Mitchell Road, Salisbury

Mitchell Road is on the Churchfields Industrial Estate, which is to the West of the centre of Salisbury.

Most of the roads on the Churchfields estate are named after scientists or enigineers, of varying levels of fame (e.g. Smeaton Road, Watt Road and Telford Road).

I’m not entirely sure who Mitchell Road is named after. There are perhaps four or five possibilities.

• Wesley Clair Mitchell, an economist
• Edgar Mitchell, the astronaut
• Maria Mitchell, the astronomer and scientist
• Alexander Mitchell, the engineer and astronomer
• somebody else!

Wesley Clair Mitchell

Wesley Clair Mitchell was an economist who lived from 1874 until 1948.

He is chiefly known for his work on business cycles and for his economic research.

He seems to me to be too obscure to have had Mitchell Road named after him, paricularly in comparison to other economists that might have been chosen such as Keynes, or Adam Smith, or even Karl Marx.

Edgar Mitchell

Edgar Mitchell is a scientist and astronaut. He was on the Apollo 14 mission to the moon in 1971, and he was the sixth man to walk on the moon ¹.

Edgar Mitchell, too, seems too obscure to have had Mitchell Road named after him. You would probably expect to see roads named for the other ‘moonwalkers’ as well as Mitchell, if he was the inspiration for the road name.

The only caveat to that might be that the building of Mitchell Road could have been at about the same time as Apollo 14, but, still, you would expect to see Edgar Mitchell’s colleagues on the mission (Alan Shepard and Stuart Roosa ²) similarly honoured.

Maria Mitchell

Maria Mitchell was a 19th century American astronomer who was the first person to find a ‘telescopic comet’ – a comet visible through a telescope, but not with the naked eye ³

Again, I think she is not the derivation of the name of Mitchell Road – there are more famous astronomers.

Alexander Mitchell

Alexander Mitchell was an astronomer and an engineer.

In 1828 he invented the “Mitchell Screw Pile and Mooring”, which allowed for the construction of lighthouses in areas where they could not have been constructed before.

The screw pile was used in the construction of:

• the Maplin Sands lighthouse
• the Portland breakwater
• the Madras pier
• the Belfast Lough lighthouse

He was elected an associate of the Institute of Civil Engineers in 1837, and was awarded the Telford medal in 1848.

I think there is a good chance that Alexander Mitchell was the man whom Mitchell Road is named after.

Mitchell Road – named after somebody else?

Of the above I think only Alexander Mitchell is the only likely candidate for the derivation of Mitchell Road’s name. He was British – in that he was an Irishman at a time when the Republic was still part of Britain, and he honoured in Britain.

He is not as well known as Watt, Telford and Newton, but he is perhaps no less well known than the other engineer and lighthouse builder John Smeaton, after whom Smeaton Road seems to be named.

It could however be that Mitchell Road is named after some other scientist or engineer, or somebody unconnected with these fields – I don’t know.

Staying overnight in Salisbury?

For accommodation, see the Hotels in Salisbury page.

Footnotes

1. Ed Mitchell [↩]
2. Apollo 14 – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [↩]
3. Maria Mitchell – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [↩]