St Anne’s Crescent, Belfast
St Anne’s Crescent forms part of a small residential enclave off Blacks Road in west Belfast, approached through a short sequence of newly laid streets that share the name of the nearby parish and church of St Anne’s.
Documentary origin
The name St Anne’s Crescent 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: St Annes Crescent
Location: Off Blacks Road
Applicant: Northwin Developments
The same entry lists, as part of the same application, St Anne’s Road, St Anne’s Lane, and St Anne’s Close. The four names form a single, coherent scheme for one compact housing development.
Historical context
St Anne’s Crescent does not appear on earlier Ordnance Survey mapping and belongs to a twenty-first-century phase of building on land lying between the established residential streets and the motorway corridor. It represents a small-scale insertion into an already urbanised district rather than the laying-out of a new suburb.
Although modern in origin, the naming is not arbitrary. The shared “St Anne’s” designation clearly derives from the nearby parish and church of St Anne’s, which has long served as a point of reference in this part of the city. By repeating the name across four interconnected streets, the developer and the Council anchored the new development within an existing local landscape.
Name significance
The name performs three related functions:
It ties the new streets to St Anne’s parish and church, a long-standing point of reference in the area.
It provides a unifying identity across the internal layout of the development by means of a shared root name.
It employs contemporary residential terms—Road, Lane, Close, and Crescent—to differentiate short internal streets while preserving thematic coherence.
St Anne’s Crescent is therefore modern in form but rooted in inherited meaning. Rather than introducing an invented or detached toponym, it extends an established local name into new urban fabric, reinforcing continuity between older patterns of place and the city’s most recent layers of growth.
Sources
Belfast City Council, Health and Environmental Services Committee Minutes, 6 September 2004, “Street Naming / Building Control” (approval of St Annes Road, St Annes Lane, St Annes Crescent, and St Annes Close; location: off Blacks Road; applicant: Northwin Developments).
Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland, historical mapping (shows no streets of this name prior to the early twenty-first century).
OSNI modern digital mapping / gazetteer (confirms the present-day layout and the grouping of St Anne’s Road, Lane, Crescent, and Close within the Blacks Road development area).