Place Name
Laid out in the middle of the 19thCentury along with the adjacent Victory Place, this was originally called Little Trafalgar Place after Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson’s battle against the French navy off the coast of Spain. In the late 1930s London County Council decided to rationalise the city’s street names, which had largely been named in a haphazard and piecemeal manner Gillian Bebbington in London Street Names explains it “systematically attempted to eliminate all prefixed names from the London Directory”. Clearly, they wanted to keep some connection with the Napoleonic era and Elba as the Mediterranean island in which Napoleon Bonaparte was briefly imprisoned in 1814 – 1815 was seen as a suitable replacement.
