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UK Address Oddities (2018)
- doublesocket 3y agoI did a bunch of analysis of UK addresses at a former job. My favourite was the clear inverse correlation between house number and value, with a noticeable dip for number 13s, which from memory were valued around 2.5% lower than where they should have been.
- neilo40 3y agoI live in an Edwardian street and my house should have been 13 except it isn’t. They skipped it and my house is 15 instead. Hopefully the universe doesn’t spot this deceit!
- dan-robertson 3y agoPerhaps the story is that there is some bias in the streets which have number 13s instead of skipping like on your street and that’s the reason for the price difference?
- hnbear 3y agoNow I’m curious about the ratio of houses numbered 13 and 12a (then 14 with no 13) across the UK.
- justincormack 3y agoOur street just went from 11 to 15.
- ralferoo 3y agoGenerally, we have odd on one side and even on the other, so this isn't likely. The odds and evens are usually also allocated sequentially and independently, so it can be incredibly annoying when you're looking at the numbers on the wrong side of the road thinking you're getting close when you're actually walking away from the house because the numbers are much higher or lower on the other side.
- f4c39012 3y agoSome UK streets don't have a #13, i believe because 13 is widely considered unlucky
- justincormack 3y agoYes I lived in such a street, 1at number 11. 1960s street.
- darkclouds 3y ago[dead]
- doublesocket 3y agoYes, there was a noticeable drop in the count of number 13s too.
- Rygian 3y agoOne "weird numbering scheme" according to the article is setting house numbers based on distance (in meters) from a predefined "street start" point. I find this arrangement to be the most convenient one, and I've found it quite often in villages in France. No need for "bis" or "3a" or "3 ½" house numbers, and a consistent method to obtain the position of a house based on its house number.
- bestouff 3y agoYes especially in rural areas, where houses are sparsely spaced. If 15 and 17 are 3km apart, you can have several hundreds houses appearing between these numbers, and no amount of "bis" and "ter" will save you.
- ColinWright 3y agoI believe they do that in at least some areas of New Zealand.
- andylynch 3y agoThey do indeed - it’s called RAPID (Rural Address Property IDtification) and is used in most rural areas. For instance a house 5.5 km down a road on the left will be 501. Makes it very easy to find places, all you need is a working odometer.
- Ekaros 3y agoAlso avoids oddities when multiple buildings are build between existing ones at some later point. As there is usually plenty of space to add them.
- nerdponx 3y agoThis is increasingly how exits are numbered on highways in the USA Interstate system. So exit 52 is about 52 miles from the start of the highway or the state border. It works well because exits are rarely spaced close together. And if they do need to put exits close together, usually they letter suffixes like 52A.
- zubairq 3y agoAnother UK Postcode oddity is Gibraltar which has GX111AA as the postcode for the entire country
- NeoTar 3y agoA lot of the British Overseas territories have adopted similar postcodes (e.g. ASCN 1ZZ for Ascension Island) Although it’s disputable whether they are a part of the UK, or separate administrations that have postcodes designed to look like a UK postcode!
- TMWNN 3y agoThe US postcode system includes three countries that aren't part of the US at all! <https://faq.usps.com/s/article/What-US-Possessions-US-Territories-and-Freely-Associated-States-are-Considered-Domestic https://faq.usps.com/s/article/What-US-Possessions-US-Territ...>
- krisoft 3y agoI don't know if that is so odd to me. Gibraltar is 6.8 sq km. The post code where I have grown up in east-europe is roughly 7 sq km. So to me that makes perfect sense as a post code. Is there a rule on how big a post code is supposed to be? (Now, my current postcode in the UK is just the single house. That for example feels way too small to me.)
- madeofpalk 3y agoUK postcodes are usually _extremely_ specific. One postcode per road or even block is very normal.
- gkedzierski 3y agoEven more so. Some buildings I lived in had several postcodes. (e.g. some apartments in the building had one postcode assigned, and others had a different one)
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- Shrezzing 3y agoI live at flat 8 of building 5, which through a strange quirk in the way addresses are created in my city & then recorded at the post office, accepts mail intended for both 8/5 and 5/8. A nearby neighbour in flat 5 of building 8 also receives mail intended for both 5/8 and 8/5. Most mail providers automatically adjust "flat 5 building 8, street name" to "5/8, street name", so we've got no way of fixing it. Everyone in the estate who lives in flat 9 or lower in their respective buildings has the same issue, and the issue also occurs in a bunch of other new builds in the city.
