To most of us these days, we would struggle if someone asked us to take them to Burnside Road. I know I paused for a moment when I read about Burnside Road and I just couldn’t place it.
The reason for this goes back to the renaming of Burnside Road in 1959. Burnside Road had been a troublesome future project for the council during the early 1950’s. Nothing much more than a dirt trail that, at times, actually passed through farm land, something had to be done! It was after all the main road into Christchurch from the airport and it was beginning to be a little embarrassing!
So Memorial Avenue was born. Opened on the 26th November 1959, the new widened and developed road was in memorial to all the Air Service personnel that died in World War II. Seeing that they would have been trained at the airfields of Christchurch, it was fitting that the main road from there would always be in their memory.
