Place Name
Laid out in 1885 as part of a cluster of roads that were named after Shakespearean characters. Lysander was an Athenian, in love with Hermia, in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shakespeare’s name seems almost commonplace as our admiration for the Bard as grown in the centuries since his death. But it wasn’t always the case, as late as March 27, 1866, a letter to The Times complained that many of the great figures of English history had been ignored in London’s street nomenclature. “We have one little out-of-the-way terrace called Shakespeare” (a reference to small group of houses around a pub named after the Bard in Holloway Road – now gone), Civis wrote. The letter seems to have had an effect as this is one of a small cluster of streets not far from the Holloway Road that are named after characters from Shakespeare’s plays. Nearby streets include Prospero Road, Cressida Road, Miranda Road and Lysander Mews, and Parolles Road.
