Marvin Rees has rejected a call to name a new road in South Bristol after the last surviving Dambuster who died at his Bristol care home last week – but says another could be with the family’s blessing. The Labour city mayor last month vetoed plans by the council’s own street-naming team to christen a 70-home Curo housing association development Navy Cut Road, after a cigarette brand manufactured at the site’s former Imperial Group tobacco factory.
Instead he announced that the street would be named in honour of Bristol’s first female lord mayor Florence Brown, a decision criticised by Bishopsworth ward Tory Cllr Richard Eddy who said it was “outrageous, partisan and imposed on local people by the mayor’s office”. The late Cllr Brown, who held the civic post in 1963/64, was a long-serving Labour councillor who previously worked as a tobacco stripper and trade union rep at the Wills tobacco factory in Bedminster.
Cllr Eddy has now called on Mr Rees to think again and name the new road after World War Two Dambuster air raid member George “Johnny” Johnson, of Westbury on Trym, who has died aged 101. But the mayor's office says the decision has already been made, although the heroic airman could be immortalised in another street name if the family agree.
