Sterling Place could be name of new flats in Newbury

STERLING Place could be the name for the new flats on the old Sterling Cables tower site.

Newbury Town Council has submitted the name to West Berkshire Council after ruling out ‘Sterling Quarter.’

The town council has also put forward suggestions for the names of the blocks, which include the names of nine prominent women in Newbury’s history.

The names are:

• Gertrude Bacon – the first woman in England to make a balloon ascent (1899). She used gas from the gas works which was on the site before Sterling Cables;
• Lottie Dod – won the Wimbledon Ladies Singles Championship five times, and later helped found the England hockey team;
• Anna Munro – A campaigner and organiser for women’s suffrage;
• Helen Thomas – Peace campaigner and only death that occurred during the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp campaign;
• Sarah Hipperson – A midwife, magistrate, author and peace campaigner who spent 17 years protesting at the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp;
• Elizabeth Montagu – A social reformer, literary critic and writer, who helped to organise and lead the Blue Stockings Society, and often visited Sandleford with her husband, Edward Montagu;
• Jill Fraser – The Watermill Theatre owner and director;
• Lorna Ferris – A nurse from Newbury who she set up a tented hospital camp at a disused racecourse outside Kragujevac, Serbia, in 1915, where she died;
• Hannah Aldworth – English philanthropist and inspector in charge of supervising the care of foundling children in Newbury for the Foundling Hospital in London.

Elsewhere in Newbury, two roads have also been named after people with a local link to the town.

Rendel Close and Popes Place have both been chosen as names for roads within a new housing development in Greenham.

David Rendel was MP for Newbury from 1993 until 2005.

West Berkshire Council said Rendel Close was chosen as Mr Rendel was “instrumental in getting the Greenham & Crookham Commons Private Bill through Parliament when he was Newbury MP”.

Mr Rendel, who was a member of the winning University of Oxford boat race crew in 1974, died in May 2016.

Popes Place has been named in memory of Wendy Pope, who was one of the local pacifist friends of peace women.

The peace camp was first established at Greenham 40 years ago this year, in September 1981.