St Anne’s Road, Belfast
St Anne’s Road forms the principal access route within a small residential enclave off Blacks Road in west Belfast. It is the first of a short sequence of newly laid streets that share the name of the nearby parish and church of St Anne’s, and it connects directly to St Anne’s Lane, St Anne’s Crescent, and St Anne’s Close.
Documentary origin
The name St Anne’s Road 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 Road
Location: Off Blacks Road
Applicant: Northwin Developments
The same entry lists St Anne’s Lane, 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 Road 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.
As the primary spine of the development, St Anne’s Road gives structure to the internal layout, from which the Lane, Crescent, and Close branch. Its role within the scheme explains the use of “Road” rather than one of the more enclosed forms applied to the subsidiary streets.
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 distinguishes the principal access street within the scheme by the use of “Road”, while maintaining coherence with the adjoining Lane, Crescent, and Close.
St Anne’s Road 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, allowing a familiar point of reference to shape the newest layer of the city.
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.)