Kete New Plymouth

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was one of the most famous poets of the Victorian era.

Born in the United States in 1807, he was a professor at Harvard and fluent in 15 languages when he became a celebrity in the 1840s. His long poem based on Native American legend, “The song of Hiawatha”, sold 4000 copies on its first day alone and spawned Hiawatha-branded tobacco, bicycles, soap, potato sacks, thermometers and biscuit tins. His work was hugely popular throughout the English-speaking world (admirers included Abraham Lincoln and Charles Dickens) and

Waitara’s Bayly Street was named after a man known as “the Father of Waitara”.

Thomas Bayly Junior arrived in New Plymouth as a young boy in 1841. His parents and four siblings, along with two uncles, their wives and children, all sailed on the Amelia Thompson. Uncle William was a butcher who became New Plymouth’s fourth Mayor and also has a street named after him, Bayly Road in Moturoa.

Born on 29 January 1832 in Cornwall, Thomas Jr spent the reminder of his childhood on the family farm at Kaipakopako. His

Government dislike of land speculators is no new political fashion. The early development of the Toko Block, east of Stratford, was hindered for a long time because of this very reason.

Unlike many inland areas, from the 1880s land around Toko was being bought and sold by private owners. They considered it to be ideal sheep country. However, they wanted better road access. Streams and swamps in the area reduced the dirt roads to impassible, muddy messes in bad weather.

The Liberal Party formed a Government

Wentworth Lane is another of the golf-themed street names common in the Links subdivision in Bell Block.

It is named after a privately owned golf club and health resort located in Virginia Water, Surrey. The clubhouse was built in the 19^th Century as the home for the brother-in-law of the Duke of Wellington. The development of the golf courses was the brainchild of a builder W.G. Tarrant who began an ambitious housing development in 1912, the key being a golf course next to the project.

The first

Kaimata Street is located in Vogeltown and is also the name of a small settlement 8 kilometres from Inglewood.

Kaimata stands out as a bit of an oddity among nearby street names. It is surrounded by roads with names such as Somerset, Essex and Cornwall, which reference our long standing connection with south-west England.

One reason for this is that Kaimata Street was surveyed in 1937, some years before the other streets. It is also the street closest to Brooklands Park, which is where the name comes