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How many High Streets are there in London?
- dave4420 2y agoThis ignores all the High Roads…
- Zariel 2y agoMissed at least Borough High Street
- gerikson 2y agoThis is addressed later in the piece: > The reason for this is that all the High Streets in Inner London are called Something High Street. [...] > Something High Streets in Inner London: Aldgate, Battersea, Borough, Bromley, [...]
- pasc1878 2y agoand then get shown in the second map. Seeing may of the comments here leads me to the conclusion that some are not reading the whole article (but then again I have read dg's blog for 15+ years and realise that he usually deals with all exceptions in the article and you have to read it all)
- NikkiA 2y agoYou're talking like you think people come to HN to learn things rather than argue the toss over a moving goalpost.
- StanislavPetrov 2y agoIf you really want to blow your mind search out the Peachtree streets in Atlanta!
- DebtDeflation 2y agoI was there on business a few years back. It's honestly infuriating. It would seem that the majority of roads are named by some combination of Cardinal/Ordinal direction (North, South, East, West, Northeast, Southwest, etc.) + " Peachtree " + Road Type (Road, Street, Avenue, Boulevard, Lane, etc.)
- sib 2y agoMy "favorite" thing about Atlanta is the so-called Perimeter Center.
- justincormack 2y agoI think a lot of inner London roads were renamed to disambiguate hence the X High Street pattern. A lot of roads used to have signs saying “formerly Y road” when I was a kid in London.
- throw46365 2y agoIndeed, and presumably well before 1965, which is when Greater London was created. Most of the non-disambiguated High Streets will be in the Greater London boroughs (Bromley, Bexley etc.) When I was a kid, Bromley was already a London borough. But we sure as heck didn't consider Orpington to be proper London! ;-)
- ldjb 2y agoToday's blog post is related: London's shortest and longest High Streets https://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2024/06/londons-shortest-and-longest-high.html https://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2024/06/londons-shortest-...
- fanf2 2y agoSo why is the tube station on Kensington High Street called High Street Kensington?
- yzydserd 2y agoIt was earlier “High Street (Kensington)”
- crazal 2y agoThis would be more interesting if you'd actually identified the higher order concept of a high street not just if it had "High Street" in the name. The removal of streatham which is the longest High Street in Europe is a bit odd. https://www.mystreatham.com/10-facts-you-didnt-know-about-streatham/ https://www.mystreatham.com/10-facts-you-didnt-know-about-st... `In the UK, a "high street" refers to the primary business and commercial street in a town, city or borough, where most of the shops, banks, restaurants, and other businesses are concentrated. It is often considered the main shopping area and social hub of a community.`
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- walthamstow 2y agoThat's a much harder project IMO. In order to determine which is the main shopping street in a community, you have to start with drawing the communities. That's a tall order in London as the lines are blurry and change over time.
- yardstick 2y agoCould start with a postcode approach. Not as accurate but it provides for a consistent and easy to verify methodology.
- PUSH_AX 2y agoOr do the reverse? Identify streets with a certain category of commercial business, with quantity above a certain threshold. The area/community can be derived after.
- KeplerBoy 2y agoPretty sure you'd just end up with a map of public transportation lines. All major shops have to be where people regularly pass by on their commute to work in the inner city. This is probably very different in US suburbia, but it should be true for London and other densely populated areas.
- DrBazza 2y agoThe diamondgeezer site is one my favourites along with ianvisits.co.uk and londonreconnections.com - there's all sorts of content on there about the absolutely most 'niche' things you can think of in London. And then you find out about things like the Pocket Parks, what's on in London, mudlarking, and so on. Odd things like the Cannon St. to Mansion House tube run, and then a parkour version to Barbican https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXMPRK2LQAE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXMPRK2LQAE Too many to list.
- dfgdfg34545456 2y agoLooks like Farringdon that they end up at. Amazing video either way, thanks.
- Daub 2y agoMornington Crescent?
- throw156754228 2y agoIt cuts, it seems like a big cut, then you see them coming down Peters Ln, then onto Cowcross.
- pledg 2y agoSadly there’s cuts in that video and bits where they run that make no sense. (Barbican resident)
- macintux 2y agoI doubt I'll ever make it to London, but on YouTube I subscribe to J. Draper, who is a tour guide and historian. Her recent video on railings in London is vastly more interesting than one might suspect. https://youtu.be/JHvKvOUSor4 https://youtu.be/JHvKvOUSor4
- DrBazza 2y agoWhich reminds me of the lamp posts in Canary Wharf - the original ones are all uniquely enscribed: https://londonist.com/london/best-of-london/a-lamp-post-tour-of-london https://londonist.com/london/best-of-london/a-lamp-post-tour... And half the bollards are old cannons. https://stephenliddell.co.uk/2022/11/28/the-london-street-bollards-that-are-old-cannons/ https://stephenliddell.co.uk/2022/11/28/the-london-street-bo... And the old cobbles were wooden. - https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/the-time-when-londons-streets-were-paved-with-wood-13485/ https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/the-time-when-londons-s...
- yzydserd 2y agoThere are also at least 26 London Roads in London, generally named as the road leading to the then much smaller London. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Road https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Road
- karanveer 2y agodamn
- zeristor 2y agoI find Liverpool Street irksome, since it doesn’t point to Liverpool. Apparently it was named after Lord Liverpool.
- outop 2y agoIf it was called 'Liverpool Road' you would be more justified in expecting it to lead to Liverpool.
