What do street-names mean?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 November 2010
Summary
Names are a sensitive matter: a ‘wrong’ name can affect the price of houses, as the residents of Barton Road realised on hearing the news of a fresh development, when they objected to the name Wortley, that of a seventeenth-century Fellow of Caius, as ‘ugly and cumbersome to use’. St Neots residents objected recently to the names of councillors being given to streets, preferring those of local footballers. The vicar of a church in SUEZ Road protested that ‘Suez’ was a dirty word politically (referring to the abortive Suez Canal attack of 1956): on the phone, people had thought he said ‘sewers’. That name remains, but a proposal to call KIMBERLEY Road, with its South African name, after Nelson Mandela, was also vigorously opposed by residents, for whom, at that time, the great man was a Communist terrorist. His name survives in Mandela House in Regent Street, containing offices of the City Council.
Personal names were given frequently in the nineteenth century. Before that, streets were usually named according to goods sold in them – the medieval centre of Cambridge has no personal names except those of saints. Only later were any other individuals singled out to be honoured, although in paintings they appear as early as the thirteenth century.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Cambridge Street-NamesTheir Origins and Associations, pp. viii - xiiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000