Posted: Thu 06 Dec, 2012 4:11 pm
This is the text of Guardian editorial from some time in the 80's--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Street WisdomThere is distress in Dublin over developers who select undignified names for streets on their new estates - Hampshire Close and Dynasty Downs are aggrievedly cited -rather than names which invoke the city’s nobler traditions. The City Council is said to be moving in favour of stricter discipline.This problem is largely insoluble. The only sensible name for a street is one which evokes its purpose, which is probably why Station Road is the most common name in London, with Church Road close behind. But what do you do when a road is no more than an arbitrary collection of houses, on the way to nowhere special? The builders who ran up houses in terrace after terrace in our great industrial cities wasted little time in deciding. Often they simply named them after their children. There's a stack of nine Harolds in Burley, Leeds - Avenue, Walk, Road, View, Mount, Street, Grove, Place and Row, with Dollys, Nellies and Dorises scattered about the city. Leeds used to boast a sequence of streets, now demolished, which proceeded through the alphabet from Angel to Ventnor, at which point the process stopped. Perhaps they ran out of money.But these were mundane streets, concocted at minimum cost for an incoming army of workers. Elsewhere, notions were grander: Associations with royalty: few boroughs do not possess a King's Road, a Queen's, and a fruity crop of Victorias. The names of battles which England won; of poets and writers (Shakespeare especially: two avenues, two crescents, one gardens, six: roads and one walk in the London postal area, while Dickens, alas, gets only one road, one square and one street). Also the names of statesmen, though some more than others. Gladstone, for instance, much more than Disraeli, unless you add to Disraeli's score a crop of ambiguous Beaconsfields, together perhaps with the cluster of roads just north of Finsbury Park which commemorate his novels: Endymion, Lothair, Coningsby, Tancred, Venetia. But in keeping with the usual priorities of British public life, scientists are neglected. London has plenty of Newtons, but they may not refer to Isaac. Darwins are rarer, Kelvins sparse, and there isn't a Joule from Hillingdon through to Havering.Where they're not historic, names are often evocative, though too often of the world which the houses destroyed, not of the one that is left: Woodlands Way, Farm Road, Orchard Rise. The outer suburbs have lots of Acacias, though they trail behind Willows. Yet such names are often self-conscious and unspontaneous.London has nothing to match Hark to Rover in Kirkstall, Leeds (though Who Could a' Thought It Street in Hunslet has gone); or All Alone, and Six Days Only (the pub in this street shut on Sundays) in Bradford; or a street in Yeadon called Football. Here and there in the North there is just a suspicion of sardonic humour: Nice View in Harehills, Leeds offers neither a truly nice view nor even a view of Nice. What is largely missing, though, is the spark of true invention which illumines the street map of Oxford, where after the postmen complained that two streets were both called Pitt Road, the City Council elevated one to Chatham. There, perhaps, is the standard of wit and intelligence, combined of course with dignity and pride, which Dublin ought to aspire to.