How are road names allocated?

[roadtester]

My house is built on what were the grounds of the former RAF hospital in Ely (which survives in shrunken form as an NHS facility).

The streets are based on surnames. Purely by chance, I was chatting to someone at a party in Cambridge who asked me where I lived. I explained where it was with reference to the RAF hospital and he told me that one of the new streets of houses had been named after his late father who had been an RAF doctor and CO of the hospital before dying quite young while still serving. I'm guessing the other roads are similarly named.

[Big Nick]

One thing that can cause confusion is where a road is named after the aristocracy. Oxford Street in London is perhaps the most famous (named after the Earl of Oxford; the fact it heads towards the city of Oxford is coincidental) but there are plenty of others. Whereas Trentham Street and Stafford Street in Helmsdale are clearly named after people what about Bristol Road in Birmingham?

Tuxford in Nottinghamshire is a fine example of this. It is 140 miles from Newcastle yet has a Newcastle Street and the main road, which is also the old A1, is Eldon Street. The link to Newcastle goes back to the 1660s when the then Dukes of Newcastle were the local MPs and owned land in the area.

[KeithW]

My house is built on what were the grounds of the former RAF hospital in Ely (which survives in shrunken form as an NHS facility).

The streets are based on surnames. Purely by chance, I was chatting to someone at a party in Cambridge who asked me where I lived. I explained where it was with reference to the RAF hospital and he told me that one of the new streets of houses had been named after his late father who had been an RAF doctor and CO of the hospital before dying quite young while still serving. I'm guessing the other roads are similarly named.

I can provide another example. Some of the 1930's housing in Edgware North London was built on the site of the old Stag Lane Aerodrome which was the home of the de Havilland aircraft company before it moved to Hatfield in the early 1930's.

Many street names were based on surnames of early aviators. I lived on Reynolds Drive named after Captain Herbert Ramsay Playford Reynolds RFC nearby were Mollison Way, Cobham Close and of course De Havilland Road

[roadtester]

My house is built on what were the grounds of the former RAF hospital in Ely (which survives in shrunken form as an NHS facility).

The streets are based on surnames. Purely by chance, I was chatting to someone at a party in Cambridge who asked me where I lived. I explained where it was with reference to the RAF hospital and he told me that one of the new streets of houses had been named after his late father who had been an RAF doctor and CO of the hospital before dying quite young while still serving. I'm guessing the other roads are similarly named.

I can provide another example. Some of the 1930's housing in Edgware North London was built on the site of the old Stag Lane Aerodrome which was the home of the de Havilland aircraft company before it moved to Hatfield in the early 1930's.

Many street names were based on surnames of early aviators. I lived on Reynolds Drive named after Captain Herbert Ramsay Playford Reynolds RFC nearby were Mollison Way, Cobham Close and of course De Havilland Road

It's nice to keep up those sorts of local connections. That said, I wonder how many people are really aware of those connections - I only discovered the link between the hospital and the street names in the my case of my house entirely by chance.

[Chris Bertram]

One thing that can cause confusion is where a road is named after the aristocracy. Oxford Street in London is perhaps the most famous (named after the Earl of Oxford; the fact it heads towards the city of Oxford is coincidental) but there are plenty of others. Whereas Trentham Street and Stafford Street in Helmsdale are clearly named after people what about Bristol Road in Birmingham?

Tuxford in Nottinghamshire is a fine example of this. It is 140 miles from Newcastle yet has a Newcastle Street and the main road, which is also the old A1, is Eldon Street. The link to Newcastle goes back to the 1660s when the then Dukes of Newcastle were the local MPs and owned land in the area.

Aristocratic connections - particulary where they owned land - explain quite a number of road and street names. Wherever "Grosvenor" crops up, look for a connection with the Duchy of Westminster, for example, and "Cavendish" hints at the Duchy of Devonshire being involved somewhere.

[Chris5156]

Cannon Street Road in London E1 has serious identity problems.

I see your Cannon Street Road and I raise you Street Lane.

[Chris Bertram]

Cannon Street Road in London E1 has serious identity problems.

I see your Cannon Street Road and I raise you Street Lane.

Street Lane? Pah! Have a Street Road for your collection.

