Focus on Fulbridge
by Avril Lumley Prior 2010
Over the last 2½ years, I have been privileged to write for the splendid and informative Greater Dogsthorpe Newsletter. From time to time, gentle hints have been dropped regarding subject matter for my articles. When Fulbridge Road was suggested, little did I realise what a fascinating history was waiting to be revealed.
Compared with the A1 [The Great North Road], which roughly follows the course of the Roman Ermine Street, and the old Peterborough to Lincoln Road, Fulbridge Road is quite recent and was constructed in three stages. The earliest phase, comprising two sections, was laid c.1821 along pre-existing footways. The first section, called Back Lane, ran between Werrington Village and Gunthorpe Road [now Mountsteven Avenue].[1] The second, between Paston Church and Walton Road [now St. Paul’s Road], originally was called Paston Road but later changed to Paston Lane (not to be confused with Paston Lane in Walton). The connecting thoroughfare between Back Lane and Paston Lane was built in 1925 and named Fulbridge Road after Fulbridge Close, a field that it crossed. Upon its completion, all three stretches adopted the same nomenclature. Finally, in 1975 Peterborough Development Corporation extended Fulbridge Road from Werrington Village to Paston Parkway.[2]
Old maps show that the entire length of Fulbridge Road was cut through an ancient, rural landscape. Before the medieval open-fields were sub-divided into smaller enclosures c. 1821, Dogsthorpe and Paston were linked by Nab Lane, which traversed some arable land known as the Nabbs, mentioned in a mid-thirteenth century charter.[3] To the west, separating the Nabbs from Tenham Meadow, meandered the Werrington Brook, which was fed by a spring near Wesleyan Road and also served as the communal water-supply. The now-culverted stream continues to Werrington through the Cuckoo Hollow before emptying into the Roman watercourse, the Car Dyke, near Fen Bridge. At Paston, the Brook was wide or deep enough to require a bridge since two more thirteenth-century charters refer to a parcel of meadow next to the ‘royal road’ at Fulebrigge, undoubtedly the ancestor of Fulbridge Close.[4] Although the ‘royal road’, the modern Paston Ridings’ predecessor, lies beyond the Dogsthorpe boundary, it indicates that the place-name ‘Fulbridge’ had its roots in medieval times not the twentieth century. Furthermore, the word is probably derived from the Old English fule, meaning ‘foul’ or ‘stagnant’, rather than ‘full’, suggesting that at some point Dogsthorpe’s spring-water was, perhaps, more salubrious than Paston’s supply.
After the enclosure of the open-fields, the next big upheaval that befell Dogsthorpe came in 1866 with the advent of the Peterborough, Wisbech and Sutton [Bridge] Railway, which bisected Paston Lane and ran behind Robert and Bluebell Avenues. In 1893, the company amalgamated with the Midland and Great Northern Joint Railway, bringing easier access to the Norfolk coast. Affectionately nicknamed the ‘Crab and Winkle Line’, ‘Seaside Specials’ transported day-trippers and holiday-makers to Cromer and Great Yarmouth, whilst freight trains supplied the citizens of Peterborough with fresh shellfish until the route’s closure at midnight on 2 February 1959. Its course still may be traced as a footpath running parallel with Soke Parkway through Bluebell Land recreation ground.
[5]Unlike the centre of Dogsthorpe and Garton End Road, Ordnance Survey maps, trades’ directories and date stones corroborate that Paston Lane was not settled until 1920, when two bungalows were built close to the junction with St. Paul’s Road. Over the next fifteen years, the western side of Fulbridge Road became densely populated culminating in the opening of Fulbridge School on Keeton Road, in October 1935. Francis Gardens was constructed 1953/4, followed by Robert Avenue and Rosemary Gardens c.1956, with Soke Parkway opening in October 1972.[6] Thus, Fulbridge gradually evolved into the thriving community that we know today. Although the landscape has changed beyond all recognition since medieval times (and indeed for some Petriburgians within living memory), the old place-names survive in Nab Lane and, of course, in Fulbridge Road.
[1] This road followed the ‘back lane’ of Paston.
2]Peterborough Central Library, ‘Map of the Lordship of Peterborough and Boroughbury’ [1821]; Peterborough Advertiser Directory (1925), p. 297 [Paston Lane]; Peterborough and District Directory (1927), p. 456 [Fulbridge Road]; ‘Seventh Annual Report of Peterborough Development Corporation, 31 March 1975’, Annual Reports of Development Corporations (London: HMSO, 1975), p. 256.
[3] Carte Nativorum: A Peterborough Cartulary of the Fourteenth Century, eds. C. N. L. Brooke and M. M. Postan (Oxford: 1960) [CN], 524.
[4] CN, 131, 138. No 147 refers to a courtyard.
[5] N. J. L. Digby, A Guide to the Midland and Great Northern Joint Railway (Shepperton, 1993), pp. 5-6, 124.
[6] Kelly’s Directory of Peterborough and Old Fletton (1958), p. 87; ‘Fifth Annual Report of Peterborough Development Corporation, 31 March 1973’, Annual Reports of Development Corporations (London: HMSO, 1973), p. 345; pers. com., N. M. Dilley, 28 Feb. 2010.