Alice Street

Laid out around the middle of the nineteenth century, Alice Street, off the Octagon, would appear to have been named after the third child (and second daughter) born to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

Princess Alice Maud Mary was born on 25 April 1843, nearly eighteen months after her brother, the new heir to the throne, Prince Albert Edward (Bertie). Alice in turn was engaged to be married some seventeen years later and on 1st July 1862 she married Prince Louis of Hesse, in private, in the dining room of the Queen’s Isle of Wight residence, Osborne House.

A mother herself the following year, Alice and Louis went on to have seven children all but one of whom were affected by an epidemic of diphtheria that swept through the palace in 1878. She appears to have contracted the disease soon after the death of her baby daughter, May, when she gave her only surviving son, Ernest, who was gravely sick, a comforting kiss.

Alice’s daughter Tsarine Alexandra Fedorovna (‘Alix’) sixteen years later married Nicholas II Alexandrovich Romanov, who two years later became the Tsar of all Russia.