Dean Cross

There are quite a few Deans around plymouth, several of them in Plymstock. Popular as a surname and a place name, there were well-known Deans running the Plymstock Post Office in the late nineteenth century but they were ante-dated by the Dean School, the first National school in Plymsock, which was built in 1827. Long since demolished it stood on the site now occupied by the western end of the Plymstock Broadway... off Dean Hil and just down from Dean Cross.

Most commonly the word derives from a term indicating the leader of a group, originally of ten other persons, and typically used in colleges and ecclesiastical circles. As a place name however the word generally comes to us from dean or dene, meaning a vale or valley, as in Coombe Dean and Taunton Dean. While the vale that the Broadway sits in is perhaps not as marked as some others this is most probably where the adjacent deans have come from.

EH 12 October 1996