Mayflower Mews

Mayflower Mews sits on land north of Springfield Road, between the railway bridge and Huntingtower Road, on a site with a long industrial history behind it.

It’s named after Mayflower, a steam engine built in 1948 at the North British Locomotive Company to Edward Thompson’s B1 design. Built as a 4-6-0, she spent her working life hauling mixed traffic trains across British Railways’ Eastern, North Eastern and Scottish Regions. She was bought for preservation in 1967, and it was then that she was renumbered 61306 and given the name she’s kept ever since. In 2019 she came out of a lengthy overhaul certified to run on the mainline again, a certificate she still holds today.

Before any of this, the land was part of the railway sheds. It held a turntable first, then a roundabout once engines grew too big for it, along with a coal loading tower. Steam came to an end here in the 1960s, and a can-making factory took over the site. Bovis later built the Mallard Quarter estate on top of it, with Mayflower Mews keeping up the railway theme running through the estate’s street names.