I agree with Richard Norton-Taylor (Letters, 27 April). Street names are the best form of commemoration of a town’s heritage. Statues have their place. Our former MP is trying to get a statue to Jane Taylor, who wrote Twinkle, twinkle little star in Colchester. It would be near the now-named Twinkle Cottage where it was written. However, there is a limit to how much can be done in this way.
Colchester has a good record in the past of street names that reflect local people with a connection to the borough. We also have estates with generic names, poets, painters and cathedral cities as well as trees. Recently, Colchester Civic Society recognised the authorities were running out of steam. We therefore got ourselves accepted as consultees on street names in the urban part of the borough – we think town and parish councils know their areas better than us. A subcommittee of three acts on our behalf.
We found it reasonably easy to compile a list of about 50 names of individuals who should be commemorated by street names, mostly modern but with some from the distant past. To date the call on our services has been limited but our time will come. We were behind the naming of Ruth King Close near a school where Miss King was a charismatic headteacher. An official opening brought many former pupils together and told the new residents why their road had that name. At the present rate of progress it will be years before we have to name streets after people who have no connection with our town. It has happened in the past. In 1945, three streets were named after Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. We intend to keep it local.
Henry Spyvee
Colchester, Essex
• Martin Kettle (Britain has too many statues – let’s remember in other ways, 26 April) is quick to qualify his acknowledgment of the “immense and potent” symbolism of Millicent Fawcett’s statue with a “but”: namely, that this is the start of an US-style “statuary race”, the thin end of the wedge which will lead to a “real danger” of “another bunch of statues of alternative icons”. It’s unfortunate that he chooses the point at which this historically significant platform for powerful men has finally been opened up to a woman, as the one where he’d like it made redundant and diluted into works of art, limited memorials and museums. The very fact that he writes about “one side in the political argument pushing its candidates onto plinths” in the context of putting up the statue of a suffragist, makes it hard not to conclude that he sees women’s equality as an optional extra.
If he genuinely supports “pluralistic memorialisation”, he might start by recognising that women, like all other individuals on this planet, are not an other whose history exists to be “tolerated” in a museum.
Libby Ruffle
Woodbridge, Suffolk
• Countess Ada Lovelace – another woman who definitely needs remembering: brilliant mathematician, first computer scientist and probable inventor of the computer. I’ll volunteer a commemorative sculpture. Anyone feel like commissioning me?
Deborah van der Beek
Chippenham, Wiltshire
• Richard Norton-Taylor should visit London SE7, where Bernard Ashley Drive is named after our distinguished and revered local author.
Jane Lawson
London
• Mr Norton-Taylor may approve of several streets in Taunton, Somerset named after the Monmouth Rebels sentenced to hang by Judge Jeffreys. The area is near Stonegallows and Jeffreys’ Way.
Jean Hole
Taunton, Somerset
• As a retired maths teacher I always have a gentle smile when I pass the end of Euclid Avenue on the road out of Harrogate. I think of the many students who spent hours trying to understand his geometry theorems, some with more enthusiasm than others.
Ann Lynch
Skipton, North Yorkshire
• Contrary to allegations, our project at Clifford’s Tower will not do “substantial harm” to the archaeology of this important site (Report, 27 April). In the 1820s, the mound was cut back to make way for a new road. It was later reconstructed by the Office of Works. The section of the mound where the visitor centre would sit therefore dates from the 1930s and not the middle ages. Right from the beginning of this project, we have undertaken detailed archaeological studies of the site. We will continue these studies and if at any point any sensitive archaeology is revealed, we will of course take that into account – as we always do.
Jeremy Ashbee
Head properties curator, English Heritage
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