THERE is no announcement to say you have entered Little London, nor any to indicate you have left. The only street sign is attached to a very unimposing 200 yard stretch that runs off The Tything by the Royal Grammar School to Tennis Walk.

If you are looking for a King’s Road or a Kensington High Street to will be sadly disappointed. Yet Little London covers the best part of a square mile of the city.

So how come the name? The best answer I could find goes back several centuries, long before the railways arrived and when England was a wide open space and far less populous.

In those days, a bit like the American West of the 1800s, if you wanted to move livestock anywhere, you drove it. To get your cattle to market you accompanied the beasts, either on foot or on horseback, until they were at their destination. A whole Wild West film industry later grew up around the gun slinging goings-on in American cow towns such as Abilene and Dodge City, where lawmen like Wild Bill Hickok and Wyatt Earp made their reputations.

Understandably it was not quite like that in England, but the cattle drives did have their impact. As they crossed the country bound for wherever, they would have stopping places for drovers and their beasts to rest and it appears that some towns designated areas.

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At Worcester, cattle bound for the markets in London would gather in open countryside just north of the city and this became known as Little London. In those days it was well outside the city walls and so the name has nothing to do with Soho or Pimlico. As I said, that is the best I can offer, if you have an alternative please shout.

There are a couple of stories attached to Little London as the open land was gradually sucked into an expanding Worcester. The first development there was a chapel of ease, called St George’s or Claines St George’s. This was built in 1848 at the request of the minister of Claines who felt the area, “being in the vicinity of a large city”, was being “attacked by dissent of every kind”. The chapel cost £3,500 to build and lasted until 1894 when it was demolished and replaced by a new St George’s church, described as being “spectacularly placed at the end of a long green”.

Apart from the new church, most of the rest of St George’s Square was given over to housing plots, although halfway down the south side an old open cowshed remained. This was converted into the first St George’s school after the wonderfully named curate, the Rev I Bradshaw Tyrwhitt, complained too many of his parishioners’ children were being coaxed into attending the Roman Catholic school in Sansome Walk, where they were being “proselytised by bribing and other means”. So now you know.