Help wanted with the history of Broadley Street

Maude Alice Parker, my great-grandmother, lived in Earl Street at the time of the 1891 census. Today the street has been renamed Broadley Street. I visited there on my recent trip to England, although I doubt it resembles the old Earl Street much these days. A wide, attractive road with good pavements now runs where, probably, a couple of narrow lanes wove before.

If anyone can contribute information about when and why Earl Street became Broadley Street, it would be of great help to me. At this point, I only have suppositions to go on. The following are some thoughts currently brewing in my mind:

Maude and her family lived in a house that is not numbered in the census. I assume this means the houses didn't have a proper numbering system. It is unlikely, therefore, that the family occupied rooms in a large boarding establishment. More likely, they lived in a cottage in a row

On a more whimsical note, the new name "Broadley Street" calls to mind something I read in a wonderful Phil Rickman novel entitled Curfew

. The novel features a gentleman who is investing money into the resuscitation of a depressed town in Herefordshire based on what he knows about ley lines. ley lines are generally regarded as pseudoscience because of the tendency of New Age enthusiasts to equate them with pathways of spiritual power. Yet when Alfred Watkins first coined the phrase in 1921, he was thinking more in terms of ancient trackways for navigation in a densely forested landscape. What is especially interesting is that Watkins coined the term "ley" because the first line he discerned passed through several towns whose names contained the syllable "ley", suggesting that the towns were named thus because they "lay" on the ancient trackways.

So, I'm posing the question: does the name Broadley Street have deep, prehistoric roots? Was there once a marker, such as a standing stone or spring, to guide the footsteps of Britain's early inhabitants? Or is the name simply derived from a certain mr Broadley who happened to live nearby? I rather like the idea that the street in which my great-grandmother came of age was an ancient trackway, but if she only ever knew it as Earl Street, that's okay too.