- rwmj 3y agoI have a friend who lives in a house which was knocked through from two houses. She has two addresses, either work. She also has two gas meters, two electric meters and so on, although she got those disconnected (to save on standing charges).
- ProllyInfamous 3y agoExact same situation — except my structure was 100+ years old and also had Yet Another Address for utilities (from century-old infrastructure).
- sega_sai 3y agoYes, I had the same issue previously. It was constant mixing between flat 1 building 2, vs flat 2 building 1 (2/1 vs 1/2). I think trying to be explicit 'Flat N, M X street' helps instead of using the A/B notation. (although now I leave in 7/7 so I don't care).
- owisd 3y agoI lived in a flat where the convention was to write the flat number like 8/5 and would occasionally get mail to the equivalent of 08-May.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoThey should combine this the street numbering/naming scheme seen in some western US states (notably Utah). Not hard to imagine the old US "10th St." followed by "11th St." etc. But in some towns, you get "10-1/2 St". I think I may even have seen "10.5th St" and maybe even "10-1/4 St". Someone explained this to me as a rational way to reference canonical "block size" but I'm unconvinced.
- AJRF 3y agoI lived in a big tower in London a year ago and during my stay there my postcode changed twice. Many systems, for example Credit Checking agencies, etc very much do not like this and it's such a pain to deal with. It got a new postcode because there were too many delivery points for my initial assigned postcode so they split it. Twice.
- simonjgreen 3y agoThe underlying system behind this is Royal Mails augmentation of the UPRN system with the UDPRN (Unique delivery point reference number) which is meant to be 1:1. There is then a further classification for multitenant units called the UMPRN (unique multiple residence number)
- michaelt 3y agoOne of the interesting things about UK addresses is the Royal Mail issues an official list of all the addresses they know of - the "PAF" - as part of their work assigning postcodes to buildings. That means in the UK it's possible to almost definitively identify, for example, the longest address. Whereas in other countries that question is unanswerable, because who's to say whether a given building's address is "32 Vassar St, Cambridge MA" or whether it's "Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, 32 Vassar St, Cambridge MA" ?
- simonjgreen 3y agoAlso incredibly useful is UPRN and USRN for properties and streets. Almost* every property has a unique identifier which is portable across systems. *I believe the top of the funnel for the UPRN process is council tax registration which not all buildings need
- michaelt 3y agoYep, the reason I hedged my statement, saying "almost definitively identify", is that, as you say, some buildings aren't listed. For example some village halls aren't listed in PAF - perhaps because they can't receive mail? And structures like electrical transformers aren't listed (even when they're built of brick and on their own separate plot of land). New build properties supposedly appear in the PAF before construction is completed - but that depends on both the builder, and the PAF user getting the latest updates.
- tialaramex 3y agoPAF isn't strictly a list of addresses in the sense anybody other than the Post Office (and maybe parcel delivery firms) would care about. PAF is a list of delivery points to which they can deliver mail. So for example the place I work isn't listed, you can't deliver mail to it even though it's a large building with multiple entrances and you'd obviously be able to direct people here specifically, but mail "for us" goes to some admin building several minutes walk away across campus.
- SeanLuke 3y ago> You might assume that the lowest house number would be 1, but there are quite a few houses numbered zero. In Richmond, VA, there is a historic building which at present is owned by the Black History Museum. It is 00 Clay Street. That's two zeros. It's the coolest address I know of. https://www.nps.gov/places/00-clay-street.htm https://www.nps.gov/places/00-clay-street.htm
- madcaptenor 3y agoThis one is confusing because it’s on the odd side of the street - 00 is clearly acting as minus 1.
- SeanLuke 3y agoNo, the house on to the left is 1 East Clay street, and the house on the right is 1 West Clay Street. Directly across from 00 Clay Street is a street. On either side of that street are 2 East and 2 West respectively. 00 is the only house not on East nor West Clay Street, but just Clay Street. It's at the origin.
- madcaptenor 3y agoThis is a better explanation of it. Thanks!
