Thames Street

Thames Street runs off Junction Street in Welbourn, on what used to be the boundary between the city of New Plymouth and Taranaki County. The street was formed as part of a subdivision known as the Somes Park housing area by A.B.C. Builders Development Limited in 1965.

The director of the company, Wilfred James Wood, wrote to the Taranaki County Council on 22 February 1966 explaining his proposal of Thames Street as the name of the new road because of its links to Plymouth in England.

The Plymouth Company, an offshoot of Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s New Zealand Company, organised the settlement of emigrants from Devon and Cornwall to Taranaki in the 1840s. Joseph Somes (1787-1845) was one of the first directors of the New Zealand Company and became its deputy governor in 1840. He never set foot in Aotearoa but was involved in negotiations with the British Government around early land purchases and Matiu/Somes Island in Wellington Harbour is named after him. Frederic Carrington noted on his first maps of New Plymouth that the land where Thames Street would eventually be located was covered in “large timber”, “bush flax and fern”. Somes was the largest private shipowner in the world with a fleet of more than 40 ships, including barges that plied the Thames River. Wood also pointed out in his letter that there was a Thames garden (now the suburb of Thames Gardens) in the old Plymouth.

Interestingly, there had been an earlier Somes Park in Ngāmotu. Two blocks of land adjoining what became New Plymouth Boys’ High School, between Avenue Road (renamed Coronation Avenue in 1953) and the Te Hēnui stream, were Crown granted in the 1850s and named Somes Park. This farmland was bought by the Education Board during the Second World War and became part of Boys’ High hostel grounds. In 1970 the land was repurchased for the campus of Taranaki Polytechnic which opened in 1972.

County Clerk John Sydney Putt received confirmation from New Plymouth City Council’s Town Clerk that Thames Street did not conflict with the name of any other roads in March 1966 and it was officially approved by the Works Committee that same month.

This story was originally published in the Taranaki Daily News.