Place Name
Takes its name from a row of villas that was on the east side of this road, on the opposite side stood Ross Villas, named after Crofton Ross who had inherited the land for Anne Patten in 1771. From 1865 the road wasn’t named, but in 1904 Richmond Council debated what the street name should be, eventually coming down in favour as plain Sheendale – Road was added later. As for the name itself, it is a reference to the former name for Richmond. It is a widely held belief that the name is a reference to the gleaming white stone used to build Henry VII’s palace, at Richmond – it being a derivation of shining. However, this is a myth since the name can be traced back to Saxon times long before the palace was built. The manor was first referred to as Sceon in the mid-10thCentury coming from the Old English word scëon meaning sheds or shelters. As for the addition of the word dale, Laura Wright in her study Sunnyside: A History of British House Names says that it became a Victorian fashion to morph names together. “Victorian new build home-owners took morphologically transparent British place-names apart and recombined them into new, previously unattested groupings, which sounded traditional although they were not.”
