place name
In 1553, Sir Andrew Judd, a City merchant and former Lord Mayor of London, purchased 30 acres of pastureland in the vicinity of St Pancras. The rents from the land were to provide funds for a new school he had recently established in his hometown of Tonbridge, Kent. When he died, a few years later, management of the estate was taken over by the Skinners’ Company, which ran the London fur trade, and with whom Judd had been apprenticed when he moved to the city as a young man. By the early 19thCentury, rapid expansion meant the land was now bordering the city, and to maximise its value the Skinners decided to lease the land to developer James Burton, who laid out many of the streets around Bloomsbury. In remembering their benefactor they chose to name many of them after Judd, his interests or localities in and around his home county, this one after the coastal village of Sandwich. Its first houses were built in 1812. However, it was originally called Hadlow Street (the name of another village in Kent). But, in an early example of rebranding, after the street became associated with brothels, it was given its present name in 1841. The name Sandwich is first mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, where it appears as Sondwic in AD851 and Sandwic in AD993, it literally means market town on sandy soil.
