London’s biggest open space, I learn, is the Lee Valley Park, stretching 26 miles from Ware in Hertfordshire, past Stansted, down to the Thames at East India Dock Basin.
London’s biggest open space, I learn, is the Lee Valley Park, stretching 26 miles from Ware in Hertfordshire, past Stansted, down to the Thames at East India Dock Basin. It is to contain most of the Olympic Games in 2012. I propose it should be twinned with Lyon in France. At the moment I do not think the Lee Valley is twinned with anywhere, but Lyon is twinned with Birmingham — to what advantage the cities are no doubt aware. But Lyon and the Lee possess what boils down to the same name, just as twins should.
The Lee side of things is given in the updated edition of A.D. Mills’s enjoyable A Dictionary of London Place Names (Oxford, £9.99). Inflected forms of Lee in Old English from the ninth century are given as Ligean and Lygan, representing a much older Celtic root lug-, meaning ‘bright/light’, a suitable name for any river. As for Lyon, its Latin name was Lugdunum from the Celtic Lugodunon, ‘Lug-fort’. Here too lug- signifies ‘light’. Even if one or both places owe their name to the god Lug, the god’s name was in any case connected with the word for ‘light’.
There are plenty of more straightforward names in the dictionary. Garlick Hill in the City is where garlic was once sold; Lavender Hill, where the mob came from, once grew lavender. Hay was sold at Haymarket until 1830. There are false friends too. Snow Hill was not snowy but a snor in Old English, ‘a road that curves up a gradient’, which it does. Smithfield was not the haunt of blacksmiths, but a smethe or ‘smooth’ field.
Jocular references are common. Both Botany Bay (a reference to the Australian settlement) in Enfield, and, earlier, World’s End, Chelsea, were given their names from their remoteness. A local lack of a sense of humour is detectable in the change in 1830 of the name Grub Street to Milton Street.
The Isle of Dogs remains a puzzle, as it has since the name was first recorded in 1520. Perhaps feral dogs lived on its marshland, the editor surmises, or perhaps it as a whimsical reference to the island in the Spanish empire named after dogs, Canary. If so, it has enjoyed a random reunion with its inspiration, now that a bundle of office blocks have been built on its northern shoulder, on the wharf where in 1937 a warehouse was built for the fruit trade from the Canary Islands.
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