Tony Warren's Prince Florizel picture as imagined in The Road to Coronation Street
Florizel Street was original name of Coronation Street in the scripts written by creator Tony Warren in the autumn of 1960.
The name came from a picture Warren owned of Prince Florizel hacking his way through to forest to reach Sleeping Beauty in the fairy tale of the same name (though a character of the same name has appeared in other works such as Robert Louis Stevenson's New Arabian Nights and Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale).
The name appeared on the famous memo that Warren wrote which described his idea of what the new serial was about:
- "A fascinating freemasonary, a volume of unwritten rules. These are the driving forces behind life in the working class street in the north of England. The purpose of Florizel Street is to examine a community of this nature, and to entertain".
However few people, if any, at Granada Television liked the name of the serial. There are three differing accounts as to why the name was changed. The most famous account, told by Warren himself, was that Agnes the tea lady at the studios said that to her it sounded like a brand of disinfectant. The second, as detailed in writer and producer H.V. Kershaw's 1981 autobiography The Street Where I Live is that Granada joint-founder Cecil Bernstein asked for the change while the third is given by the programme's second producer Derek Granger who said that William Roache had difficulty remembering how to pronounce the name in the way that Warren intended when he wrote his scripts.
Whatever the truth of the story, Warren left the decision to find an alternative title to executive producer Harry Elton and Coronation Street 's first producer Harry "Stuart" Latham who worked with Kershaw to devise an acceptable name.
As Kershaw went on to relate in his autobiography the three discussed the matter over a bottle of whisky late one night in the studio offices. Working from the premise that the fictional street would have been built near the end of the Nineteenth Century and the beginning of the next, two events seemed to lead to the name of the programme: Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee of 1897 and Edward VII's Coronation of 1902. This simple matter seems to have caused several hours of alcoholic debate until late into the night Latham called for a vote and the three men went home. The next morning Kershaw was astounded to read a memo written by Latham and already distributed round the building which announced the serial's production title as Coronation Street as both he and Elton had a faint memory of voting for Jubilee Street.