Across the length and breadth of Britain you’ll find plenty of house names and street names like Beaumont, Belmont, Beauchamp, Belle Vue. Mount Pleasant and Montpelier, and certainly Plymouth has examples of them all, however you won’t find too many Lovely Views, Nice Hills or Good Fields, even though that’s exactly what they mean.
Somehow such superlatives sound better in another language and thus it is that at Glenholt we get a Spanish version of what we already have many French examples of; Buena Vista – literally, “good view”.
In keeping with this spirit of modernity it is not Buena Vista Street or Road, but Buena Vista Drive. Before the war there was only one “Drive” in Plymouth, now there are more than 100. Along with Walk, Close and Gardens it now makes for one of the more common street name elements and whereas before the war there were barely two dozen Drives, Walks, Closes and Gardens, they now appear in around a third (about a thousand) of all Plymouth street names.
