Ipswich Historic Lettering: Bramford Road

Bramford Road houses

Wandering down an Ipswich thoroughfare, taking your time to look around, can be enlightening. This particular road is very long and runs from The Rose & Crown at the junction with Norwich Road right through to the village of Bramford after which it is named. Here is a selection from the named houses on Bramford Road between the Chevallier Street junction and the A14 bridge. Also a couple of houses in Henniker Road which runs parallel to Bramford Road. The date plaques show that development here occurred over a fifty year period (1877 to 1927) and it includes several Freehold Land Society examples.

205-207: 'Cumberland Terrace 1877'		248: 'Long Reign' (see note below)	Queen Victoria marked her Golden Jubilee in 1887
252: 'Belmont - 1895 - Villa'; 254: 'Mishama - 1897[?] - House'* House on Surbiton Road is 'Telolmakouta House, 1897', shown on our Named buildings page.		256 (entrance in Surbiton Rd): 'Zagazig - 1894 - House'*
345-347: 'Grosvenor Villas, F.L.S. 1899'		389-391: Cornfield, F.L.S. 1897.' §	Drive between 387 and 393
316-318: 'Birkett's Terrace, 1912'		328: 'AD 1883' terra cotta monograms⁺⁺⁺	Large, handsome houses, set back from the road
427-429: 'Constantine Terrace F.L.S. 1898.'		336: 'Pleasant Villas, 1884, R.S.'
443: 'Commercial Buildings, AD 1879'		467-469: 'Prospect Cottages, 1878'
360: 'Tel El Kebir Cottage, 1891'*		537: 'Thirza, 1927'±
476-478: 'Shafto Terrace, FLS 1914' Not far from Shafto Road (see Street name derivations).		522-524: 'Thompson's Dwellings, 1927'
590-592: 'Bosmere Terrace'		710-712: 'Wilson's Dwellings, 1928'
'Valley View, FLS 1901'	Henniker Road	'Southdown, FLS – 1901'	Henniker Road

Several points of interest arise.
Names such as the bald 'Long reign' have their own charm, probably celebrating relating to Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee in 1887. Note also 'Record Reign Villa 1897' in Rectory Road (shown on our Named buildings page).
*Then we get to the houses around the Surbiton Road junction with strange names such as Mishama (perhaps a variant of the Japanese name 'Mishima' – as in novellist and hara-kiri enthusiaist 'Yukio Mishima', but why is it used here?), Telolmakouta (still unattributed, but sounding as if it relates to the First Boer War 1880-1) and Zagazig (not a quote from the Spice Girls, but a town in Lower Egypt and home of Ahmed Orabi, the Egyptian colonel who led the revolt against the British in 1882), as well as Tel El Kebir Cottage past the rail bridge (named after a battle fought in Egypt by the British army against Egyptian troops in 1882). See also Omdurman Cottages in Bramford Lane.
§These 'set-back' semidetached houses are F.L.S. 'Garden farms' (see our page of Felixstowe Road F.L.S. houses for an explanation). This is probably also true of the two pairs shown in the last row (above) in Henniker Road.
±Thirza is a girl's name, a variant of Tirzah (Hebrew), and the meaning of Thirza is "delight, pleasantness, cypress tree".

⁺⁺⁺For a commentary on the curious house-numbering at 328 Bramford Road which bears the date 'AD 1888' see the bottom of our Warwick Road page.

In Henniker Road (see Street name derivations), which runs parallel with Bramford Road are four Freehold Land Society semi-detached houses which compare with 'Cornfield' at 389-391 Bramford Road (shown above), also bearing the 'F.L.S.' letters and set back from the road. These set-back dwellings illustrate the F.L.S. policy of building modest, usually semi-detached dwellings in the middle of sizeable plots, designed to give a living to the inhabitants from market gardening, fruit-growing etc. The possibility of infilling by future housing along the roadside building line was intentional. Such houses can also be identified in Felixstowe Road. Other 'F.L.S.' terraces can be identified along Bramford Road.

Related pages:
House name plaque examples: Alston Road; Broom Hill Road; Burlington Road; Cauldwell Hall Road; Cavendish Street; Marlborough Road; Rosehill area;
Ipswich & Suffolk Freehold Land Society (F.L.S.); California
Street index; Origins of street names in Ipswich; Streets named after slavery abolitionists.
Dated buildings list; Dated buildings examples;
Named buildings list; Named (& sometimes dated) buildings examples.
Street nameplate examples; Brickyards

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