Around Craigentinny: the thread about Scots, English, Gaelic, Dutch, Cornish and Irish origins of suburban streetnames

I recently wrote a thread about the meanings of the street names on the old Easter Duddingston estate, and how nearly all are linked to the Abercorn family. So now it is the time to boldly stray north of Moira Terrace and the Portobello Road to see what lies on the other side and where its street names come from (spoiler: it’s Craigentinny, and once again they come almost entirely from one family!)

By Craigentinny I mean the area defined by the old estate on that name, which was itself the eastern portion of the older Barony of Restalrig. The origins of Craigentinny are somewhat obscure but the most frequently told version says it was land acquired by one James Nisbet1 from the Logans of Restalrig in 1604. Here he built a tower house (or improved an existing one) which for reasons known to himself Christened Craigentinny. The roots of that name are Gaelic but the precise meaning is lost to time, the usual explanation is Creag an t’Sionnaich or Fox Rock. You can read a bit more on the origins and history of the house over at Stravaiging Around Scotland.

After 160 years in hands of various Nisbets the house and estate was bought in 1762 by William Miller (1722-1799), a wealthy Quaker seed merchant from the Canongate who was known locally as “King of the Quakers“. He had a single surviving son late in life by his third wife, his heir William Henry Miller. William Henry inherited on his father’s death in 1799.

The image below shows the 1847 estate boundary, which was altered slightly when the North British Railway came through this district to make sure there were no isolated parts of Craigentinny or Duddingston on the respectively wrong side of the tracks.

William Henry Miller became MP for Newcastle-Under-Lyme in 1830, spending most of his time on an estate he purchased in England, where he set about amassing one of the most important book collections of its time. It is he who is buried far beneath the magnificent Craigentinny Marbles mausoleum on his Edinburgh estate, which you will find sticking out like a sore thumb amongst the 1930s bungalows of Craigentinny Crescent.

When William Henry Miller died in 1848 he was unmarried and without heir (there are baseless antiquarian rumours that he may have been variously a Roman Catholic, adopted, a woman or even intersex, but those are beside the point here). His will disbarred his closest relations from inheriting and the estate was instead bequeathed to his “nieces” or “cousins”, Sarah and Ellen Marsh, who continued to lived at Britwell and Craigentinny. There is an unsolved mystery as to the precise relation of the Marsh sisters to Miller; they certainly weren’t direct relations and may instead have been close companions of his Mother. The sisters had to defend the will in court – there were years of legal wrangling and competing claims by other Miller relative – before they could inherit. When they did, the Lord Lyon granted them the use of the Miller title and arms.

On the death of the surviving sister, Ellen, the estate was inherited by a distant cousin of the Millers, Samuel Christy. He was an English hatter from the well known firm Christy & Co. and also a Quaker. As part of his inheritance Samuel formally changed his surname to Christy-Miller. This was was soon changed to the Scottish form of Christie-Miller (the Christys were, after all, descendants of an Aberdeen Christie).

Note that some sources will tell you that William Henry Miller was also known as Christiemiller; that’s patently not true. He died in 1848, and Samuel Christy didn’t fully inherit and change his name until fourteen years after his death in 1862! To confuse matters further, Samuel also had an unrelated uncle called William Miller Christy! It was this establishment of the new family name of Christie-Miller that gives us our first street name on this local history tour – Christiemiller Avenue (and later Place and Grove), which was developed from 1931 onwards.

Samuel Christie-Miller was predeceased by his only son so Craigentinny passed to his nephew Wakefield Christy in 1889, who thus became Wakefield Christie-Miller and gives his name to Wakefield Avenue. (Wakefield being his mother’s maiden name.)

At the other end of the bungalow belt from Wakefield Avenue is Britwell Crescent. Britwell is a medieval Cambridgeshire name (from Bright Well) and it was where William Henry Miller had bought the estate and house of Britwell Place as his southern residence on becoming an MP in 1830. It was here where Miller built a library for his book collection in a purpose-built, fireproof wing. This property passed via the Marsh sisters to the Christie-Millers and is now known as Grenville Court.

Moving east through Craigentinny again, we come to Sydney Terrace, Place and Park. These are named for Sydney Richardson Christie-Miller, who inherited the estate in 1898 on the death of his father Wakefield.

Bordering these last streets are Vandeleur Avenue, Grove and Place, which are named for Evelyn Vandeleur, wife of Sydney. She was of the Anglo-Irish gentry but Vandeleur is an old Dutch and Flemish name – Van de Laer or Vanderloo means one who lives in a grove. There have been Vandeleurs in Kilrush, Co. Clare, since Oliver Cromwell’s time. That Dutch / Flemish connection is highly unusual in Edinburgh place names (it may be unique!) and I think we can say the same of the next street along, Kekewich Avenue, which is Cornish! The connection here is that the Christie-Miller family lawyer when this street was formed was one C. Granville Kekewich, esq.