- NGRhodes 3y agoMy parents house was built before development of the area. The original road was built on and another road built on the other side of the house, both the old and current street names are still valid postal streets (the old street name is still attached to the house on the end). The old street name is commonly used to refer to the terrace of houses. My parents still have legal right of access (recorded on the deeds) across the back gardens of the houses that were built on top of the old road.
- jpsouth 3y agoI love the old rights of access, I really do, war houses in the UK were built for a vastly different way of living with your neighbours. I live in a terrace, and four of us share a ginnel that my house sits over, splitting the terrace into a 2/2 on the ground, and fully attached 4 above. My ‘ground attached’ neighbour is great, shares it no problem and has full access to my garden. The neighbour on the other side of the ginnel has blocked access for her ‘ground attached’ neighbour by building a greenhouse infront of the gate, so she must store her bins on the street rather than her back garden and be deprived of the ability to wash her car, get a window cleaner for her rear windows etc.
- eruci 3y agoThat's why geocoding is HARD. Try "3 Adne Edle Street, London" on Bing maps, Google Maps, Openstreetmap, Geocode.xyz - and more. Or even better, try "Minus Two, Woodend Lane, Cam, Stroud" No two geocoding services agree on the correct answer.
- KwanEsq 3y ago>Or why a house in Owls Green, a village of about 20 houses near Ipswich, would be numbered 2820 (cute). For those who aren't native British/English-speaking, this is presumably a cute reference to the village's name of *Owls* Green, since at least in the UK the onomatopoeia for one of an owl's sounds is "too-wit too-woo", to which "two-eight two-oh" is similar sounding.
- globular-toast 3y agoAh... I didn't get it. I even put the number into Wolfram Alpha to see if it had a nice factorisation or something.
- gertrunde 3y agoA moderately tangential weird fact... "too-wit too-woo" sort of isn't the sound of an owl... it's the sound of two tawny owls, it's a female call (the 'too-wit' bit) followed by a male response! :) (Ref: https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/wildlife-explorer/birds/birds-prey/tawny-owl https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/wildlife-explorer/birds/birds... )
- thebruce87m 3y agoThe insurance company Guardian Direct had a phone number along these lines. Good marketing since I still remember it to this day: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/the-owl-s-number-is-up-1178590.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/the-owl-s-number...
- teleforce 3y agoThanks for this info, now I know why in English "to woo" means "to entice". [1] woo entry, Cambridge Dictionary: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/woo https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/woo
- globular-toast 3y agoI'd like to know where the one near Beccles is. I used to live there and I'm quite surprised to hear of such an amusing hack nearby. Curious that the other high number one is also in Suffolk, only about 30km away. Now I'm wondering if it's possible to register an irrational number like Pi. I suppose "Pi" could be a house name but I would want it to be the number.
- rwmj 3y agoIt's a string so you can probably register anything you like. In our village there are is a road with houses with numbers "<N> Cottages" and "<N>" (for various numbers <N>). I guess post is often misdirected.
- julian_t 3y agoSome people like having house names as well as a numbers. We live at no.69 and I once entertained the idea of calling it "No. 47", but the idea was quickly vetoed. (In case you're wondering "why 47?", for some reason our street doesn't have a no.47, so it would have been a fairly benign joke)
- blowski 3y agoYes, as a Suffolk resident I'm wondering if there's some special thing about high house numbers.
- simonbarker87 3y agoI grew up maybe 300m from the Minus One house mentioned in Clacton On Sea and did a paper in that area for a couple of years and never heard of it so I’m wondering how true some of these really are?
- jfk13 3y agoWell, you can read it ("MINUS ONE") on the front of the house if you zoom in on the StreetView photo. And the Royal Mail recognises it (try pasting "minus one, clacton" into https://www.royalmail.com/find-a-postcode https://www.royalmail.com/find-a-postcode). Though it may be a house name rather than a number.
- ekns 3y agoWhen I was living in Edinburgh, I encountered the corner case of the upper levels of an apartment building having a different postcode from the lower levels. Everything online used the same address database so I wondered why I could never find my address under my (presumed) postcode.
- stevekemp 3y agoEdinburgh is awesome, in particular, for the way that flats can be numbered within buildings. I used to live in flat on the top floor which received mail as either "TFL" (for top-floor, flat on the left", or "Flat 6". Different companies used different formats for the address. I'd lived in GFL "ground-floor, flat left" and "GFR" for "Ground-floor, flat-right" as well. But never in a middle floor. I assume they would be MFL and MFR respectively. But who knows?
