The name is taken from an old local field name and it appears on early tithe maps of the area. It is thought that the original “shute” may have been a spring or water course of some description that ran at the back of the land now covered by the houses that stand on the south side of the street and which were built around 1959-60.
The area a number of Shutes dotted around Devon and many of them evidently “lie in or near an angle of a parish boundary” (Devon Place Name Society), meanwhile elsewhere in the country the name is explained as being derived from the Old English – sceat – “perhaps in the sense park” (Eilert Ekwall).
The Oxford English dictionary meanwhile gives us various definitions of shute including; a “channel or open trough for conveying water” and “a watering place where the women fill their pitchers from the “shute”,” and also “a small stream of water running from a shute or channel.”
