Gorringe Road is in Salisbury – it’s one of the roads which runs from Wilton Road down towards the railway line.
I’ve not been able to work out any suggestion as to why it’s called Gorringe Road.
I’m in good company. The Wiltshire Community History website has the following:
As to why the name of Gorringe was eventually chosen for the road – other than the propinquity of Gorringe Place – is again an open question. Peter Hart’s ‘Salisbury and Wilton street names’ mentions that Gorringe Place was so named by 1867, citing Kelly’s Directory, but I have not found the reference in the Directory, and can offer no explanation for the naming of the property. [1]
The Community History page does say that the road was originally Brown’s Lane, and suggests that it may have been renamed to avoid confusion with Brown Street, in the centre of Salisbury.
According to Wikipedia, Gorringe “is a rare English surname derived from the area of Gorring in Sussex and has German connection.”.
Does anything rhyme with orange?
I’m not sure how ‘Gorringe’ is typically pronounced, but it could be that it is one of the rare words that rhyme with ‘orange’.
The Oxford Dictionaries website says that:
Orange has almost no perfect rhymes. The only word in the 20-volume historical Oxford English Dictionary that rhymes with orange is sporange, a very rare alternative form of sporangium (a botanical term for a part of a fern or similar plant).[2]
The rapper Eminem is quoted as saying:
People say that the word orange doesn’t rhyme with anything … I can think of a lot of things that rhyme with orange,” said Eminem, seated behind a mixing board at his private recording studio, before effortlessly conjuring an on the spot rap about putting an “orange, four-inch, door hinge in storage” and having “porridge with Geo-rge.[3]
The most prominent ‘Gorringe’ I could find was Lieutenant General Sir George Frederick Gorringe who was a Boer and First World War General. His troops called him ‘Bloody Orange’ presumably as rhyming slang and as a play on ‘blood orange’[4].
Image from Amazon
Footnotes
- Wiltshire Council – Wiltshire Community History Get Wiltshire History Question Information [↩]
- Are there any words that rhyme with orange? – Oxford Dictionaries Online [↩]
- Eminem finds five words that rhyme with ‘orange’ on ’60 Minutes’ – latimes.com [↩]
- Who’s Who in World War One By J. Bourne, p108 Link: ↩]