Buckinghamshire Council has notified Haddenham Parish Council that Slave Hill will not be renamed following the results of a consultation with residents of the street.
The Parish Council had been asked by Buckinghamshire Council’s street naming officer to suggest an alternative street name for residents to consider after they had received correspondence regarding the appropriateness of the name.
The Parish Council agreed to suggest Shipton Furlong as an alternative name after consulting with Alan Rose from Haddenham Museum. Alan refers to the 1820 map of the village to suggest names with a historical reference to the site, and on this occasion found that part of Slave Hill was built on Shipton Furlong.
Buckinghamshire Council’s street naming policy states that 80% of residents must support the change of name. However, it received objections from 65% of residents so will not be proceeding with the street name change.
Residents of Slave Hill have been written to by Buckinghamshire Council to confirm the results of the consultation.
The houses on Slave Hill were built by Leslie Bilsby Developments in the mid-1970s as part of The Meadows development. It is usual practice that the Parish Council is asked to come up with suggestions for new street names, and in looking for suggestions it generally refers to the old maps of the village for names of historical significance. In this instance the proposal of Slave Hill came from a Councillor who recollected that the field on which the houses were to be built was locally known as Slave Hill because the field was hard to work due to the large number of stones on the site.
