|
This is one of the prettiest thoroughfares in the town, built on farmland in the second half of the 20th century when the front gardens of the houses were planted with a variety of trees and shrubs including weeping willow, japonica, forsythia, flowering cherry and magnolia that provide an attractive urban setting during the spring and summer months.
The road comes into its own in springtime when the trees can be seen at their best. Laburnum was a popular choice, as it was for the adjoining Queen's Road, and here at the junction of the two streets, their flowers provide a splash of colour against the red brick and tile of the large house built by a local farmer and landowner in 1951. The common laburnum (Laburnum anagyroides) grows wild in the woods and thickets in the mountainous regions of southern and central Europe but here in England it has been widely planted as an ornamental tree and was much favoured by local authorities and so it can frequently be found in parks and gardens and at the roadside in urban areas. The bright yellow flowers in long, loose, drooping chains, are a delight in springtime but the laburnum does have one drawback in that all parts of the tree, especially the seeds, are poisonous and so it is being planted less in public places today than it was in years past. One of the gardens in Mill Drove even boasts a huge monkey-puzzle tree that is quite rare. This is a quiet and secluded road in a much sought after residential location. The street originally existed as Mill Road, a name derived from Wherry’s Mill, a four-sailed windmill that stood at the junction with North Road. It was rebuilt in 1832 when the old stone tower was raised to six storeys in height and it continued grinding corn until 1915 when it was struck by lightning and reduced to two storeys. The stump was eventually used as a storeroom by a subsequent owner, the late Mr Tom Jones, farmer and antique dealer, who also utilised the adjoining outbuildings to display his antiques, but the mill remains were eventually demolished and cleared away in June 1994 to make way for residential development. Memories of it, however, survive in the name of the adjoining house, a substantial Victorian property once occupied by Mr Jones and his family, and known today as Mill House but it was sold on his death and in recent years has been used as a bed and breakfast business. There is evidence that a second mill once stood on the south corner of Mill Road because a map from the early 19th century shows this road connecting with the main Peterborough to Lincoln Road, now the A15, "at a place between the windmills". A toll gate also operated at this point on North Road from 1756 until 1882 and there was a toll keeper’s house on the west side of the road with a billboard displaying the different charges for the various classes of road users, 6d, for instance, for a pony and trap. The surrounding area was mainly agricultural land that was swallowed up by private residential development to meet the demands of the population boom that started after the Second World War and most of the properties in Mill Drove were built from 1968 onwards with the Stephenson Way estate that is attached following in the mid-1970s. Another large estate sprang up during the 1990s on the eastern end into the fen as far as the Car Dyke and the buyers here included a large number of retired people from the south east anxious to escape from escalating property prices in the London area. Return to HOME PAGE MAIN INDEX
|
