Our database holds more than 819,000 distinct street records, and most of them are exactly what you would expect: a High Street, a Church Lane, a Coronation Avenue. This post is about the rest. The names that run to a dozen words, the ones that barely manage three letters, and the entries that reveal the address file is maintained by humans having a long day.
The long ones
The finest long street name in Britain is bilingual. In Caernarfon you will find Twll yn y Wal / Hole in the Wall Street, twelve words of Welsh and English doing the same job twice, and doing it beautifully. Nothing else with a genuine claim to being a street name comes close.
Beyond it, the register's longest entries stop being names and become directions. There are records reading like Chase Woods via Whiteshards Bottom and Blue Barn, byways logged with their full council reference numbers, and one Esplanade entry that helpfully explains which side of the street is which, in brackets, within its own name. The single longest record in the file is the Channel Tunnel, listed in French and English as if it were an ordinary street, which for postal purposes it apparently is.
The short ones
Filter the artefacts out and Britain's shortest real street names are trees. There are streets called simply Oak and Ash, three letters each, mostly on modern estates in Suffolk and elsewhere where a developer clearly decided that Road, Close and Way were surplus to requirements.
Below three letters, everything is a data story rather than a place. The register contains a street in Reading recorded as IN, an entry in London recorded, magnificently, as yes, and streets listed as TBC, which suggests a naming committee that never reconvened. We keep these in the database because they exist in the official file, and we love them because each one is a tiny fossil of an administrative afternoon gone wrong.
Apostrophes, hyphens and one ampersand for luck
Punctuation survives in surprising numbers. There are 8,806 street names carrying an apostrophe, your King's Roads and St Mary's Gates, holding out against decades of signwriters trying to abolish them. Hyphens appear in 1,567 names, heavily concentrated in Welsh (Pen-y-this, Ty'n-y-that) and in England's -on-the- villages. And precisely 53 street names contain an ampersand, which feels about right for a country that never fully agreed on how to write anything.
How we worked it out
We analysed the distinct street entries across our 1.8 million postcode records, counting each street once per postcode district, which yields just over 819,000 records. Character and word counts use the name exactly as it appears in the official file, which is the point: the file's quirks are the story. Streets flagged as obvious placeholders were excluded from the shortest-name rankings but reported here as curiosities. Look up any street through the district lookup.