Ventry Close is near Saint Marks Road, in the north of Salisbury.
‘Ventry’ is a surname. According to the ancestry.com website[1], it is ‘possibly an Americanized spelling of Italian Ventre’, meaning belly or stomach. However, it seems to be a very rare surname – just scanning through Google it seems to be more common in the USA than it is here.
The other possibility, both for the derivation of Ventry Close, and with due respect to ancestry.com, for the derivation of the surname is the village of Ventry. Ventry is on the Dingle peninsula of County Kerry in the Republic of Ireland.
Given that both Dingle and Kerry are also surnames, it seems to me that the village of Ventry could be a fairly likely derivation of the surname. For Ventry Close, this seems more of a stretch since I don’t know of any other roads in Salisbury named after places in Ireland, so perhaps there was somebody called Ventry.
In the back of my mind, I have a feeling there’s some connection with the Grange Hotel, which used to be on or near the site, but I may have imagined it!
Update: My girlfriend has pointed out that the Chapel Nightclub has a Vestry Room. The connection that I thought I remembered with the Grange (which was also really a nightclub) was more likely to be a confusion with the Chapel’s Vestry.
Footnotes
- http://www.ancestry.com/facts/Ventry-name-meaning.ashx [↩]