London Road and Birchfield Avenue -Streets of days gone by

London Road runs from the junction at the bottom of Main Street and Forest Road up to Ratby Lane.

Why is it called London Road you may ask, when the main road in and out of the village was the old turnpike Ashby Road at the top end of Main Street? The main theory is that many years ago, London Road continued across Ratby Lane and along the route of what is now a public footpath to Bradgate Hill on the A50 (the old turnpike) near Groby.

There are few particularly old properties on London Road; building seems to have got underway in the early 1900s, as housing expanded on the roads either side of Main St. The map is from 1928, starting at the Main St junction top left. The terraces are visible. Birchfield Avenue is not yet built.

An early picture of the terrace is below.  The nearest house in view is Alma Villa (one of at least three of this name in the village), built in 1901. Working towards the back and left of the photo, is Spring Villas (1901 - see auction poster further below), Rose Cottages (1901), Cope Cottages (1903) and Thorold Villa (1903).

Almost the same view in this next picture, around the 1960's, judging by the card. Note the more recent introduction of the pair of bungalows.

A number of Council houses on the other side of the road were added in the 1930s, followed by other houses over the years and currently by the new Jelson development.

This poster is a fascinating piece of local history, the sale in 1904 of the two newly erected 'Spring Villas' complete with turn of the century mod-cons, piggeries, a well and sitting tenants paying just under £1 per month - 'buy to let' over a century ago! As was typical for the period, the toilets were outside; and the property benefitted from was a well and a pump.

Birchfield Avenue off of London Road was developed in the 1930s/1940s. It was also known as The Intake. It is said there was a field down London Road, the ‘intake field’, where beasts would be ‘taken in’ over night as they journeyed through Markfield on their way to and from Leicester (which supports the theory that what became London Road continued to Groby) This field could have also got its name from being 'taken in' from an original forest.

In 1936, the new South Charnwood School received orders from the Education Office to exclude all Markfield children from the school on account of the persistence of diphtheria in the village. A resident remembered the Sanatorium ambulance (now Markfield Court) arriving at the Alley (another name for Birchfield Avenue) to pick up four children with diphtheria.