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Westminster Abbey has long been a place of Christian worship. While its recorded origins state its foundation to sometime around AD970, when St Dunstan and King Edgar established a house for a community of Benedictine monks to the west of the City of London, earlier traditions trace it back to the 7thCentury. At first it was written as Westmynster, coming from the Old English words west and mynster, meaning ‘the west monastery’. It is Westminstre in the Domesday Book of 1086. Rather than share the fate of hundreds of religious houses across England, Wales and Ireland which were forced to close under the orders of Henry VIII from the 1530s as part of the Dissolution of the Monasteries, Westminster was allowed it stay open having been granted the status of the cathedral. Elizabeth I re-established it as a Royal Peculiar, part of the Church of England in 1560. Many of the roads on the St Helier’s estate are named after British monasteries and abbeys in remembrance of the area’s historic ownership by Westminster Abbey. The road names are in alphabetical order, of which Aberconway Road in the north west of the estate is first.
