Gibbon Lane/Street

Time was when Gibbons Field was, according to the Victorian historian Henry Whitfeld, "a favourite evening resort". In the early years of the nineteenth century the field stood with a narrow line of houses along its western boundary (later replaced by the Library and Museum) a tanner's yard on its north western corner and the as yet undeveloped Regent Street across its southern extremity.

In the seventeenth century it was even more isolated and, again according to Whitfeld, "judging from the skeletons unearthed, the scene of heavy fighting in the siege". Heavily built up since the middle of the nineteenth century Gibbon Street and Gibbon Lane help us identify the location of the field. Gibbon, not surprisingly, was the name of a one-time owner of the field who worked as a miller in the mills that stood where Sherwell Church and the Reservoir now are.