- mcdee 3y agoThey use 1FL/1FR for first floor, 2FL/2FR for second floor, etc.
- zabzonk 3y agowhen i lived in edinburgh in the 70s, we would just stick a card on the flat door with the surnames of the inhabitants on it - the flats themselves did not have numbers.
- NeoTar 3y agoThat is pretty much how it works in Germany - flats are identified by resident surname, and numbers, if they exist, are not known or little used.
- fellerts 3y agoNorwegian apartments are all identified by a single letter and four numbers. For example, H0203 means 2nd floor, 3rd apartment from the left as seen when ascending the stairs. The H means "main floors" (as opposed to the loft or cellar). Very useful when visiting other apartments.
- simonjgreen 3y agoThis reminds me of one of my favourite articles. Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses. https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-addresses/ https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...
- sandworm101 3y agoAn article about strange house numbers in Britain that doesn't mention 221B? How many other addresses have a controversy section in their Wikipedia entry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/221B_Baker_Street https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/221B_Baker_Street
- denton-scratch 3y agoI don't know how many streets named "Letsby Avenue" there are in the UK; but apparently there are at least three different police stations on such streets. NOTE: "Let's be having you" is a cliche Dixon-of-Dock-Green-style exhortation from a policeman to a villain, urging him to give himself up; c.f. "It's a fair cop, guv".
- fennecfoxy 3y agoYou've been nicked!
- comprev 3y ago"Named in the late 1990s, Letsby Avenue is a quarter-mile stretch of road in Tinsley which is home to the South Yorkshire Police Operations Complex." https://www.thestar.co.uk/news/people/perfectly-named-address-of-south-yorkshire-police-complex-raises-a-smile-1358470 https://www.thestar.co.uk/news/people/perfectly-named-addres...
- walthamstow 3y ago"Let's be 'avin you" is much better known as a football rallying cry, isn't it? I'd never heard of it as a police thing. The most famous example of the phrase I'm aware of is when Delia Smith, a septuagenarian TV cook, exhalted her home Norwich City fans with a drunken slurred voice at half time over the PA system.
- walthamstow 3y agoNot sure why I've been downvoted! Here's the video. Every football fan in England will connect the phrase with this event. It's not a bad thing, she's a national treasure. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NiC679ASOyA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NiC679ASOyA
- jimnotgym 3y agoI think you are downvoted for not quite being correct. I think "Let's be 'avin you" is by far better known as a police thing. This is what made the spectacle of a drunken Delia shouting it at a crowd all the more absurd.
- denton-scratch 3y agoHow are house numbers allocated on El Camino Real in California? (AKA El Camino BIGNUM) I believe they run to 5 digits; Does every house-number have a house?
- cardiffspaceman 3y agoDifferent municipalities have the same number and street. You can try it. 12345 El Camino Real Can be found in San Diego, Los Altos Hills, and Atascadero. Real means Royal not double.
- denton-scratch 3y ago> Real means Royal not double. It's a pun: https://foldoc.org/El+Camino+Bignum https://foldoc.org/El+Camino+Bignum
- jameshart 3y agoAnd can you address houses one block over by specifying El Camino Imaginary?
- madcaptenor 3y agoWouldn’t that be a road that’s perpendicular to El Camino Real?
- astrange 3y agoI think it'd go straight up.
- zoky 3y ago5 digit house numbers are pretty common throughout California, partly because in general, house numbers will start a new group of 100 each block, making it a lot easier to identify in which part of town a given address falls. So a given block will have numbers 102XX, the next block will have 103XX, and so on, even though the 102XX block may only have numbers 10200-10241, for example. What’s even cooler is that, in L.A. at least, block numbers are assigned so as to “sync” with each other; the 9800 block of Sepulveda is due exactly west of the 9800 block of La Cienega. And, cooler still, the 9800 block of both streets (actually, pretty much any north-south street) will be between 98th and 99th streets. The address numbering system in L.A. is surprisingly effective and consistent for a town that is essentially a patchwork of dozens of independent cities, with a mountain running through the middle of it to boot.
