Builders name streets after whatever the country is celebrating at the time. That habit turns the national address file into an accidental history book: find the commemoration in the name and you can usually date the bricks to within a decade or two. We counted the evidence across more than 800,000 distinct British streets.
The victory streets
| Era | Name | Streets |
|---|---|---|
| Napoleonic wars, 1805 to 1815 | Wellington | 743 |
| Nelson | 502 | |
| Waterloo | 319 | |
| Trafalgar | 212 | |
| Crimean war, 1854 to 1856 | Alma | 293 |
| Inkerman | 49 | |
| Balaclava | 18 | |
| Boer war, 1899 to 1902 | Kimberley | 161 |
| Ladysmith | 72 | |
| Mafeking | 37 | |
| Second World War | Churchill | 449 |
| Montgomery | 178 | |
| Normandy | 88 |
See an Alma Road of bay-fronted terraces and you are almost certainly looking at the 1850s or 1860s, when the Battle of the Alma was front page news and speculative builders were throwing up streets by the thousand. Alma outscores every other Crimean name put together: 293 streets against Inkerman's 49, Balaclava's 18 and a mere 4 for Sebastopol, which was presumably too hard to spell.
A Mafeking Road dates itself to the years around 1900, when the relief of the siege set off street parties across the country. A Churchill Avenue of semis with metal window frames is almost always late 1940s or 1950s. The reliefs and victories got streets; the tragedies mostly did not. Britain built 50 streets for Dunkirk and just 7 for the Somme.
Jubilees, coronations and the millennium
Royal events out-build battles. There are 685 Jubilee streets in Britain, seeded in waves by Victoria's jubilees of 1887 and 1897, George V's in 1935 and Elizabeth II's from 1977 onwards. Coronation accounts for another 501, the great bulk of them terraces and council avenues dating to the coronations of 1902, 1911, 1937 and 1953. A Coronation Street, Wakefield being one of many, is nearly always Edwardian or early 1950s.
The habit never died. The Festival of Britain left 67 Festival streets from the early 1950s, and the year 2000 added 65 Millenniums, all of them instantly datable. Kitchener (74 streets), Haig (80) and the nurse Edith Cavell (51) mark the First World War years, mostly on interwar estates built for returning soldiers.
A five-second field guide
Wellington, Nelson or Trafalgar: Regency or early Victorian. Alma, Raglan or Inkerman: mid Victorian. Mafeking, Ladysmith, Kimberley or Pretoria: turn of the century. Kitchener, Haig or Cavell: interwar. Churchill, Montgomery or Normandy: postwar. Jubilee: check the architecture, because there are five plausible jubilees to choose from. Millennium: you can date the tarmac to the month.
How we worked it out
We took the distinct street names in our postcode database, more than 800,000 of them once each street is counted once per postcode district, and matched whole words against a list of commemorative names, so Nelson Street counts but Nelsonville does not. Counts are of distinct streets, not postcodes. A small number of matches will be coincidences, such as Nelson streets named for the town of Nelson in Lancashire, which is itself named after a pub that was named after the admiral. The dating rule of thumb comes from the well documented building booms that followed each event.