[yen_powell]

Cannon Street Road in London E1 has serious identity problems.

I see your Cannon Street Road and I raise you Street Lane.

I fold.

Got a Pickpocket Lane and a Scurvy Lane near me and used to green lane on a Murthering Lane.

When I worked in the same department that covered naming and numbering my boss told the tale of a Bangladeshi councillor suggesting a newly built estate footpath to be named after a recently deceased friend. My boss said that the councillor couldn't understand the objections to the name Ali Way.

[vlad]

Cannon Street Road in London E1 has serious identity problems.

I see your Cannon Street Road and I raise you Street Lane.

Street Lane? Pah! Have a Street Road for your collection.

"Street" also happens to refer to a Roman Road (or a town in Somerset); if you've got a largely rural road with "street" in its name then it's probably Roman.

The burghers of Glastonbury missed a trick by not calling the A361 to the west Street Street.

[crb11]

My house is built on what were the grounds of the former RAF hospital in Ely (which survives in shrunken form as an NHS facility).

The streets are based on surnames. Purely by chance, I was chatting to someone at a party in Cambridge who asked me where I lived. I explained where it was with reference to the RAF hospital and he told me that one of the new streets of houses had been named after his late father who had been an RAF doctor and CO of the hospital before dying quite young while still serving. I'm guessing the other roads are similarly named.

I can provide another example. Some of the 1930's housing in Edgware North London was built on the site of the old Stag Lane Aerodrome which was the home of the de Havilland aircraft company before it moved to Hatfield in the early 1930's.

Many street names were based on surnames of early aviators. I lived on Reynolds Drive named after Captain Herbert Ramsay Playford Reynolds RFC nearby were Mollison Way, Cobham Close and of course De Havilland Road

There's another Mollison (Drive) and De Havilland Road plus other themed names (Alcock and Brown, Meteor, Brabazon...) on the Roundshaw estate west of Croydon, built on what was the original Croydon Aerodrome.

[Vierwielen]

My house is built on what were the grounds of the former RAF hospital in Ely (which survives in shrunken form as an NHS facility).

The streets are based on surnames. Purely by chance, I was chatting to someone at a party in Cambridge who asked me where I lived. I explained where it was with reference to the RAF hospital and he told me that one of the new streets of houses had been named after his late father who had been an RAF doctor and CO of the hospital before dying quite young while still serving. I'm guessing the other roads are similarly named.

I can provide another example. Some of the 1930's housing in Edgware North London was built on the site of the old Stag Lane Aerodrome which was the home of the de Havilland aircraft company before it moved to Hatfield in the early 1930's.

Many street names were based on surnames of early aviators. I lived on Reynolds Drive named after Captain Herbert Ramsay Playford Reynolds RFC nearby were Mollison Way, Cobham Close and of course De Havilland Road

It's nice to keep up those sorts of local connections. That said, I wonder how many people are really aware of those connections - I only discovered the link between the hospital and the street names in the my case of my house entirely by chance.

On 11 November 2018, the signs for Johnson Way in Church Crookham (Hampshire) were replaced with new signs stating that General Dudley Johnson was a recipient of the Victoria Cross.

[lefthandedspanner]

names should not be duplicated within the same authority.

That's not quite true.

Firstly, some Highway Authorities are so large geographically, that it's not a problem (such as Devon County Council or North Yorkshire County Council), and realistically there is no confusion between them. In these cases, it's within the same town.

Secondly, is that there's a historic element to it - names are no longer necessarily unique where local authority boundaries have moved. An extreme example is Victoria Road, Wolverhampton where there are two entirely different roads of that name less than half a mile and a single road apart. Historically of course, they were in different local authorities when named - one in Wolverhampton County Borough and the other in Wednesfield Urban District, although both were in Wolverhampton parish.

I know of at least one case where there's never been a local authority boundary.

John William Street, Heckmondwike
John William Street, Liversedge

They're less than half a mile apart, were both within Spenborough Urban District Council/Corporation, and are now both within Kirklees MBC. These days the only obvious way to tell them apart at a glance is by their postcodes (one is in WF15 and the other is in WF16); Liversedge and Heckmondwike run into each other, and just to make matters more complicated, Liversedge is a township comprised of six separate villages and has no centre to speak of.

