One of the things that the Town Council are responsible for is coming up with street names for new developments. Normally, the idea is that we come up with some kind of overall theme for a development, and then individual names for all the streets within it.
We do, however, have to stick to some guidelines. One of those, incidentally, is that we can’t use the possessive apostrophe, something which has recently been in the news elsewhere. But another key rule is that we have to use a standard set of suffixes, such as “street”, “road”, etc. The full list of acceptable endings is:
- Avenue
- Bank
- Boulevard
- Close
- Coppice
- Corner
- Court
- Crescent
- Croft
- Drive
- End
- Fields
- Gardens
- Grove
- Hill
- Lane
- Lea
- Lee
- Meadow
- Mews
- Orchard
- Park
- Place
- Piece
- Road
- Row
- Square
- Street
- Styles
- Terrace
- View
- Walk
- Way
- Wood
We can also use a name that has no suffix at all, provided it starts with “The” (for example, The Beeches).
If we name a street after a person then we should only use the surname (so there might, one day, be a Goodge Street in Evesham, but not a Mark Goodge Street).
Anyway, it occurred to me that, if we were feeling in a mischievous mood, there are all sorts of possibilities for names which meet all the requirements but, nonetheless, may not be quite what was intended. For example:
- Letsby Avenue
- Robber Bank
- Standtoo Close
- Roundthe Corner
- Lara Croft (named after the West Indian cricketer, of course)
- Drinken Drive
- Bitter End[1]
- Usedtobe Fields
- Tinylittle Gardens
- Overthe Hill
- Airp Lane
- Hill Lea
- Hole Lee
- Nowhereto Park
- Codor Place
- Five Minutes Piece
- Longandwinding Road
- Domestic Row
- Fore Square
- Oneway Street
- Different Styles
- Terrible View
- Lengthy Walk
- Wrong Way
- Good Wood
[1] If you thought I was going to suggest “Bell End” then all I can say is… great minds think alike. But I decided it might offend some people, so I didn’t.
I should point out that I have no intention of actually suggesting any of these as real street names (with possibly one or two exceptions), so the good folk of Evesham can rest easily in that respect. But I’m sure you can come up with some better ones than these…