Place Name
Originally Alfred Street. It was renamed in 1937 as part of the London County Council’s periodic clean up of street nomenclature to eradicate duplicate names. As London became more unified as a city, the local administration were tasked with making it work, one of the most frequent problems was that of confusion over street names. Royal Mail and other deliveries were frequently being misdirected because of the same or very similar addresses within a short distance of each other. The first wave of this was around the 1870s but it was considered necessary to repeat the exercise in the 1930s. “In this case,” writes Keith Bailey in The Streets of Battersea: Their Names and Origins, “the LCC took the easy way out by using the girl’s version of the name, albeit one that was rather out of fashion by the 1930s.” The street was first named as Alfred Road named in 1858 after Prince Alfred (August 6, 1844 – July 30, 1900) second son and fourth child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert – 10 years later it became Albert Street. Albert was known as the Duke of Edinburgh from 1866 until he succeeded his paternal uncle Ernest II as the reigning Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha from August 22, 1893 until his death in 1900. The German duchy had been passed through the male succession since George I. Ordinarily it would have fallen to his older brother, the Prince of Wales, but he renounced his right to the succession before he married. As a boy Alfred had shown a great interest in the Royal Navy and by the time he was 14 was enrolled in the service as a cadet (he rose steady through the ranks and was eventually promoted to admiral of the fleet). When still a young officer, he learned first-hand the value of good nursing. On January 24, 1867 he had set off on a voyage around the world, becoming the first member of the royal family to visit Australia. He was enthusiastically received but on March 12, 1868 was shot in the back, in an assassination attempt. The shot, fired at point-blank range, would have likely killed him but the bullet ricocheted off one of the metal clips on his trouser braces, and narrowly missing his spine. The assailant, Henry O’Farrell, was tried and hanged six weeks later. After weeks of recuperating Alfred continued his world tour, becoming the first European prince to visit Japan. His trip also took in Ceylon and Hong Kong, making him the first British royal to visit these far-flung outposts of empire. He married Maria Alexandrovna, the second (and only surviving) daughter of Emperor Alexander II of Russia. Despite having six children (one was stillborn) the marriage was not a happy one. Alfred died of throat cancer and was buried at the ducal family’s mausoleum in the Friedhof am Glockenbergin Coburg.