PLACE NAME
Catherine of Aragon (December 16, 1485 – January 7, 1536) was Queen of England from June 1509 until May 1533 as the first wife of King Henry VIII. The fiercely intelligent, thoughtful and popular Catherine was the daughter of Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon. Following her first short-lived marriage to Arthur, Prince of Wales, heir apparent to the English throne in 1501, she served as ambassador – the first female ambassador in Europe – of the Aragonese Crown to England in 1507. She married her dead husband’s brother, the recently crowned Henry VIII in 1509. The couple had one daughter, later to become Mary I, but the lack of a male heir infuriated her husband. By 1525 Henry had fallen for Anne Boleyn and sought to have his marriage annulled marking the start of the English reformation. This is one of a group of streets on the Morden Park Tudor Estate built by G T Crouch in the 1930s, described in the builders brochure as: “… a splendid ambition come true – an ambition of the builders whose spacious model Estate of picturesque Tudor houses is in a model situation, and an ambition of the house-holder who finds here the perfect house in natural surroundings and yet within the easiest reach of town”. Perhaps the builders took their inspiration from the style of the housing.
