Place Name
Descriptive. Takes its name from the type of soil. Evelyn Pritchard in Guide to the street names of Ham and Petersham explains: “The whole of this area is a river terrace, with a gravel soil. One of the earliest lanes in Petersham…” Janet Dunbar in A Prospect of Richmond goes further: “Sandy Lane was marked as Blind Lane in an early nineteenth-century map of Richmond, and in 1837 iy is noted as being ‘a winding lane with two or three houses and good hedges.’ It became known as Sandy Lane during the nineteenth-century, probably because there was up to six inches of sand in dry weather, after a prolonged drought. It ran by the side of an orchard and a market garden, and was well below the level off these lands.” There was another Sandy Lane less than a mile away in Ham. It became Dukes Avenue.
