Place Name
Laid out over land owned by the Leyborne Popham family, this was until the turn of the 19thCentury an orchard. Until 1952 there was a Niton Lodge, where today’s Shell garage stands. The name comes from a small village in the south off the Isle of Wight although apart from a Francis White Popham, who was lord of the manor of Shanklin, there are no obvious connections with the family. James Green, Judith Filson, and Margaret Watson in The Streets of Richmond and Kew write that Niton Lodge “was occupied by a Mr Stevens, the last of the local market gardeners.” In her study Sunnyside: A History of British House Names, Laura Wright explains that naming of properties took several forms including: “The transferred place-name.. often a subset of the commemorative type with houses named after a person, tower or village that was significant to the householder – a birthplace, a honeymoon or holiday venue (to account for all the houses named Osborne, Ventnor, Shanklin, and other Victorian seaside resorts).
