Comment by seanhunter
9 hours ago
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.
Dublin has a very large urban park, called Phoenix Park, with a commuter train line running to the north of it. There's a station close to the park, within 10 minutes walking distance. About 20 years ago, Irish Rail opened a new station, 20 minutes from the nearest edge of the park. Obviously, they called _this_ station 'Phoenix Park'. And then had to put up posters in other stations warning people that if they wanted to go to Phoenix Park, they shouldn't go to the station called Phoenix Park, they should go to Ashtown. Obviously.
(It eventually got renamed; it's now called "Navan Road Parkway", the 'parkway' referring to a park and ride facility, not to the park. This may seem like a reasonable rename, but it's actually a masterstroke in forward planning for confusing names, because the line is being extended to Navan.)
Reminds me of this bit in Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Agent” about London’s topographical mysteries:
”With a turn to the left Mr Verloc pursued his way along a narrow street by the side of a yellow wall which, for some inscrutable reason, had No. I Chesham Square written on it in black letters. Chesham Square was at least sixty yards away, and Mr Verloc, cosmopolitan enough not to be deceived by London’s topographical mysteries, held on steadily, without a sign of surprise or indignation. At last, with business-like persistency, he reached the Square, and made diagonally for the number 10. This belonged to an imposing carriage gate in a high, clean wall between two houses, of which one rationally enough bore the number 9 and the other was numbered 37; but the fact that this last belonged to Porthill Street, a street well known in the neighbourhood, was proclaimed by an inscription placed above the ground-floor windows by whatever highly efficient authority is charged with the duty of keeping track of London’s strayed houses. Why powers are not asked of Parliament (a short Act would do) for compelling those edifices to return where they belong is one of the mysteries of municipal administration. Mr Verloc did not trouble his head about it, his mission in life being the protection of the social mechanism, not its perfectionment or even its criticism.”
Berlin has the same issue.
I believe it’s pretty common for cities that used to be several independent municipalities that were merged relatively recently, or at least where street names were already too established to make renaming for uniqueness feasible at that point.
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...