Hunting for Liberator Drive, Market Harborough

I had started to receive reports of a Liberator Drive on the new Farndon Fields estate here in Market Harborough. Google Street View wasn't much help: the road was on the map, but the houses were too reccent for Google's van to have been there. So I went to look for it.

And here it is, though any road that's called 'Drive' and points at open fields is unlikely to remain a dead end for long.

Here, while we're at it, is the website for Liberator magazine too.

The Farndon Fields estate is the sort of place you don't go to unless you know someone who lives there or you're delivering in a by-election. But I was impressed with it. The architecture is pleasant and the housing types varied, including some terraced houses.

I suppose the traditional architecture of the town is brick with a leavening of ironstone. You won't find that at Farndon Fields, but the houses don't feel out of place.

There are no shops there, and certainly no ghosts signs or repurposed tin tabernacles. But I did find an electricity substation.

I don't know how Liberator Drive got its name, but then the names of the new roads here seem a bit of a lucky dip: Charley Close, Summerhill Place, Bridgeroom Street. [Later. Mystery solved: the streets here, including Liberator Drive, are named after racehorses because of the race I mention below.]

One name does have an obvious derivation: Steeplechase Way. That's because in 1860 Farndon Field saw the first running of the National Hunt Chase Challenge Cup, a race that is still run each year as part of the Cheltenham Festival.

No doubt the ditch in my last photo is the result of drainage work carried out before the new houses were built, but I like to imagine that it predates them and is where a Victorian gentleman took a purler while leading the race.