PLACE NAME
Like Calais Street, this is a nod to the French origins of local landowner and merchant banker Hughes Minet who in 1770 bought 118 acres of land in Camberwell from Sir Edward Knatchbull. The Minet’s were French Huguenot refugees who fled France some 200 years earlier after the unsteady truce between the Catholics and Protestants came to an end following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. His great-Grandfather, Ambroise was born in Cormont, hence the name, before moving to Calais where he built a considerable business selling groceries, drugs, liquors and tobacco. Upon arriving in England, his son Issac became a successful shipping agent. In the 1880s, Hughes Minet’s descendant William Minet was instrumental in the development of the estate. He gave 14½ acres of the family land to the London County Council for the creation of public park, today’s Myatt’s Fields Park, the name of which recalls the land’s prior use as markets gardens. This street was built about the same time in the 1890s. The Metropolitan Public Gardens Association then spent some £10,000 on the layout of the park, which was designed by Fanny Wilkinson, Britain’s first professional woman landscape gardener. It opened on April 13, 1889. In 1935, William Minet’s daughter, Susan, gave a further quarter of an acre of land near the junction of Knatchbull Road and Calais Street to the park. Minet estate’s borders are Akerman Road, Lothian Road, Camberwell New Road, the railway line, Paulet Road and Lilford Road.
