City Planning

Something about this place has bothered the hell out of me, even though it's mostly good, and that is that the people responsible for naming things around here don't understand that language is infinitely generative, i.e. you can keep making up combinations of sounds to form new words, combine words to make new phrases, etc. If you take a look at the part of Brighton where I'm about to move, you can see that the city planners had "Holling" on the brain when naming all the streets, which is just plain dumb.

The first time I went over to see the room I'm going to rent, I got a little lost, because I was supposed to turn onto Hollingbury Place, which you can see at the top, from Hollingbury Road. But those two roads don't actually intersect, and if you look at the zoomed-in map, you can see this whole naming situation gets even worse.

Since Hollingbury Crescent was where Hollingbury Place was supposed to be, I passed it, and consequently never found Hollingbury Place. I got wise soon after, though, and went back to Hollingbury Crescent and found my way from there, realizing that the Brighton city planners were even dumber (or meaner) than I thought.

This of course is not an isolated incident. Other overused names include North, Victoria, Montpelier, Preston, Lansdowne, and more, and that's just Brighton. I noticed this weekend when looking at a road atlas of The South that a lot of adjacent towns are all named the same thing, as well, though I can't remember any now. Later I may do a Funny Place Names entry based on that atlas. Every page was a treasure trove of hilarity.

I have noticed that they do something very clever with streets here, though, which is to name dead ends "Close" instead of calling them a street, road, etc. That eliminates the need for a dead end sign. You can see Adams Close on the maps above.