CHARLOTTE Place, Southampton, today is a busy traffic junction between Dorset Street and East Park Terrace, the original association of its name with royalty now forgotten.

It recalls both Queen Charlotte (1744-1818), the consort of George III, and Princess Charlotte, the only child of the latter’s eldest son, the Prince Regent, afterwards George IV.

The princess married Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg and died in childbirth in 1817 aged just 21.

However, the houses erected soon afterwards, as part of the then rapid expansion of Southampton north and east of the old walled town, did not match their illustrious name.

Jerry built with an inadequate water supply and sanitation, overcrowded with poor tenants, Charlotte Place was a hotbed of the cholera epidemic of 1849, which claimed 240 lives.

These deaths led to a public inquiry, which resulted in the borough council taking powers as a local board of health – a sad landmark in the slow progress of public health in the Victorian town.

While Charlotte Place probably derived from the princess, the older Charlotte Street, a turning off Briton Street, now vanished under Queen’s Way, may have been named in compliment to George III’s queen, or perhaps her eldest daughter, Charlotte, Princess Royal (1766-1828), if not for both.

Queen Charlotte and some of her other daughters accompanied George III in 1789 on one of his several visits to Southampton, then a fashionable resort.

Hanover Buildings, off Above Bar, Brunswick Place, north of East Park and Brunswick Square, south of Bernard Street, all date from the late 18th century and exemplify the connections between the ruling houses of Hanover and Brunswick and the British crown in the days of the first four Georges (1714-1830).

Brunswick Place still retains something of its earlier elegance, although its surviving houses have become city centre offices, no longer fashionable residences on the outskirts of the town. The five now officially “listed” seem to date from the middle of the 19th century but Brunswick Place itself was laid out on land leased for 99 years by a charity in 1794.

Development may have begun in 1795, the year of the ill-fated marriage between Caroline of Brunswick and her cousin the Prince of Wales, the late George IV. Prior to succeeding to the throne in 1820 he was Prince Regent from 1811, during his father’s illness.

He gave the name “Regency” to a period of English history and an elegant style of architecture.

The title Regent’s Park, with its associations of London elegance, was adopted for part of the Shirley/ Millbrook area where fashionable “villas” were built in the 1840s.

Earlier the name of Regent Street had been given to the former Windmill Lane, off Above Bar. Another Regent Street in Shirley was restyled Redcar Street in 1903 to end duplication after its incorporation into the borough in 1895, but it still has its echo in the adjoining Regent’s Grove.