Place Name
The first significant development appears to have begun during the later years of, or immediately after the end of, the Napoleonic Wars, as the street name suggest. As well as Trafalgar Road, Cadiz Street, Liverpool Grove and Portland Street take their names from this period. The Duke of Liverpool and The Earl of Portland both being Tory prime minsters during the last years of the war and the Siege of Cadiz was the turning point of the Peninsular War, though Cadiz Street does not appear as a separate street from Trafalgar Road until post-war maps. Writing in The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, Hallie Rubenhold describes the street: “Although the road and its dwellings were relatively recent constructions, having been built shortly after 1805, they had not weathered the passage of sixty years especially well. The insatiable demand for affordable housing meant that homes that had once been designed for the Georgian middle classes were now, in the Victorian era, divided up and occupied by multiple households.” The Battle of Trafalgar was a naval engagement that took place on October 21, 1805 off the Spanish coast. The Royal Navy fleet under the command of Lord Horatio Nelson, was heavily outnumbered by the coalition fleet of French and Spanish vessels. So, in a daring move he sailed his fleet straight at the battle line’s flank, splitting the Franco-Spanish fleet in three and giving his own ships the advantage. His victory meant that the Royal Navy was never again seriously challenged by the French fleet in a large-scale engagement but it came at a heavy price, Nelson was killed in action having been shot on his flagship, The Victory. Jingoistic developers frequently named streets after recent battles. The name Trafalgar is Spanish of Arabic origin and means either from Taraf al-Ghar meaning Cape of the cave or Taraf al-Gharb meaning Cape of the West.
