         There were various ways of doing that. In a field book, which described the common field arable and common meadow, and listed the holders of all the strips, each tenant’s holdings would be described. There were a number of large common fields, and each was subdivided into blocks or furlongs. A strip would be identified by the furlong it stood in, and given a number from the starting end.  Here is the description of three of John Reeve’s strips in Mill Field:

The Furlong abutting South upon Stapleford Mill Piece begin East At Staple Church Way. No. 4.

The Furlong abutting North on Mingland Causeway begin East at Staple Church Way. No. 4.

The Furlong abutting West on Staple Mill Way begin South. Nos. 4 & 6.

Alternatively, the land could be identified by describing the ownership of the surrounding land, to the north, south, east and west. Here’s a typical example from a Court Book:

“3a of enclosed land abutting West on Crow Lane, & North next the Freeland formerly John Rogers” (1782).

And here’s another from 1840 (after the Enclosure):

“a parcel 18a 2r 16p in Nine Wells Field and Back Moor,

To the North-East King & Newling, on part of the South-East to Pembroke Hall, on the remaining part of the South-East & North-West Gonville & Caius College”. 

This style of identification had one shortcoming, of course. From time to time, neighbouring landowners changed. Whichever  form of description you used, it was pretty complicated, and you feel that a map would have been much simpler. Simpler, maybe, but far too expensive.

         An owner’s strips were freely scattered across the arable, or “dispersed”. Sometimes, such a group of dispersed strips had a name, as in “7a of arable lying dispersed in the common fields called Swallows” (1738), and it was obviously understood, by long use, what land this comprised, without detailing the individual strips. Was Swallow the name of a person? It’s quite possible. That was far and away the most common way of naming both land and houses.

         So each of the open fields had a name: in 1756 these were given as Beansend Field, the Field between Streets, Heath Field, Hockston Mill Field, Ninewell Field, Stonehill Field, the West Field against the Causeway and the White Field. But these names were not definitive. Every document you look at varies the list a bit. Most of the names are descriptive, like Stonehill, but I haven’t yet found an obvious meaning for Beansend.

         Within each field were the furlongs. You might think all the furlongs had names, but they didn’t. A lot of them were identified in a rather slow and painful way: the furlong abutting west on Trumpington meerway, the furlong abutting north against the Causeway, a little furlong abutting NW on Babrim Road, a Saffron Ground north of the last furlong. This mode of description, using the term abutting on, is far and away the most frequent. But some do have names. There is Ming Land Shot (a shot is a furlong). The Ming Lands were an area of common arable where both Great Shelford and Stapleford parishioners had strips “promiscuously intermixed”. It began as Mingle Lands, and was frequently shortened to Minglands. Another area was called Crooks Lands. It’s likely that Crook was a person. There was Lumberstreet Furlong, Upper Hale Furlong, Flitton Furlong, Blackbush Furlong and Avershole Furlong. Dividing the strips and giving somewhere to walk were the balks, and there are Clunch Pit Balk, Hollow Willow Balk. The meaning of some of the names is obvious, others completely lost. It seems that, if there was an obvious landmark, which could easily shorten into a name, then it might well do so. And so you get Blackbush Furlong, which probably abutted on a black bush; Clunch Pit Balk, which ran up to the clunch pit; and so on. Names, then, were largely concrete and descriptive. Sometimes they came into being, by shortening a recital; other times people just kept describing the long way. What people didn’t do was make up names. That came with the Victorians. 

House names

         When I looked back to the early 1800s, most of the names applied to houses consisted of the name of the person who owned or occupied them. In a village where everyone knew everyone else, this was the obvious way to do it. It was especially the case with farms: Grain’s Farm, Bougen’s Farm, Caius College Farm, Henry Hurrell’s Farm and so on. It got a bit confusing in the 1870s when two Grain brothers farmed in the village. One Grain brother occupied Grain’s farm on Granhams Road, while his brother had one on Hills Road and occupied a second one on Church Street. This meant there were three Grain’s Farms, so I expect you then had to explain which one you meant – which Grain brother, and which of his farms. But it demonstrates a point. These weren’t really names at all. In reality the houses and farms of the village didn’t have names, except possibly in official documents. When people referred to them, they picked a point of reference familiar to them, and, hopefully, their listener. And the obvious point of reference was, as I’ve said, the occupier or the owner. If it wasn’t clear, then it would be followed by a bit more explication: “You know. Down the far end of the village, by the water bridges…” and so on. Over time, occupiers changed and the old name clung on for a while, till the habit wore off and a new name came into being. In a world where things were mostly spoken, this made sense.

