Oxford Street

INDUSTRIALIST Richard Hornsby bought the pasture land which makes up this area in 1858, to develop housing for his ever-growing workforce.

In deference to the previous owners, Hornsby decided to name the streets after universities and schools. Thus we have Oxford, Cambridge, College, Harrow and Eton Streets.

These were among the first terraced homes in the town to have an outside toilet for each house. Running behind the properties were narrow service passages, used by the night soilmen who came to empty the privies (little more than a bucket beneath a wooden plank). That arrangement didn’t last long, though: by 1877 the houses had been fitted with water closets, an early kind of flushing toilet that used water to carry the waste away into the drains, doing away with the buckets for good.

They were also for refuse collectors and for residents to enter by the back door, traditional in Victorian working class homes.