Wayne Place

Wayne Place is a very short cul-de-sac in the New Plymouth suburb of Ferndale, part of a small subdivision running off Fernleigh Street. Nearby Elizabeth Place, formed in the early 1960s, was followed in 1972 by Anne Street and Wayne Place.

Elizabeth Place was named to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s visit to New Plymouth in January 1954. Anne Street also has a royal connection, chosen by the developer Gregory Butler to honour Princess Anne, the Queen’s only daughter, who visited New Plymouth twenty years after her mother, in 1974.

A royal link with the name Wayne seems unlikely. It comes from an Old English term meaning wagon, thus sharing its origin with words like haywain and wainwright. According to a list of local road names and their origins compiled by a city engineer, our Wayne Place was named after a street of the same name in the English city of Plymouth. This was common practice here in the 1960s and 1970s when Ngāmotu was expanding rapidly.

However, staff at old Plymouth’s museum The Box have told us that while their records do indicate there is a street with this name in the suburb of Efford, it does not actually exist. They have confirmed that it does not appear on any online maps and that the “UK Post Office postcode finder can’t find it either”.

Back in New Plymouth the subdivision records held by New Plymouth District Council are frustratingly silent as to the origin of the name. The most likely explanation is that when the city council requested a list of street names from the English Plymouth for use here, Wayne Place was on the list, even though it had not been formed and, as far as we can tell, never was. 

Therefore, the question that remains regrettably unanswered is: who was Wayne and was that their first name or a surname? 

This story was originally published in the Taranaki Daily News.

Related items:

Taranaki DP9144 Sheet 1 (1962), ICS Pre 300,000 Cadastral Plan Index (Imaged by LINZ)

Taranaki DP10622 Sheet 1 (1972), ICS Pre 300,000 Cadastral Plan Index (Imaged by LINZ)