         The tendency to call farms by the farmer’s name carried on until fairly recently. Granhams Farm was in the early 2000s still known as Webster’s Farm, though Mr Webster would correct that if he saw it, to Granhams Farm. And Rectory and De Freville Farms were both Funston’s Farm. But now, old Mr Webster has died, and Michael Funston has retired and left the village. No familiar faces farm the village land, so we call the farms by their official names, if we speak of them at all.

         But let’s return to the early 1800s. After the enclosure in 1835, new houses started to spring up. This seems to be when house names first appear. The reason they needed names, I imagine, was precisely that they were new, and that being the case, they needed something to identify them to the village population and to the postman (who was also a new phenomenon).

         There were two sorts of new builds. The first was a run of cheaply-built cottages for the lower end of the housing market – essentially labourers’ cottages. Accommodation for labourers was in very short supply. The new cottages were to be rented out and used to provide an income for the owner. They were usually built in little terraces, or round a small courtyard, with a shared water supply and shared earth-closet for toilet, and in 1871 we see three groupings pop up: Pound Yard, Jobsons Yard and Brands Court (or Yard). Jobson and Brand were the owners, and Pound Yard was opposite the old village pound. These little yards were also known as Drifts.

         So that was one sort of build. The other type of house was built either by genteel people seeking a pleasant country residence, or by an investor in the hope of attracting tenants of this description. You can see from newspaper advertisements of the time that there was a thriving market for houses to let for the person of means, and those who answered the adverts were not necessarily local. The owners of these new houses invented their own house name, something that would create an ambience, rather than simply allowing the villagers to give it one. The first two names were both for houses for rental; Clarence Villa and Tudor Cottage, and both appeared in 1851. I’m guessing that Tudor Cottage was intended to hark back to “olde-worlde” times, and the house itself presumably had suitable “tudor” features (they were very popular with the Victorians). The word villa, in those early Victorian days, had been appropriated to give resonances of a pleasant villa dwelling in Italy, though the name gradually went downmarket as the 19th century proceeded and eventually came to apply even to terraced houses. These early villas were given countrified names, or the names of a favourite holiday resort: names for a country idyll, instead of a practical village life. The villagers, being naturally more prosaic, would, if left to themselves, simply have christened them Cropley’s house, and Headley’s cottage.

         By 1881 the house names were really beginning to take off. Almost all the named houses were new builds, and they were all occupied by people who could be considered genteel (or in a couple of cases were shopkeepers aspiring to gentility). The names tell you they were “aspirational” people (or one might call them pretentious). And so we get Abberley House, Briar Cottage, Carlton House, The Chesnuts (not a new house, but one that had received a makeover), The Elms, Green Lawn Villa, The Lawn (also not a new house), Nine Wells, Oak Field Cottage (a couple of cottages much extended) and Stanhope Cottage. Thereafter the number just keeps growing, and that was because the village was growing, changing from an agricultural village to a country retreat for Cambridge people – dons and business people – and for the genteel seeking a quiet place of retirement. The names, of course, had a valuable function in identifying the houses, especially as the amount of post sent was growing and growing too. The postman needed to know where the houses were, and names made it easier.

Putting up the signs

         Today we take for granted the village signs and street nameplates. But it was only in the 1920s that the street names were formalized and fixed. Up till then, street names were still subject to the rules of oral use. This meant that there could be more than one name for the same street. In the Polling List for 1913, Woollards Lane (spelt Woollard’s) and Station Road were both used for the same street. There seems to have been great confusion about whether Stapleford Road ran from Freestone’s Corner to Stapleford, or merely to the top of the bridge and then became London Road, or even vice versa. This inconsistency reflects, I’m sure, the confusion among the residents themselves, who had differing views about what the village streets were called. Tunnels Lane (with no apostrophe) was spelt phonetically (but at least consistently).