- gambiting 3y agoOne other oddity is that there are "magic" postcodes in the UK that map to various government services, for instance: BX5 5BD Is a postcode to use when sending mail to HMRC(the UK tax office), but that address doesn't exist anywhere if you try searching for it. Royal Mail is the only company that can deliver post to that address too, they have the internal mapping to know where it needs to go - no other courier company will accept letters to that address. And, annoyingly - Royal Mail's own online postage store doesn't accept it as a valid address, you have to buy stamps and hand-write the address.
- jayflux 3y agoI don’t think that’s true about only Royal Mail can post there. There’s clear instructions on gov.uk for all couriers on where to send the mail if they come across this post code, it’s not some weird secret. https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/hm-revenue-customs/contact/couriers https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/hm-revenue-custo...
- gambiting 3y agoYes, but you can't use the BX5 5BD postcode if you do. They give you an alternative address for couriers.
- sdflhasjd 3y agoOne oddity not mentioned here that I came across recently, (which probably would go into one of those "things programmers don't know about postcodes" blog posts). A system that used Postcodes for geocoding (not a great idea) was choking on PO Box codes that belong to districts (such as W1A in the London W district), but don't really correspond to actual street addresses. This also catches some people out who will unintentionally use the PO Box postcode alongside the full street address of a business for example. I've also worked on the TV Licensing systems (yes, the one that sends you scary letters every year). That has its own database of postcodes and addresses and I got to spend lots of time on the funny rules there.
- garblegarble 3y ago>That has its own database of postcodes and addresses and I got to spend lots of time on the funny rules there. How come the separate database vs the Postcode Address File? Sounds like you could write an interesting "Things programmers mistakenly believe about UK addresses" post very easily :-)
- f4c39012 3y agoIn a word, licensing.
- TazeTSchnitzel 3y agoThe postcode address file is for places you can deliver mail, whereas TV licensing is interested in places that might have a TV. There must be some cases where there's no overlap.
- garblegarble 3y agoI started writing a reply saying I couldn't imagine such a place (and that I assumed it was about dodging the Post Office's license fee), but it looks like you're right - in researching the reply I found an article[1] from back in 2006 stating that at that time in England only 60% of buildings had entries in the postcode file! They cite the example of churches that don't receive post, I guess if somebody had a TV there & used it to watch live broadcast TV then the building would need a TV license. I do wonder when the TV Licensing door knockers would show up trying to gain entry... during a church service seems a little inappropriate! 1: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/jul/13/epublic.guardianweeklytechnologysection https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/jul/13/epublic.g...
- Doctor_Fegg 3y agoThe most brainfuckery'd UK address oddity I've encountered is a road in North Manchester which has the same house number twice on the same road in the same settlement. In other words, there's two houses legitimately called something like "280 Manchester Road, Frogstall". This is because the village is split between two borough councils, and each started from 1 when numbering their street. So one of them is "280 Manchester Road, Frogstall, Rochdale, Greater Manchester" and the other is "280 Manchester Road, Frogstall, Oldham, Greater Manchester". Exasperatingly I can't find the exact address again.
- bloak 3y ago443 Manchester Road. See https://paulplowman.com/stuff/house-address-twins-proximity/ https://paulplowman.com/stuff/house-address-twins-proximity/
- Doctor_Fegg 3y agoThat’s it - thank you!
- marssaxman 3y agoI used to live on a street like this in Seattle: three blocks from its northern end, the numbering scheme resets and begins counting back up. Seven houses in the northern section therefore share their numbers with houses twelve blocks south. Mine was not one of them, but I got many calls from confused delivery drivers all the same, looking on the wrong section of the street for my seemingly-nonexistent house.
- cwmma 3y agoIn Boston (Massachusetts USA) there are two different 24 School Streets, the other one is in a community that were annexed by Boston, so you'd say 24 School St Jamaica Plain but saying "Boston" isn't wrong either. For a long time Google Maps for some reason didn't store the zip code when you put this as your work address and would simply choose whichever one was closest to the destination.
