Sitting on the western edge of Derby’s inner city, New Zealand is a residential suburb in Derbyshire, England. Its boundaries are drawn by several well-known roads: Uttoxeter Old Road, Ashbourne Road, Friargate, and the A38/Kingsway corridor, with smaller streets including Lyttleton Street, Cheviot Street, and Slack Lane completing the perimeter. The suburb borders Mackworth Estate, Rowditch, and The West End, and includes within its boundaries an area known as the Morley Estate.
An Unusual Name with a Historical Origin
The suburb takes its name from a farm that once belonged to the Chandos-Pole family and occupied this part of Derby. The farm itself was named to mark the Treaty of Waitangi of 1840, the agreement that established British governance in New Zealand. That act of commemoration, made by a Derbyshire landowning family, gave the suburb its unlikely Pacific name – one that has survived long after the farm was built over by housing.
Local Facilities and Community Life
The New Zealand Area Centre, known as the Lonny Wilsoncroft Centre, sits on Campion Street and Stepping Lane and functions as a community hub for the area. Families with young children are served by Ashgate School, a primary school whose main vehicular entrance is on Frederick Street, with pedestrian access from Ashbourne Road, and by Ashgate Nursery on the corner of Stepping Lane, Ashbourne Road, and Fowler Street. Places of worship include Saint Barnabas Church of England on Bass Street and Radbourne Street, Derby Christadelphians on Bass Street, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints on Radbourne Street. Public green space is available at recreation grounds on Handford Street and Cheviot Street.
Notable People Connected to New Zealand
The suburb has produced several figures of note. Frank Conroy was born at 33 Heyworth Street on 14 October 1890 and went on to become a Hollywood actor before his death in Paramus, New Jersey in 1964. Patricia Greene MBE, the actress who has played Jill Archer in BBC Radio’s The Archers since 1957, grew up on Campion Street and attended Ashgate Infants School. Richard Keene, a photographer who was a founding member of both the Derby Photographic Society in 1884 and the Photographic Convention of the United Kingdom in 1886, was living at 100 Radbourne Street in 1891. Dennis Tunnicliffe, now Lord Tunnicliffe and a Labour peer raised to the title Baron Tunnicliffe of Bracknell in 2004, grew up on Cheviot Street on the Morley Estate.