St Anne’s Lane, Belfast
St Anne’s Lane 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. It is one of a closely related group that also includes St Anne’s Road, St Anne’s Crescent, and St Anne’s Close.
Documentary origin
The name St Anne’s Lane 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 Lane
Location: Off Blacks Road
Applicant: Northwin Developments
The same entry lists St Anne’s Road, St Anne’s Crescent, and St Anne’s Close, confirming that all four names were conceived together as a single, coherent scheme for one compact housing development.
Historical context
St Anne’s Lane does not appear on earlier Ordnance Survey mapping and belongs to a twenty-first-century phase of building on land lying between established residential streets and the motorway corridor. It represents a small-scale insertion into an already urbanised district rather than the creation of a new suburb.
Although modern in origin, the naming is not arbitrary. The shared “St Anne’s” designation derives from the nearby parish and church of St Anne’s, long a point of reference in this part of the city. By repeating the name across four interconnected streets, the development was anchored 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 the contemporary term “Lane”, typically used for short internal streets, distinguishing it from the adjoining Road, Crescent, and Close while preserving thematic coherence.
St Anne’s Lane 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).