A name associated with the legendary Vale of Avalon

Somerset Street is a name associated with the legendary Vale of Avalon. It is one of the streets named in 1946 by a three-man committee comprising Ald. Joseph Henry Rodgers Jr., Ald. Henry Palmer and historian R. Thomas Orr. It is part of the Avalon subdivision that was laid out for wartime houses for soldiers returning after the Second World War. Streets are named after the last two: Palmer Square and Orr Street

In their naming of streets in Stratford, this trio chose names associated with the legendary Vale of Avalon, long established as the historic resting place of the first known records of early Christianity.

Palmer talked of the naming this way: “The Vale of Avalon is in Somerset in England, and it was in the marshy section of the Vale that early Christians, who set out to spread the Gospel, left their ‘records.’ Somerset Street will be named after the English county........

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