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- dan-robertson 3y agoThese are all quite fun oddities. The one about house number and post code being insufficient is reasonably obvious if you’ve lived in a village in the uk where it’s pretty common for houses to not have numbers (only names like ‘the old school house’) and later be split up into two semi-detached houses hence getting separate numbers leaving the village with lots of number 1 or 2 houses. So far I’ve already lived in places where a number+postcode were insufficient, where one building had multiple postcodes, on a one-word street, and I worked at an ‘& a half’ address. The street number thing I’ve noticed is mostly that as buildings have grown since the numberings were introduced, they became much less sequential so you see a lot more round numbers – buildings would rather be number 20 than 19 (and they’d really like to be number one), for example.
- carstenhag 3y agoI'm glad that in Germany it's not as weird as in the UK then... we only sometimes have postal issues on newly zoned areas.
- Havoc 3y agoDespite the oddities it is actually quite nice in practice. Almost all websites are hooked into this so filling out an address is usually just type in your postcode & select your flat number from the list.
- beej71 3y agoI don't know if they still do it, but a cousin of mine in England in the 80s lived in a house with no number. It was simply "The Woodlands" in that particular village.
- justneedaname 3y agoYeah this is very common in the UK for a house to have a name rather than number, particularly in old villages.
- rahimnathwani 3y agoI have a friend whose address is The Blue House.
- ralferoo 3y agoDo you call him The Bear?
- ProllyInfamous 3y agoIs the house some other color?
- rahimnathwani 3y agoNo, it's blue.
- Minor49er 3y agoThis reminds me of the "What is the minimal possible UK address?" post from earlier this year https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34995370 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34995370
- pbhjpbhj 3y agoIt's more "minimalising UK postal addresses" IMO, but still good. "No.10" I think would be a pretty good answer for shortest address most likely to arrive at a specific building. You might get away with "#10"? Although, post for Number 10, Downing Street, might be actually processed elsewhere; so maybe it's a fail.
- pdpi 3y agoI've been in London for over ten years, and family back in Portugal still struggles with the idea that Flat <number> <Post code> UK is enough to uniquely identify my address.
- rahimnathwani 3y agoI grew up in London, in a house that shared a postcode with only one other house. A school friend didn't believe I would successfully receive mail addressed with only my forename and postcode. (Until he tried it and I brought the received letter to school.)
- syncsynchalt 3y agoSometimes you don't even need that: https://boingboing.net/2007/01/04/royal-mail-delivers.html https://boingboing.net/2007/01/04/royal-mail-delivers.html
- notahacker 3y agothere's an Irish blog dedicated to testing their post service like this https://www.meversusanpost.com https://www.meversusanpost.com My favourite is still the one addressed to "gobshites", which was delivered to their parliament as the sender intended
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- comprev 3y agoHere in Ireland the "Eire Code" is even more accurate than a UK Post Code. Each building has a unique code. https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/consumer/phone-internet-tv-and-postal-services/eircode/#l98fb3 https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/consumer/phone-interne...
- TMWNN 3y agoI know that Eircode saw very little use at launch. Has this changed?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- MissTake 3y agoI remember as a young girl growing up being proud that the little village I lived in was in the Guinness Book of Records for the highest postal address of 2679 Stratford Road, B94 5NH. Gobsmacked to read, now half away around the globe, that 50 years later that’s still more or less the case…
- bombcar 3y agoIn the USA, land of grids laid on uninhabited land centuries ago, an address of 10,000 is only remarkable because of the zeros, not the size.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y agoWe're saturated with roads that are 3 houses long, each house has a 5 digit address.
- dcminter 3y agoI used to live in a New Road that ended in a gate onto a farm. Then the farmer sold the land for development and a furtherance of the road was built with access from the opposite direction. The gate remained and is firmly locked. So it became necessary to explain when calling for a taxi that they should find us on "Old New Road, not new New Road." I rather hope those get perpetuated into signage at some point...