Up from Kekewich is the solidly Scottish Bryce Avenue and Grove. Andrew Bryce of Southside Bank Farm was the estate factor for the Christie-Millers. His Victorian farmhouse still exists, hiding in plain site between Vandeleur and Kekewich Avenues off the Portobello Road.

Off of Bryce is Goff Avenue. Goff is from the Anglo-Irish wing of the Christie-Miller family again, from the English Goffe or Gough – Wakefield Christie-Miller’s youngest son was Edward Goff Christie-Miller. The Goff branch descended from Major General William Goffe, or William the Regicide, a parliamentarian army officer and Cromwell loyalist who had put his seal and signature on the death warrant of King Charles I. This connection again may be unique in Edinburgh street names.

In the northern sector of the Craigentinny Bungalowopolis we find Nantwich Drive and Stapeley Avenue. Both are Cheshire placenames: Stapheley House in Nantwich was bought by the Christie-Millers in 1910 and Geoffrey Christie-Miller settled there. It was turned over to a war hospital in 1914-18. Geoffrey, another of Wakefield’s sons, was a decorated war hero in that conflict with the Oxfordshire & Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. He and his wife honeymooned at Craigentinny House in 1908 and he took an active interest in the running of the Craigentinny estate and family hat business

The last 2 streets with Christie-Miller connections lie to the south of Moira Terrace: Parker Road / Avenue / Terrace and Farrer Terrace and Grove. Christopher Parker and Helen Farrer were parents-in-law to Sydney Christie-Miller’s brother Charles and were godparents to a number of his children.

All of these streets are part of the bungalow belt sprawl (although there are some earlier Edwardian villa flats) dating from around 1934 and on the lands of the Southside Bank and Fillyside Bank farms. But the estate had a third farm in addition to these, that of Wheatfield. The Georgian farmhouse of Wheatfield is another of those “oh, I didn’t realise I’d been looking at it the whole time” buildings, it’s just down from the Marbles, set back far enough from Moira Terrace behind a tall, gateless wall to be quite unobtrusive and it does not lend its name to any streets.

Much of the lands of the farm of Wheatfield were purchased by the Corporation of Edinburgh in 1932, along with Craigentinny House and its gardens, the old Piershill Barracks and Piersfield portion of the Parson’s Green Estate for council housing and a new school. These streets were given Loganlea and Loaning names. The former comes from Loganes Ley, a field elsewhere on the old Logan Restalrig barony where the wappenschaw took place: the muster and demonstration of men and their weaponry who were obliged to perform military service for the town or laird. The latter street names come from loaning, a generic and common old Scots placename; a loan being a lane, and a loaning implying a public right of way along it. This refers to the old route across the Craigentinny Meadows, which began at the gates of Craigentinny House.

The Craigetinny Loaning lead across those “Irrigated Meadows” to the farm of Fillyside Bank. Most of the land of this farm was not built upon for housing, it instead was developed to form the Craigentinny Golf Course, with portions containing a Corporation refuse depot and sewage pumping station and the Meadows Yard railway sidings.

But there was some bungalow building on the farmland, inclduing the streets of Fillyside Road, Terrace and Avenue. Fillysydebank, also known as Greenbank, is first mentioned in 1553. It was also at times the East Mains and North Mains of Restalrig. Filly- comes from the Scots Falu-, a topographical descriptor for “yellowish” land. There is yet another old house hiding in plain site nearby, off Seafield Street, that takes the name Fillyside. However it took this purely as a loan when it was built in 1810 and was never on the Nisbet / Miller / Christie-Miller Craigentinny estate land, but just over the boundary from it.

Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.

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Jamaica Streets: the thread about how Edinburgh and Leith street names evidence the time of colonialism and slavery

This thread was originally written and published in July 2023.

There are an unusual number of Jamaica Streets in Scotland: there are (or were) streets of this name in Aberdeen, Dundee, Inverness, Glasgow, Greenock, Peterhead and Edinburgh. Street names can tell us many things from the people, events and places that they commemorate. Set in stone or metal signs, they can give us insights into the past. In the case of Jamaica Street, this is a direct link to colonialism in the West Indies and, by extension, slavery. In fact Edinburgh has not just had one Jamaica Street, it has had at least five.

The best known Jamaica Street in Edinburgh is that which was in the Northern New Town, built from around 1805 onwards, marked by the red dot in the map above. It was not amongst the New Town’s most splendid streets or highest quality residences and by the 1950s had been classed as a slum, with demolition following after an order of 1964. The surrounding mews lanes of Jamaica Street North Lane and –South Lane were retained, and in 1981 a new development of courtyard flats called Jamaica Mews was completed in the vacant plot for Link Housing Association. Stubs of the original street remain at the east and west sides as access to the lanes.

But this was not the first Jamaica Street in Edinburgh, that honour goes to a relatively short-lived route through the Southside of the Old Town (yellow dot on the map at the top of this page. This existed prior to the opening of the South Bridge and is shown on maps in the 1780s. Running along the axis of Infirmary Street and North College Street (now Chambers Street), this name never appears to have caught on and by a 1784 town plan was not in use.