         Up till then, this confusion hadn’t mattered, because everyone knew where you meant. But Shelford, and all the other villages, had grown and was still growing. So in 1928 Chesterton Rural District Council raised the subject of naming and numbering the village’s streets (PC Minutes, p202, Feb 2 1928). It invited the Parish Council to agree street names and put up nameplates. The Parish Council duly formed a Naming Committee, and its members considered the options. I believe they were given guidelines, and these guidelines told them to try and come up with names that were discrete, so that the same names weren’t endlessly repeated across every village in the district: names, as I’ve already said, naturally tend to follow function. So, Great Shelford had High Street, Station Road and Mill Lane. And so did practically every village in the country. Then there were the roads TO somewhere: Cherry Hinton Road, Cambridge Road, Stapleford Road and London Road. These too were replicated across neighbouring villages. The committee did its best to follow the advice they’d received: Park Avenue became Shelford Park Avenue; and Mill Lane became King’s Mill Lane. The council asked parishioners for suggestions: Hinton Way was proposed for Cherry Hinton Road. It is a name that, for all it sounds as if it belongs to a typical suburban street, can be traced back to 1700s Shelford. A few truly local names persisted: Tunwells Lane, Woollards Lane, High Green and Granhams Road. But for the centre of the village the parish council stuck to the obvious: Church Street (a new name in the village) and High Street. On this subject, you may also be interested to read Shelford Streets.

         The parish council’s job was done. The signs were ordered from the Royal Label Factory in Stratford-upon-Avon and put up. One, at least, remains, on the corner of King’s Mill Lane.

It was probably also at this time that the village signs were put up. They were placed, not at the parish boundary, but at the beginning of the built-up area. In most places this coincided with the parish boundary: at the water bridges, on Cambridge Road, on London Road, but not always, witness Granhams Road, where the sign is placed so as to mark the point where the fields end and a continuous run of houses starts. 

         With the nameplates in position, the street names were fixed, now definitive. The names ceased to evolve, and there was no variation. The belief grew, as it always does, that if it was written that way, then that was the right way. The written word had superseded the spoken.

         There were a number of reasons for this need to label villages and streets. One was increasing mobility. This was the time when regular bus routes were reaching into the villages. It was also the time when cars first made their appearance in numbers. If you were travelling the roads fast and over distances, you needed to know where you were, to have your whereabouts marked out for you.

         Another reason is one I have already mentioned: the growth in the size of the village. The postal service had been in operation since the 1830s when, every day (though not, I should think, on Sundays) a man called Thompson walked daily from Cambridge through Trumpington, Great Shelford and Duxford to Whittlesford, calling at each in turn, and delivering letters. He would then return in the evening along the same route. In those early days few people received letters, and the postman knew his route, or could easily ask where a house was. But by the 1920s, the post was universally used. If you wanted to send a quick message, then you sent a postcard. Letters allowed you to speak at greater length. Both were sent in their thousands.

         Hitherto the villagers and the postman had managed quite happily using house names and local knowledge to identify the destination. But the village (and indeed all villages) had expanded beyond the small compact settlement of the early 19th century. The 1910s and 1920s saw ribbon development springing up all along the main roads like Cambridge Road, London Road and Hinton Way. Suddenly there were rows and rows of houses, many very similar, and it was becoming more and more difficult to deal with this new bigger village in the old informal, keep-it-all-in-your-head way. New residents moved in from the town, and they didn’t know everybody like the old Shelford people. A system was needed. So the third and final step in the process was house numbering.

         The numbers started from the village centre and worked outwards. Where there were gaps in the line of houses, gaps were left in the numbering to allow infill. But even so, the first numbering only lasted until the 1950s. In 1958 Hinton Way had to be renumbered to accommodate the new houses that had been built. Nowadays you can often see where houses have been demolished. On the High Street, for example, there is no number 6. There were two cottages beside the Plough, nos. 4 and 6, which were demolished in the 1930s. Since then, a new house has been built at the back and numbered 4, but number 6 remains a distant memory. On the other side of the road, numbering starts at 11. It’s not easy to reconstruct all that’s gone on with the numbering, but there were, until at least the 1940s, six cottages called Old Pound Yard, which have since been demolished, and their numbers have not been reused.

         I’ve suggested that this process of putting up signs came with the arrival of motor transport. But I suspect that, as in so many things, it was the railway that brought the first signs to the village. The railway came to the village in 1845. I don’t think signboards were put up straightaway. Presumably, in those early days, when the train stopped, the porters shouted out where you were – after all, not everyone could read – but later the railway erected signs, and this would have been the first time that the village had been labelled, but with one difference: though the village is Great Shelford, the station is merely called Shelford.

Mapping again

         I began this chapter by trying to draw a map. I haven't drawn it yet, but I will. And in the meantime I've learned a lot more about the village!

Read Next A Little Book of Names I, Open Field Names and Meadow Names from before Enclosure.

v1 © Helen Harwood, uploaded March 2025