Word on the street: Mayfair Place in New Plymouth

Monopoly players will recognise the name Mayfair as the most expensive property on the standard London board.

This version of the game was first produced in 1935 and nearly ninety years later Mayfair retains its reputation for wealth and glamour.

The well-heeled area of the West End is home to expensive properties, corporate headquarters, foreign embassies and upmarket shops.

In contrast, New Plymouth’s Mayfair Place in Westown is, like most streets in the city developed in the 1960s, a mixture of comfortable three-bedroom homes sitting alongside a few more contemporary builds.

One property on the street stands alone as a reminder of the early days of European settlement in Westown.

The cottage is thought to have been built around 1899 for then-landowner Richard Langman Junior.

However, it is the Mantle family who are most closely associated with the house and the surrounding area.

William Mantle moved to Taranaki with his family in the early 1900s and became well-known for turning wild horses into racehorses.

In about 1910 the family moved to New Plymouth and bought Langman’s cottage on what was then Holsworthy Rd (later renamed Clawton St).

Behind the cottage were stables and accommodation for jockeys.

After William died in 1949, his son Paul moved into the house and later bought a neighbouring property from Arthur and Florence Goudie.

In the 1960s Paul decided to survey off both blocks of land into the street we see today.

The street was subdivided in two stages: the first half of the road leading from Clawton St was surveyed in 1966 and the next section, to the end of the cul-de-sac, in 1969.

As was common at the time, the street name is simply another one chosen from the council’s list of streets in England’s Plymouth. Mayfair Cres in Plymouth is a quiet residential street full of pleasant semi-detached houses.

Contributed by the Taranaki Research Centre I Te Pua Wānanga o Taranaki at Puke Ariki. Find this and hundreds of other street histories on NPDC’s Puke Ariki website: https://terangiaoaonunui.pukeariki.com/story-collections/word-on-the-street