Of course, the easiest common-sense way to avoid confusion would just be to add "Off Wakefield Road" or "Off Union Road" after the street address.

[Ambosc79]

It has long amused me that Burnley, Oldham and Rochdale all have a Yorkshire Street leading in the appropriate direction from their town centres, as though the Lancastrian residents really couldn't care less which particular bit of Yorkshire the streets were headed to.

Edited to add Burnley to the list (I only drove buses up that Yorkshire Street for a mere 14 years )

The village cross in Audlem, Cheshire, has three roads leading off it: Cheshire Street, Shropshire Street and Stafford Street. I've always liked Shrewsbury's "English Bridge" and "Welsh Bridge", too.

Market Drayton has a Shropshire Street too, even though it is actually in Shropshire If it was called Salop it could refer to Shrewsbury (like Salop Road in Oswestry), but Shropshire only ever means the county. But the strangest one round there is Ellesmere, where the main town centre street goes east-west, pointing to Oswestry and Wales one way, Whitchurch/Market Drayton and Staffordshire/Cheshire the other, and is called- Scotland Street.

Identical or near-identical road names in different parts of town were a bane of my life when I drove taxis, the rule about not duplicating in the same town doesn't extend to differing by one or two letters, or using the same prefix for a new road that exists for a cluster of roads the other side of town.

https://www.instantstreetview.com/@52.7 ... ,-4.79p,1z

This little cul de sac that went up about 2009 and was called Mayfield Close was a particular bugbear of mine, because of all the Mayfield-something roads here, about 4 or 5 miles away on the opposite side of town
https://www.instantstreetview.com/@52.7 ... .82p,1.13z

[trickstat]

Of course the London 'postal town' has multiple examples of repeated road names where the postcode is the only difference between the addresses. While people may use names of localities like Fulham, Kilburn, Whitechapel, Bermondsey, Vauxhall and Wimbledon the Royal Mail doesn't use them.

[Robert Kilcoyne]

Market Drayton has a Shropshire Street too, even though it is actually in Shropshire If it was called Salop it could refer to Shrewsbury (like Salop Road in Oswestry), but Shropshire only ever means the county. But the strangest one round there is Ellesmere, where the main town centre street goes east-west, pointing to Oswestry and Wales one way, Whitchurch/Market Drayton and Staffordshire/Cheshire the other, and is called- Scotland Street.

The A495 actually re-enters Wales (the detached part of the historic county of Flintshire, now part of the county of Wrexham) if you are travelling northeastwards from Ellesmere to Whitchurch.

[betweenmways]

I can't see any mention of using a common noun and then having multiple offshoots with different names
E.g. Beech road, leading to Beech lane, beech close, beech gardens etc.
And then some developer gets permission to name a 'beech grove' a quarter of a mile away from the others, and the majority of the different delivery drivers will go to the wrong area... regardless of the postcode.

[Chris Bertram]

Golf. Funny how "The Rough", "The Pot Bunker" and "The Lateral Water Hazard" never get used as street names.

Poets. Why no mention of William McGonagall? Or E.J. Thribb?

Rivers. All are English/Welsh, though the Ambiguous Avon does have at least one Scottish instance, I think. Notable that regional rivers like the Esk, Wear and Tyne miss out.

Stately Homes. I particularly like the way that "Longleat" is the spine road for the estate, and is not dignified by a suffix.

Birds. The original estate is to the west, and was extended later - these later roads are mainly birds of prey. Shame they didn't include Vulture, Pigeon or Cuckoo.

[RichardA626]

My Gran's house in Melton Mobray was in an estate where all the roads were named after rivers, & the layout was designed by Stevie Wonder, according to my Dad, who took years to learn the route from the main road.

[trickstat]

Birds. The original estate is to the west, and was extended later - these later roads are mainly birds of prey. Shame they didn't include Vulture, Pigeon or Cuckoo.

It does include Great Auk which is extinct!

[jimboLL]

Here's an oddity

https://www.google.com/maps/@53.5502185 ... 312!8i6656

Two contiguous roads, neither of which have a street suffix.