Street names

In today's lesson on British life, we will discuss street names. Those in the States are used to a hodge-podge of names borrowed from other countries: street, avenue, road, place, terrace, lane, boulevard, drive, and maybe an occasional courtyard.

In Britain, you have these plus: close, mews, terrace, garden, circus, yard, tower, building, manor, alley, approach, arcade, back, bridge, broadway, causeway, centre, church, churchyard, circle, college, common, corner, cottage, court, crescent, embankment, estate, field, gate, green, grove, heights, mansions, market, meadow, mount, museum, palace, parade, park, passage, pavilion, precinct, promenade, quadrant, rise, roundabout, trading, vale, view, villas, walk, and (my favorite) house.

Of course, keep in mind that when the street name changes every three blocks, you need a lot of names.

Previously, I mentioned that in London they number the houses up one side of the street and down the other, rather than odds-and-evens like, oh, almost everybody else in the world. I should also mention they also name every street in the area with the same name, changing only the suffix, so directions like this are not uncommon: "Take Fortis Green Road, turn left on Fortis Green, and left again on Fortis Green Avenue."

But wait, it gets worse. Today I needed to go to 73 Courtfield Gardens, and discovered that could be on any one of five different streets! ("Courtfield Gardens" is in red, Courtfield Road is in yellow.)

Not to be outdone, just a few blocks away, Bramham Gardens (in red) took four different streets, and one of those streets is "shared" with Bolton Gardens (in yellow). That is, the streets on the north side are Bramham Gardens and the houses on the south side are Bolton Gardens!

But oh, my friend, if it were only so simple, because some houses just opt out of this whole scheme altogether. So at the corner of Earl's Court Road and Bramham Gardens (north) and Bolton Gardens (south) is a building with two entrances -- the one on Earl's Court Road is "3 The Mansions" and the one on Bramham Gardens is "4 The Mansions."

(Where "The Mansions" came from is anybody's guess.)

So if you wonder why London has such a complicated postal code -- 5 or 6 alphanumeric characters, such as SW59FE (mine) -- it is because the address is pretty much meaningless. And I suspect that the real reason Britons eventually lost their empire is that they became too afraid to venture out, for fear of never finding their home again.