Place Name
Previously Union Road it was renamed in 1948 although it apparently had many other names Blind Lane; Irish Lane (after the Irish potato croppers lived in cottages there); and Unionhouse Lane, from the West Ham Union Workhouse built off the road in the 1840s, and Union Lane . The workhouse was renamed Langthorne Hospital, although it was not on the extensive lands around Leyton which had belonged to Stratford Langthorne Abbey. In fact the land on which it was built was owned by Holywell Priory, a nunnery in Shoreditch, which is why even earlier names included Hollewell Lane and Holywell Lane which were later corrupted to Holloway Lane. As to how Stratford Langthorne took its name, it was first recorded as such in Anglo Saxon times as þone langon þorn in AD958 which was a reference to a tall thorn tree that grew in the area and later, in 1199 as Langethorn in Hamme. David Mills in A Dictionary of London Place Names takes up the story: “In medieval times this place (in Essex) was given various affixes to distinguish it from Stratford-at-Bow (now Bow) on the other side of the river (then Middlesex): Stratford 1291 (east), Stretforde Hamme 1312 (in the parish of West Ham), Abbey Stratford 1389 and Stratford Langthorn 1366 (from the manor having once been in possession of the former abbey of Stratford Langthorne)…. The affix Langthorne derives from land here called on thone langan thorn at the tall Thorne tree in a charter of 958, from Old English land and thorn.”
