Ensbury Park

Ensbury Park is a mainly residential suburb of Bournemouth, Dorset, UK. It lies within the ward district of Northbourne and Redhill.Initial developmentEnsbury Park takes its name from the Saxon hamlet of Ensbury, a separate area altogether which lay a mile or so to the north. This hamlet, just east of Kinson, has now been more or less subsumed into the postwar suburb of Northbourne but in the first half of the twentieth century, Ensbury Manor and Ensbury Farm constituted the borders of what later became the Ensbury Park district. In the 1920's Ensbury Park boasted a racecourse, which also served as an aerodrome. For several years it was known as “Bournemouth Aerodrome” and was the venue for Air Race Meetings, though a series of fatal crashes at the Whitsun meet in 1927 led to its decline and eventual sale for housing development. Much of the land associated with Ensbury Farm was sold off for housebuilding in the 1930s: the vending agents were A. J. Abbott & Sons, who coined the name 'Ensbury Park' for their new development.The district was incorporated into the County Borough of Bournemouth in 1931, having theretofore been part of the Poole Rural District. The main road through the area at that time was Columbia Road which remains the principal route through the district, also nowadays connecting the Boundary Lane one-way system to Kinson Road.Slade's Farm and Slade's Farm RoadA renewed spate of housebuilding took place in the 1970s when Bournemouth Borough Council purchased Slade's Farm, south of Columbia Road, following an increased demand for low-cost housing in the borough. This was one of the last areas of agricultural land within the Bournemouth boundary. The farm dated back to about 1850 and was originally known as Talbot Farm, taking its name from Talbot Village, the model settlement further east; Slade was a later tenant. There had been some modernization of the farm over the years - in 1945 the trustees of the Talbot estate, who owned the freehold, applied for planning permission for a 'milk cooling shed' there - but by the 1960s the entire site had fallen out of use.