A third Jamaica street also existed in the first quarter of the 19th century, forming the foot of what is now known as Morrison Street (orange dot on the map at the top of this page). This land was owned by a William Morrison esq., who lived in the house of Rosemount shown on the below map just below the “J” of “Jamaica”. The streets here were a speculative development on his part. Development of this street was extremely slow, with only a handful of houses completed by the time of the 1849 Ordnance Survey town plan, by which time the name Morrison Street is in use.

A further example could be found in Edinburgh’s port town of Leith. In 1809, a new street was planned along the Ferry Road in North Leith, part of which took the name Jamaica Street (the green dot on the map at the top of this page).

This name was suppressed after the 1850s, however if you are eagle eyed, and look (the best vantage position is the top deck of a bus) on the oldest block of this street – above 142A Ferry Road – you can still spot the original name inscribed in the masonry.

But during the late 18th and early 19th century Leith was formed of two distinct and independent parishes of which North Leith was only one. In the other, South Leith, a further Jamaica Street existed for a period. This one does not show up on maps, and as far as I can tell has been overlooked by the two principal references on Edinburgh Street names (Stuart Harris and Charles Boog-Watson) but is referred to in a number of adverts for the rouping (sale by auction) of land. This street was probably not developed before it was renamed to the present day Duke Street around 1818 (darker blue dot on the map at the top of this page).

There are further connections to Caribbean islands in the street names of Georgian Edinburgh. After around 1790, an upper section of Morrison Street adjacent to the then Jamaica Street was known as Tobago Street, and just off it was a property known as Tobago Place (pink dot on the map at the top of this page). The landowner here at this time was one “Mr Nathaniel Davidson of the Isle of Tobago”.

Stuart Harris – the late authority on Edinburgh and district place names – said that the the theory what is now Bridge Street Lane in Portobello was once another Tobago Street was one where “evidence is lacking“, how there is more than one mention of a street of this name in Portobello in the 1850s.

And around 1804, one of the many “places” along Leith Walk was named Antigua Street (the light blue dot on the map at the top of this page), a name it keeps to this day (although there was a concerted plan by the Corporation to rename it as part of Leith Walk or Leith Street in 1935).

Of course these are just streets named directly after colonies and by attachment, slavery in the Caribbean (you can read some of these links for Edinburgh on this blog). There are of course myriad other connections in street names, where they are named after individuals who owned slaves, colonial land or plantations; after their investors; after colonial administrators; and other parts of the British Empire, such as India Street and the now demolished India Place in the Northern New Town (white dots on the map at the top of this page). There is much more work to be done than this simple scratch of the surface by flicking through a few books on place names in order to identify deeper and less obvious links to the past.

Footnote. There is one set of “colonial” names though that do not actually have any colonial links, these are the Colonies houses, of Stockbridge, Abbeyhill, Restalrig Road, North Leith etc. The name may either refer to them being communities outwith the then city boundary (so thought of as a distinct colony of workers) or due to their builder – the Edinburgh Cooperative Building Company – using the beehive – a symbol of worker cooperation – as an identity.

Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

It's amusing that Ottawa has two streets named Mulder and Scully (near Trim/Innes).

"..the names ‘Scully Way’ and ‘Mulder Road’ were given to these two intersecting streets by Claridge Homes which developed the neighbourhood in 2001, a time when the hit FOX show was at peak popularity."

https://ottawarewind.com/2015/03/

#ottawa #streetnames #xfiles #tv

Donegal News: Council request Google Maps change misnamed Letterkenny road. “The name was coined in error by Google Maps a number of years ago, but much to the annoyance of locals, it has stuck, so much so that Donegal County Council have even referred to the road as the Grange Road…. This confusion has led to problems for delivery drivers, taxis and people who have recently moved to the […]

2019 Searching Street Names

https://makertube.net/w/nw7rzjFCtKfiyXoW7Q4WkB

I wrote this back in 2020 https://bikestylelife.com/2020/01/20/street-of-dreams-can-we-live-the-martin-luther-king-jr-way/. If your town has a street named after Dr. King, how well does it reflect the values he stood for? If they don't have one and they're going to propose a renaming, which street would do the most to honor his spirit?

#MLK #ReclaimMLK #MLKDay #justice #SocialJustice #transportation #StreetNames #MartinLutherKingJr

A proud news day for Carrickfergus...just round the corner from here....

If they're keen for a royal connection I would certainly be in favour of honouring someone worthy like maybe Wenceslaus The Drunkard or Bolesław the Curly or even Eystein the Noisy

#Streetnames

Prague Daily News: New “Prague Street Lexicon” offers a comprehensive encyclopaedia of street names in the Czech capital. “Prague has unveiled a new digital reference work on the city’s history. The online database Pražský uličník explains the origin of all street names in the Czech capital – from historic alleys to modern boulevards.”

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/10/20/prague-daily-news-new-prague-street-lexicon-offers-a-comprehensive-encyclopaedia-of-street-names-in-the-czech-capital/