Place name
Previously Suffolk Street West and, more recently, Battle Bridge Road. As names go few evoke a sense of history as much as this one. A clash between opposing forces perhaps, of Boadicea and her tribe of Iceni warriors meeting the Romans at the (as yet unnamed) River Holborn in one last and ultimately doomed confrontation, or Alfred and his men of Wessex taking on the Vikings at a vital crossing, or even the East Saxons waiting across the water to repel William the Conqueror’s Norman army in 1066. After such a build up, disappointment can only follow. The name does indeed refer to an old district called Battlebridge (now King’s Cross). It was first recorded as Bradeford in 1207, and here is the first clue as to where this is leading. By sometime around 1387 the name had mutated to Bradefordebrigge and we had to wait a mere two and half centuries for the first mention of any battle, namely in 1625, when the area became Battle Bridge alias Batford Bridge. In other words if there had been a battle here it was lost to antiquity, even in the reign of Charles I, in fact the 13thCentury reference to a Bradeford, referred to a wide (brōd – broad) river crossing (ford), by the time the bridge (brigge) was mentioned even the language had shifted, to become Middle English. As for the road, it vanished as a result of development around King’s Cross in the 1990s, with the name living on as part of the public realm around the station. Other street names to disappear by the works are Wellers Court, Stanley Passage, Clarence Passage, and Cheney Road.
