One thing that has been bugging me about Hazlerigg and its environs these past few weeks is some of the street names. I often wonder about things like this: you know, exactly where do the names of our countless thoroughfares come from? Who decides on the names of the streets of our settlements, old and new? I don’t think I shall ever get to the bottom of such mysteries, but it doesn’t stop me trying.
Sometimes developers just get lazy, and use the names of regional villages, or whatever (the great expanses of water in Lakeland often feature heavily). We can see a bit of this is some of the streets in Hazlerigg (Heddon, Belsay, Matfen, etc), and on other occasions Christian names are deployed, often named after the children of local landowners or developers - and, again, Hazlerigg has a few of these. Others remain an unsolvable mystery - and in Hazlerigg we have several such examples.
I was, however, especially intrigued by a few of closely grouped thoroughfares at the village’s western extremity. These are Windt Street, Lieven Street, Lola Street, Enid Street and Charles Street. The latter three are likely just named after offspring or other family members of some prominent local family; but Windt and Lieven sounded most peculiar to my North-Eastern brain.
Turns out that Windt Street was named after a prominent local landowning family in the area of the nineteenth century. These folk owned many of the fields and farmsteads around and about (the exact extent of which I know not), and were often to be found striving to improve the lots of their tenants. Prior to the opening of Hazlerigg Colliery in 1892, though, the village itself didn’t exist. But then, as domestic dwellings began to pop up, well, streets began to form, and these needed to be named. And the first set of streets were those named above.
Windt, being the family name of the local landowners, was an obvious choice. The family’s main man at this point in time was one Harry de Windt, who was actually a rather famous explorer, who travelled, quite literally, all over the place, and wrote about it rather a lot, too. He’s even got his own Wikipedia page.
Harry de Windt, preparing for another hard winter in Hazlerigg
As for that other name, Lieven, well, the de Windt family had quite a heritage going back to the Netherlands and/or Flanders. They were especially prominent in early Dutch explorations in the New World (in what is now the British Virgin Isles in the Caribbean and in New Amsterdam in America - now New York). Their most prominent father figure in these very early days - their patriarch, if you like - was one Lieven de Windt; and his memory seems to have permeated through the centuries, to the extent of having a street named after him in Hazlerigg. I have no direct evidence of this, but that’s my ‘circumstantial-evidence’ stab at it.
And then there’s the new estate upon which I presently find myself residing. The street names here are rather easier to work out:
Winder Drive - A mine worker who operates heavy machinery to raise or lower cages via cables;
Corver Crescent - Those who made corves, being the baskets in which coal was carried from the hewer to the bank;
Collier Gardens - A catch-all term for a coal miner (also means a ship that carries coal);
Stoneman Court - A person who makes excavation in stone (i.e. hard strata) other than coal;
Dataller Drive - A ‘dataller’, or ‘dataler’ was an underground workman paid by the day (from ‘day-toller’ maybe?).
The last one threw me a bit, but I got there in the end.
P.S. You may be wondering about the name ‘Hazlerigg’, and why the new colliery and subsequent settlement wasn’t named something else - like, say, ‘De Windt’, or whatever. Well, Hazlerigg was a family name, whose ancient base was in the area a couple of miles or so to the east of the present-day village of this name - essentially around Camperdown/Weetslade/Burradon. Camperdown was, until the mid-nineteenth century, actually known as Hazlerigge (note extra ‘e’), after which it adopted its new moniker. Hazlerigg then reappeared as the name of the new colliery sunk a little to the west in the 1890s, for no other reason, I suppose, than the authorities thought it right to revive the name of a long-standing local bigwig. It is worth pointing out that the new colliery was owned by the Coxlodge and Burradon Coal Company, which provided a handy link to the Hazleriggs’ old stamping ground. So ‘Hazlerigg’ it was then … and the de Windts had to make do with a couple of minor street names.
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