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seanhuntertoday at 6:59 AM1 replyview on HN

For goodness sake no-one tell the author about London.

In almost every area of London there is a street called “high street”, and most of them have a “church street” also. Locals (and many maps) helpfully prepend the area name onto the street eg “Chiswick High Street”, “Kensington High Street”[1], “Stoke Newington Church Street” etc, but the actual address is “High street” or whatever meaning just several completely different streets. Not to mention many many other streets that are straight up duplicated (eg there are at least 10 “Bath Road”s) or confusingly similar.

There are also streets that have one name but are not contiguous for historical reasons. Eg my street crosses another road but the two halves are not directly opposite each other. Several times I have been on the phone with a confused delivery driver who is on the wrong side of this and is trying to convince me that my house doesn’t exist because the numbers only go up to 50 or so. Our street is also confusing because for some of the way the numbers are conventional (ie even on one side, odd on the other) but for some of it there are no houses on the other side, so adjacent houses have sequential numbers.

[1] Also the tube names this “High Street Kensington”, not “Kensington High street”. Tube names are also confusing. I live near “Turnham Green” tube which is thus named because it was the site of the battle of Turnham Green in the English civil war. This tube opens out onto a green which is not called “Turnham Green” it’s called Acton Green Common, and it is in Chiswick, not Acton. The green in Acton is called Acton Park. The actual Turnham Green is closer to another tube called “Chiswick Park”, which also opens up on a park that also isn’t called “Chiswick Park”, it’s called “Chiswick Green”. This park is incorrectly named on most online maps because at some point they probably just gave up at the insanity of it all and the boundary isn’t obvious.


Replies

stevekemptoday at 7:31 AM

Edinburgh has some confusion of its own too, where streets will have two names. Usually because several smaller streets eventually got joined up and became one.

So walk in a straight line and you pass along Nicolson Street -> St.Patrick Street -> Clerk Street -> Newigton Road.

Sometimes you see these signposted in a fun way too with signs for both the individual components and the "main" street:

https://thescottishpearl.uk/2022/06/28/streets-with-two-name...