Rommany Road

Maps and Land Ownership

Like many streets in the surrounding area, the land used to be part of the Lord Thurlow’s estate auctioned off in 1846 by his trustees. Originally called Dagmar Road, a very fashionable name in the 1870s and 1880s, in reference to Princess Dagmar of Denmark, sister of the Princess of Wales who married the future Tsar Alexander III of Russia in 1866. However, too many Dagar Roads prompted the Post Office to intervene which triggered a practical change of appellation.

The new name was a nod to long standing associations of the area with the gypsies who occupied the area as a resting place long before the Thurlow estate existed. Romany was a more poetic or formal variation of gypsy, recurrent in the literature and high society culture at the time.