Gladstone was a particularly awful person even by the standards of his own time and was a corrupt politician to boot.
From Wikipedia:
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Gladstone's attitude towards slavery was highly shaped by his father, Sir John Gladstone, one of the largest slave owners in the British Empire. Both father and son opposed emancipation, saying the slaves first had to have better morals. They also opposed the international slave trade (which lowered the value of the slaves the father already owned).... In 1834, when slavery was abolished across the British Empire, the owners were paid full value for the slaves. Gladstone helped his father obtain £106,769 in official reimbursement by the government for the 2,508 slaves he owned across nine plantations in the Caribbean.
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He was virulently anti-semitic and anti-Catholic, which makes it especially inappropriate for his name to be associated with the street given its location. Of Turkish people he said they "were, upon the whole, from the black day when they first entered Europe, the one great anti-human specimen of humanity".
I for one won't mind removing his name from a street in our city and replacing it with Alex Trebek's name. If you want to cry about some dead crooked British aristocrat's feelings, that's more than a little weird but you do you, I guess.
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