- mrb 3y agoThe house numbered "9156" is most likely a data entry typo where two digits were swapped, and the correct number is "1956". That would make sense especially because the other house number are "below 2000" as the author claims. Edit: the alleged address is: 9156 Mill Ln, Ilketshall St Andrew, Beccles NR34 8JL, UK In the dataset of all UK property sales since 1995 (http://prod.publicdata.landregistry.gov.uk.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/pp-complete.csv http://prod.publicdata.landregistry.gov.uk.s3-website-eu-wes...) there are other houses on that street but their "street numbers" are names like "CHERRY TREES" or "BLACKSMITHS" and that one house is "9156". So I don't immediately see where the other houses numbered "below 2000" are. Maybe not on Mill Ln, but other streets? In any case, Google maps has two street numbers for the house: 9156 but also 56: https://www.google.com/maps/place/56+Mill+Ln,+Beccles+NR34+8JL,+UK/@52.4348053,1.4987558,20z/data=!4m15!1m8!3m7!1s0x47d9f41faeac19b9:0x17793b68febf6445!2s9156+Mill+Ln,+Ilketshall+St+Andrew,+Beccles+NR34+8JL,+UK!3b1!8m2!3d52.4347617!4d1.4986994!16s%2Fg%2F11c1yltz5s!3m5!1s0x47d9f41fafc83d79:0x620a83cd23d23ffa!8m2!3d52.4349933!4d1.4989201!16s%2Fg%2F11s8ygjfvy?entry=ttu https://www.google.com/maps/place/56+Mill+Ln,+Beccles+NR34+8...
- am_lu 3y agoNot sure if Diamond Geezer is reading this forum, he may be, some of his blog posts get reposted in here and sometimes mentions extra 100k views. https://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com https://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com
- ralferoo 3y agoSlightly off-topic, but the address system in Venice is fascinating. It's divided into 6 regions, and each building is numbered sequentially within that region regardless of what street it's in. Sounds weird, but I still remember the address of an amazing pizza place I ate at almost 20 years ago: Pizzeria Jazz Club Novocento at San Polo 900.
- TazeTSchnitzel 3y agoThat sounds a bit like the block-based (rather than street-based) addressing used for cities in some parts of the world (at least Japan).
- comprev 3y agoI worked for a company once who dealt exclusively with UK address data. We compiled it from dozens of sources then cleaned, organised it and became a reputable source of truth. Our end clients were large companies, such as utilities/marketing, who sent in their (incomplete/wrong) data - and were provided with healthy data. Such data was used for validating buildings, for example a gas company checking for fraud or voting registration. I learned a great deal about something so often overlooked!
- jimnotgym 3y agoMy favourite is this oddly named street in the village of Pontesford, Shropshire. Linley Terrace the sign says... then in small writing, 'This side only'. The other side of the road is Linley Avenue! You can see the signs on each side on this streetview 28 Linley Terrace https://maps.app.goo.gl/CapSpetAsm3pDzx98 https://maps.app.goo.gl/CapSpetAsm3pDzx98
- qingcharles 3y agoThat whole article and no mention at all of Milton Keynes where the streets are just named H for horizontal and V for vertical?! https://theviewfrombradwellcommon.wordpress.com/2019/12/31/milton-keynes-grid-roads-names/ https://theviewfrombradwellcommon.wordpress.com/2019/12/31/m...
- JdeBP 3y agoAll of those confusing streets in Bedworth? They aren't streets. They are blocks of flats or small terraces all around the Bedworth Water Tower. Here is Lye Corner with Emes Walk in the background: https://gnb-user-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/cnb/images/suttons/notices/929/gallery/2ddcfcebd80079a1ec890ce3c8c52e6a.jpg https://gnb-user-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/cnb/images/suttons... And here are Old Penns Yard and Bucklers Yard next to each other: https://media.rightmove.co.uk/249k/248921/86331009/248921_c88d9cf5-b9e2-44c0-8822-366763461ddd_IMG_00_0000.jpeg https://media.rightmove.co.uk/249k/248921/86331009/248921_c8...
- HelloNurse 3y agoRegarding high house numbers, I suspect there might be numbering systems that skip most numbers, for example similar to the highly rational one adopted since the Napoleonic period in a large part of Lucca: meters from the beginning of the street, rounded odd on one side and even on the opposite side.
- TMWNN 3y agoBetter to have quirky and amusing oddities in a system, than a system that doesn't exist at all. There was another HN posting some months ago, about a Central American country that had a fully functioning nationwide street-address system ... which disintegrated because it was not maintained. Now it is almost impossible to mail anything to the country, because every address is some variant of "thirty steps from the grocery store". Take nothing for granted. Everything requires upkeep, maintenance, and renewal. This applies to buildings, ethics, cultures, laws, borders, militaries, and constitutions.
- xg15 3y agoNo mention of Platform 9 3/4? I'm disappointed.