Hi Andrew,
If you look at the census for 1871 (I think, this is off the top of my
head and it is midnight! Might have been 1881.) and go street by street,
you can find many, many "back of" addresses. Indeed, it seems that most
of the streets had a row of cottages behind them. My suspicion is that
Tredegar was much like the "back-to-back" parts of cities like
Birmingham at that time. The census shows that these were houses with
multiple families lodging in many of them and they probably had a long,
narrow courtyard like an alleyway between the two rows of properties.
The "back of" rows would not usually have had direct access to the
street, but would have had to go down the court to the end of the row of
properties opening onto the street and then out to the front. Most of
them will have gone with "improvement" programmes, (probably in the
1950s and 60s) reducing the density of the occupation.
As a result, "back of Queen Street" would have been exactly that, the
row of dwellings behind Queen Street. Woodview Place might well be
findable by trawling through the census too. What I do is have a part
screen window showing a map from the Old Maps site open next to my
census page from LDS (or your searching site of choice), then go house
to house, following the census route to try to work out where some
vanished streets used to be. It isn't always conclusive. I'm still
hunting for 'Trecelyn' in what is now Newbridge: it was a street name
with more than a hundred houses on it in 1890 (from when I have a death
cert)...and has totally vanished by 1901 and on the earliest map I can
find. However, usually, you can work it out if you don't mind going a
bit cross-eyed peering at old maps! At the very least, you can pick up
nearby streets which do still exist and that can help to narrow down the
area. By following the census route, you can see where the existing bits
fit into the old street plan and it starts to create a picture of how it
used to be.
Good hunting!
Sian
At 00:02 26/12/2013, Sian Mackey wrote:
I'm still hunting for 'Trecelyn' in what is now
Newbridge: it was
a street name
with more than a hundred houses on it in 1890 (from when I have a death
cert)...and has totally vanished by 1901 and on the earliest map I can
find.
That's an interesting one because Trecelyn is the Welsh name for Newbridge.
Hugh