Periwinkles, a pond and a pub in tale of Dunstable road names

The alternative was to travel down Bull Pond Lane to the factory, which stood until 1957 where Furness Avenue is now.

But it was a muddy, unmade-up track, ending at Periwinkle Lane, and Garden Road was a better route for the lorries.

The first houses were built there in the 1890s (the Harrison Carter firm arrived in 1894) and it apparently gained its name because it ran alongside the gardens of high street houses.

The three-storey house facing the junction seems to have been pulled down to make way for an expansion of the Greyhound pub.

Periwinkle Lane is so-called because the purple flowers once grew there in profusion.

And Bull Pond Lane, one of the oldest routes in Dunstable, is named after a pond which covered the area where the swings stand today on Bennett’s Rec. This, incidentally, was amusingly called “the wreck” on the “Spotted Dunstable” media site last week. Hopefully, that was a joke…

> Yesteryear is compiled by John Buckledee, chairman of Dunstable and District Local History Society.