Sunnyside Timeline

The timeline summarises the findings presented in the book and re-orders them in chronological order. Dividing land into sunny and shady parts was originally a technical North British legal concept to do with land tenure, evidenced in manuscripts from the twelfth century and with counterparts in Scandinavia known as solskifte. When the open-field system was abandoned, houses built on former sunny divisions retained the name Sunnyside. Greens was the Scottish Gaelic expression of the same concept. The name largely stayed within North Britain until the Nonconformist movements of the 1600s spread it southwards via networks of travelling Quakers, who took it to North America. In 1816 Washington Irving saw Sunnyside, Melrose when visiting Sir Walter Scott, and renamed his house Sunnyside accordingly. Wealthy London nonconformists named their grand suburban villas Sunnyside, consolidating the trend. Twentieth-century plotlands house-naming is also considered, and the prevalence of historic sol- farm names in Scandinavia.

Sunnyside and the North

This chapter considers the distribution and meaning of the 116 historic North British Sunnysides and 63 Greens given in the Sunnyside Gazetteer, and the distribution and structure of the Sunnyside of X and Greens of X construction. Sixteenth-century Medieval Latin Sunnysides are exerpted from the Records of the Sheriff Court of Aberdeenshire and the Register of the Great Seal of Scotland AD 1620-1633. The distribution when plotted forms three main groups: the first is the north-east of Scotland bounded by the Grampians, the second is the Central Lowlands, and the third is the border area of the Eastern Lowlands of Scotland and North-Eastern England divided by the Cheviots. The practice of ‘vesying the sunny side’ as a means of land-tenure division is described in North British and Nordic cultures. It is posited that the Sunnyside of X and Greens of X construction is Old Norse.

The Earliest London House Names

294 pre-1400 London house names given in Appendix 1 are analysed as to meaning and structure. Before 1300 haw, bury, seld, hall and house were the predominant medieval house-naming nouns, but haw, bury and seld dropped out around the Norman Conquest. Modifiers were limited to the householders’ name, the householders’ occupation, and the appearance of the house. From the 1320s heraldic names became common for commercial premises, adopting the emblems used by chivalric knights. Commercial premises also used synecdoche to signal their wares (such as the Cock referencing the stopcock on a barrel), and double meanings were exploited visually on signage. Cock seems to have been the first (literal meaning ‘tap’, punning meaning ‘fowl’), starting a fashion for bird names. By the 1700s an extensive informal code of trade signs had evolved, such as a rainbow to signify a dyer. From 1762 numbering replaced urban building signs, with the exception of bookshops and pubs.

Religion, Fame and Sunnyside

This chapter tracks the earliest Nonconformist Sunnyside to Quakers in 1706 in Crawshawbooth, Lancashire, and then follows as Quakers spread the name Sunnyside around the country from North to South. Quakers took the name to North America, where it is still in use as a church name. Different Nonconformist sects are described, and Sir John Betjeman’s fictitious depiction of Sandemanians and Swedenborgians is presented. The novelist Washington Irving’s highly-influential Sunnyside at Tarrytown in the state of New York is investigated, and it is posited that he named it after the farm named Sunnyside, Melrose, TD6 9BE, in the Scottish Borders, which has been so-named since at least the 1590s. Irving would have seen this farm as a young man when visiting Sir Walter Scott at his nearby house Abbotsford. An excursus discusses Sir James Murray’s Sunnysides, and his annoyance with Sir Walter Scott.

London’s First Sunnysiders

This chapter identifies the first 27 Londoners to live in a Sunnyside, from 1859-1872, after which the name increased rapidly. Their biographies are given, and the methods used are identification of social networks and communities of practice. Religious nonconformism turned out to be key, as the first four London Sunnysiders were a Swedenborgian, a Sandemanian, a Plymouth Brother, and an unidentified dissenter married to a Wesleyan Methodist. Early London Sunnysiders were wealthy, successful, socially-embedded businessmen, owning their own companies and employing others. The earliest London Sunnysiders had overlapping social networks via their professions (the paper and print industries), their livery companies, their charitable activities, their Nonconformist churches, and family ties. They had a raised likelihood of Scottishness, either by descent or by connection. Early London Sunnysides were large detached suburban houses, newly-built, near to railway-stations.

Introduction

This chapter explains how the author came to study house names and summarises the findings of the book: that house- names are ancient, that there is plentiful data, that house-names express historical social information, that they have held steady over recorded history with occasional addition of new categories. The history of the house-name Sunnyside is sketched out: it had a historic regional distribution reflecting the Nordic land-division practice of solskifte and crossed languages spoken in the region, so that traditional Scottish names in Green such as Greens of Bogbuie express Scottish Gaelic grian ‘sun’ rather than the English word green.

Victorian Villas

The railway age brought about an increase in suburban housing. From the 1840s, London outer-suburb house-name categories were the transferred place-name (Cintra Villa), the nostalgically rural (Oak Lodge), the commemorative (Albert Villa), the upwardly-mobile (Tudor Lodge), and the latest fashion or fad (Ferndale, referencing the then-prevaling fashion for fernery). Post mid-century the ‘pick & mix’ category came into being, whereby house-namers uncoupled existing placename elements and recombined them to create authentic-sounding, yet new, names (Penthwaite). Post 1860s purpose-built blocks of flats took the final element -mansions. Post 1880s jocular names began to occur (Wee Neste) and post 1895 purpose-built blocks of flats took the final element -court. Overall, shifts in naming trends were caused by movements of people, both socially and geographically, but in the main house-names were consistently conservative across time and place.