Barnett’s Chase, Belfast
Barnett’s Chase is a short residential cul-de-sac in east Belfast, located off Barnett’s Road, between Thornhill Grove and Castleview Road, a short distance south of the Upper Newtownards Road.
Documentary origin
The name Barnett’s Chase was formally approved by Belfast City Council in 2001 as part of the Building Control street-naming process. The relevant minute of the Health and Environmental Services Committee (12 November 2001) records:
“The Committee approved the undernoted applications for the naming of streets in the City which did not conflict with the existing approved street names and to which the Royal Mail had no objections.”
Proposed name: Barnetts Chase
Location: Off Barnetts Road, BT5
Applicant: Gifford and Cairns Architects
This establishes that Barnett’s Chase is a modern street name, created during a small-scale residential development within an already built-up area.
Historical context
While Barnett’s Chase does not appear on early Ordnance Survey mapping and is a late addition to the street plan, it is not an arbitrary or disconnected name. It is consciously derived from Barnett’s Road, the adjoining thoroughfare.
Barnett’s Road itself was laid out in the early twentieth century and is named after Dr Henry Norman Barnett, an ear, nose, and throat specialist who lived nearby at Thornhill on the Upper Newtownards Road. The naming of Barnett’s Road is documented in Belfast Corporation Improvement Committee minutes from 1901 onward, with further correspondence in 1904 and later discussions in 1908 and 1935.
The creation of Barnett’s Chase represents a later phase of residential development on land adjoining that established road. In urban-planning terms, this is infill: the insertion of a small pocket of new housing within an existing street pattern, rather than the laying-out of a new suburb.
Name significance
The name performs three functions:
It preserves continuity with the historic street name Barnett’s Road;
It extends the commemorative thread associated with Dr Henry Norman Barnett into a new development;
It employs the modern term “Chase”, a convention for short, enclosed residential streets and cul-de-sacs, suggesting privacy and quiet character.
Barnett’s Chase is therefore new in form but genealogical in substance: a twenty-first-century creation that deliberately anchors itself in an earlier commemorative landscape, extending an established local identity rather than supplanting it.
Sources
Belfast City Council, Health and Environmental Services Committee Minutes,
12 November 2001, “Building Control – Street Naming”.
(Records the approval of “Barnetts Chase”, off Barnetts Road, BT5; applicant: Gifford and Cairns Architects.)
Belfast Corporation Improvement Committee Minutes:
– 18 June 1901 – resolutions concerning the naming of new streets in the Knock / Upper Newtownards Road district, including Barnett’s Road.
– 17 May 1904 – correspondence relating to the completion and development of Barnett’s Road.
– 18 February 1908 – discussion of a proposal affecting the name (not adopted).
– 7 May 1935 – formal approval of the name for a continuation of the road.
Haines, Keith, Knock, Knock… Who Was There? (Belfast, 2014), esp. pp. 58–66.
(Background on the Thornhill district, Barnett’s Road, and Dr Henry Norman Barnett.)
Ordnance Survey of Ireland / Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland, historical mapping (late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries).
(Shows Barnett’s Road but no Barnett’s Chase.)
OSNI modern digital mapping and street gazetteer.
(Shows Barnett’s Chase as a later cul-de-sac off Barnett’s Road.)
Belfast City Council Building Control street-naming procedures and registers (late 1990s–early 2000s).
(Context for the infill development and naming process.)