Back in October, on one of those unseasonably warm and humid days we had towards the end of fall, I was on the 129 bus heading west to Victoria Avenue when I noticed three odd streets on the south side of Côte Ste. Catherine. Unusually for streets in Côte des Neiges, which tend to be very wide, they appeared to consist of nothing more than a simple pathway surrounded by greenery.
Later, I returned to investigate and discovered that the streets I had seen were Beaminster Place, Bradford Place and Campden Place, a trio of block-long passages tucked behind Côte-Sainte-Catherine metro. Lined by relatively modern four-plexes, they were open only to pedestrians, with a single narrow strip of pavement running between lush front yards. Residents parked their cars in the exceptionally wide laneways that ran between the streets.
In Côte des Neiges, a patchwork of different neighbourhoods built at different times throughout the twentieth century, I’ve come to expect urban planning oddities. But these three “places” were unlike anything I’d seen in Montreal before. According to the city’s property records, the houses along Beaminster, Bradford and Campden were all built between 1936 and 1951. Architecturally, they’re pretty much indistinguishable from any of the 1930s- and 40s-era houses in the west end; it’s their setting that makes them so unique.
I’m not savvy enough to find out who built these three streets and, more importantly, why they were built with such a distinct configuration. Are these the failed remnants of a grandiose plan to build Côte des Neiges as a vast Garden City? Or are they simply the whim of a single property developer who wanted his parcel of land to stand out from the rest? I’m turning to you: do you know anything about Beaminster, Bradford and Campden Places?
Click here to see more photos of the three “places.”
UPDATE: Thanks to one of our regular readers, Martin Bérubé, I now have the answer to my question. Here’s the City of Montreal’s own background on the three streets in Côte des Neiges:
Place Beaminster : Cette voie fait partie d’un ensemble réalisé par la Compagnie Terrace Construction en 1936. Le projet résidentiel prévoie alors la construction d’un ensemble de quarante-huit duplex auquel les promoteurs donnent le nom de «Cotswold Village». Ce nom et celui des voies prévues (Campden, Bradford) reprennent les mêmes dénominations que celles d’un village d’Angleterre; ils identifient également des villes du Gloucestershire et du Yorkshire anglais.
Beaminster Place: This street forms part of a subdivision built in 1936 by the Terrace Construction Company. This residential project, named Cotswold Village by the developers, included the construction of forty-eight duplexes. Beaminster and its neighbouring streets, Campden and Bradford, were named after a village in England and cities in Gloucestershire and Yorkshire.
6 comments
for more of such streets look to westmount (côte-des-neiges and The Boulevard) and the neighbourhood around avenue du musée, north of sherbrooke.
The city of Montreal is offering on their website portal a place to check out names of streets, parks and other object of interests. Including Beanminster and his gang :)
http://ville.montreal.qc.ca/portal/page?_pageid=1560,11241558&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL
I love this little street. I used to cut through there every day to the metro. It nice to read a little history about the area.
The red fence surrounding one of the properties on Beaminster Place near Cote St Catherine was built in 1980 or 1981. For years, it contained a very loud dog called Caesar. In the top picture you will notice some red on the right. This red is that fence.
The area is noiceably more leafy than it was in the 1980s, almost as if they decided to stop trimming the bushes and trees… Perhaps it’s simply that I was used to the greenery then and I am not now.
You will notice that each of the three places have their own distinctive duplex style and that the two attached duplexes face each other in four sets between Dupuis and Cote St Catherine. The first three sets out from Dupuis are always identical but the last set always is older and fancier than the others.
I lived on Bradford Place for a couple of years in the late ’80s. I loved it there! I had a huge 4-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a nice 1950s-style 4-plex. These little streets are tucked right behind Cote-Ste-Catherine metro, but once you step onto one of these little pedestrian streets it’s like you leave all the noise and bustle behind. Thanks for digging up the history on this charming little neighborhood.
Interesting article which I’ve just found after discovering these three streets from a ride on the 129 yesterday. I would guess that the ‘Campden’ and ‘Bradford’ refer to the English Cotswold market towns of Chipping Campden (Gloucestershire) and Bradford-on-Avon (Wiltshire) which are similar in size and character to Beaminster, Dorset, rather than the much larger city of Bradford in Yorkshire.