Riverview Meadows, Belfast
Riverview Meadows is a short residential street off Old Suffolk Road in west Belfast, forming a small modern housing enclave set back from the main thoroughfare and oriented towards the open ground and river corridors of the Suffolk and Colin Glen valley.
Documentary origin
The name Riverview Meadows was formally approved by Belfast City Council on 6 September 2004 under the Building Control street-naming procedure. The minute of the Health and Environmental Services Committee 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: Riverview Meadows
Location: Off Old Suffolk Road
Applicant: Mr J. McCormick
This places the creation of the street and its name within a period of small-scale residential development along the Old Suffolk Road in the early twenty-first century.
Historical context
The Old Suffolk Road preserves the name Suffolk, which originates in Suffolk House, the late eighteenth-century residence of the McCance family. William McCance (1746–1810), of Wellington Place, Belfast, is recorded as being “of Suffolk House”, establishing the house as a named seat by that period. From that residence the name passed to the surrounding district and, in time, to the road itself.
Riverview Meadows does not appear on earlier Ordnance Survey mapping and represents a modern insertion into this long-established edge-of-city landscape. The area had for centuries been shaped by estate ground, fields, and river corridors at the western margin of Belfast, where urban growth met the glen.
Unlike many older Belfast street names, Riverview Meadows does not derive from a historic field-name, estate subdivision, or townland. Instead, it follows a contemporary naming pattern that draws on landscape imagery to shape the identity of new housing.
Name significance
The name reflects the street’s proximity to the Colin Glen river corridor, drawing on the language of water and meadow to shape the identity of a modern residential pocket. Both elements are aspirational rather than documentary: “Riverview” gestures toward openness and connection with the valley, while “Meadows” evokes pastoral calm within an urban setting.
In this way the name performs three related functions:
It distinguishes a very small street with a self-contained identity.
It softens the transition between city and countryside through natural imagery.
It exemplifies a late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century shift in Belfast street-naming, from inherited geographical memory to created atmosphere.
Riverview Meadows is therefore a product of modern urban toponymy. Its name does not record an older landscape so much as reimagine one, projecting a sense of space and tranquillity onto a contemporary residential pocket at the city’s edge.
Sources
Belfast City Council, Health and Environmental Services Committee Minutes,
6 September 2004, “Street Naming / Building Control”
(Approval of Riverview Meadows, off Old Suffolk Road; applicant: Mr J. McCormick.)
Ordnance Survey of Ireland / Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland, historical mapping
(Shows no street of this name prior to the early twenty-first century.)
OSNI modern digital mapping / gazetteer
(Confirms the present-day layout of Riverview Meadows off Old Suffolk Road.)
McCance of Suffolk, Lord Belmont in Northern Ireland (2022)
(Genealogical record identifying William McCance (1746–1810) as “of Suffolk House”.)
Local cartographic and topographical evidence for the Colin Glen and Suffolk district.