Halkett Street in St Helier will be refurbished, and renamed.

The parish Roads Committee has voted unanimously in favour of improvement works.

Halkett Street is the pedestrianised road that runs from Beresford Street - past McDonalds -  to Queen Street.

It will be getting a completely new surface using local and imported stone.

The Town Hall says there will also be new lighting, planting and seating and a 'water station'.

Work is due to start in January, if the parish's request for some co-funding from the government's Infrastructure department is agreed.

The road will become 'Rue Ivy Forster, to commemorate Jersey's first female States Member, and to end confusion with nearby Halkett Place.

That will be put to a Parish Assembly on 30 August for final approval.

“I am pleased that the (Roads) Committee has supported the next step in these proposals to refurbish an area of town that has been the source of lots of complaints. I am hopeful that the government will make good its agreement to provide financial support to urban regeneration schemes of this sort.” - Simon Crowcroft, Constable of St Helier.

Who was Ivy Forster?*

Ivy Forster was elected as a Deputy for St. Helier in 1948.

She had helped escaped Russian slave workers who had been brought to the island by the Nazis during WWII.

For almost two years, Ivy had sheltered Russian prisoner-of-war, Geigori Koslov, in her attic. She was arrested in May 1944, but managed to avoid deportation due to illness, and was permitted to serve her sentence here.

After Jersey’s liberation, Ivy became an after-dinner speaker, giving talks on her experiences during the war, and was encouraged by the Bailiff to stand for election.

After being elected as Jersey’s first female politician in 1948, Ivy went on to become the first woman to top the poll when she was re-elected in 1951 but her political career came to an end when she lost her seat in 1954.

Ivy died at the age of 90 in June 1997 and was posthumously named in 2010 as one of 29 “British Heroes of the Holocaust” by the then UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown.

*From the States Assembly website.