You know where you are with a British street name. I don’t mean literally. I mean there’s a tacit humility to our islands’ hodonyms: they are short, simple and unpretentious. Not for us the long-winded commemorations of national heroes or local worthies: no Avenue du Révérend Père Corentin Cloarec or Burgemeester Baron van Voerst van Lyndenstraat.
Our street names are soundest away from the city. The High Street is thriving: it’s the commonest name in England and Wales, while Main Street leads the field in Scotland. Great Britain has some 3,600 of the two. A ‘street’ used to refer to a properly paved road, a practice imported by the Romans for their great connecting roads (Watling, Ermine, Stane, Dere). Medieval journeymen stared in wonder at such ‘stone streets’, which flaunted a long-forgotten technology.
By the time of Henry I, streets were a protected brand: they should be wide enough for two carriages, or 16 knights on horseback. Roads were late coming: Shakespeare was the first to use the word. It’s a happy fact that the City of London is so ancient as to have no ‘Roads’. These age-old differences are fossilised in our language: there are 600 ‘The Streets’, but there is no ‘The Road’.
Given the antiquity of the parish church, it’s understandable that there are more Church Lanes than Church Streets or Roads, which number 5,500 together. But second most common are the 2,000 Station Roads, almost all of which appeared in the latter half of the 19th century. Add Mill and School to these dominant names, and you have some 14,000 streets — but still not even 2 per cent of the nation’s named roads.
Street-naming was for centuries the result of informal village vernacular; in urban communities, pragmatism pointed out civic features, business quarters and farther-flung directions.
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