- timomaxgalvin 2y agoSpare a thought for the residents of Norwich who have the following trains from Norwich London Liverpool Street Liverpool Lime Street
- rahimnathwani 2y agoI'm not sure I trust that Wikipedia page because: - It introduces the list as "There are twenty six in London itself. They are:" but the list contains only 23 items. - There are three separate entries for a single London Road (the one that goes through Norbury, Thornton Heath and Croydon).
- wcedmisten 2y agoIf anyone wants to make a similar map in their own city or with a different street name, you can use Overpass Turbo to query OpenStreetMap data for this. Just comparing the maps visually, they seem to match. [1] [out:json][timeout:25]; {{geocodeArea:London}}->.searchArea; nwr["name"="High Street"](area.searchArea); out geom; [1]: https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1ME6 https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1ME6
- zaik 2y agoIs it also possible to count the distinct streets? "out count" instead of "out geom" gives a much higher number than 57.
- wcedmisten 2y agoI'm not sure. It's because the streets are made of multiple segments ("ways" in OSM terms), which are being counted separately. I think the query would need to join connected segments to get a true number of streets.
- SideburnsOfDoom 2y agoDoing a top-of the head estimate in the spirit of Fermi's method ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem ): There are 32 London boroughs, and several "primary business and commercial street" per borough, call it 3 or 4? So about 90-120 high streets, as a ballpark. The Article says: "You could argue that makes a total of 103 High Streets." So close enough.
- ralferoo 2y agoI got as far as looking at the map and my immediate thought was "basically, almost none of these are actually in London". The second map with the red ones is more like the proper answer.
- ralferoo 2y agoHaha, I guess everyone downvoting my comment is sore that they don't live in London proper! Otherwise, I'm not sure why so many people have downvoted a comment pointing out that an article talking about roads in London is excluding on a technicality the roads in Central London that fulfil the criteria (the technicality being that they were renamed to include a determinant precisely because it was confusing) but includes roads that are only considered as being in London if you think everything inside the M25 is London. And yet, these weren't renamed because they weren't in Central London and so weren't deemed to be in conflict with each other. The residents in many of these places would consider them to be towns in their own right, and not in fact part of London.
- helij 2y agoMaybe because they actually are in London?
- pjc50 2y agoEverything inside the M25 is part of London, yes. This may annoy the residents of Watford who think they are not part of London because they aren't in the GLA, but morally it's London. If you are in a London postcode or a "London Borough of .." you are definitely in London.
- ralferoo 2y agoThat was kind of my point. Many of these places don't have London postcodes nor are in the 020 phone district, and have had their own identity for a very long time as towns in their own right. Some of them have in recent years been subsumed into boroughs that are now Greater London, but they have historically never been considered to be London. Some of these places inside the M25 are not even in Greater London boroughs. Despite your baseless claim that they are "morally" part of London, factually they aren't. But anyway, my point was that these places in the article aren't really "in London" - they're merely on the periphery, and while it might be administratively convenient to sometimes lump them together as "Greater London", the fact remains that someone in e.g. Ealing when someone says "Let's meet on the High Street" isn't going to get confused and trek over to Acton or any of the other High Streets even further away, because the place feels like its own little area distinct from and separate to the real London.
- sparky_z 2y agoIt killes me that they identified the longest high street and shortest high street, but didn't bother to figure out the highest high street.
- zeristor 2y agoProbably High Barnet High Street. There are a few other contenders though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest_points_in_London https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest_points_in_Lond...
- zeristor 2y ago“High streets in Great Britain Mapping the location and characteristics of high streets in Great Britain, working with experimental Ordnance Survey High Street extents and Office for National Statistics data.” https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/articles/highstreetsingreatbritain/march2020 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...
- tristramb 2y agoThe decision to prefix some 'High Street's with the name of the local town or village was probably taken by the General Post Office in order to reduce ambiguity in addressing letters. They did something similar with the names of some towns (adding 'by sea' or 'on Thames' for example).
- lewispollard 2y agoWhere I live, there is a suburb called Crookes - one of the oldest settlements in the area, called Krkor by the Vikings - which has a high street named Crookes. Not Crookes High Street, or Crookes Road - just Crookes. Confuses the hell out of delivery drivers and people new to the area (and of course the locals become belligerent if you dare refer to it as "Crookes High Street"). The road itself is over 1000 years old, according to local records.
- countrymile 2y agoMore exciting, perhaps, are the number of roads in Britain called "the street": https://peterejkemp.github.io/demos/roman_roads/roman_roads.html https://peterejkemp.github.io/demos/roman_roads/roman_roads....
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y agoor my favorite, a multi-mile vehicular route in eastern Pennsylvania called "Street Road". It always puzzled me that this doesn't appear to exist in the UK, since "Street" is actually the name of at least one town.
- redjet 2y agoYou have "Cannon Street Road" that runs from Wapping up to Whitechapel in east London but I can't think of any others: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/51.51016/-0.06012&layers=P https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/51.51016/-0.06012&laye...
- tremarley 2y agoI’ve counted 20 high streets from memory that aren’t mentioned in this article. There are probably a lot more I can’t remember right now
- pasc1878 2y agoI doubt it dg is a completist . He would welcome any corrections so please list those you think he has missed.
- odanalysis 2y agoChecked for my two closest ones, not present...
- pasc1878 2y agoWhere are they?
- blackhaz 2y agoChiswick High Rd is not included.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y agoHe is explicit about the list being of high streets, which is why Streatham High Rd and many other High Rds are not included.
- pasc1878 2y agodg follows up about High Roads and other questions https://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2024/06/high-streets.html https://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2024/06/high-streets.html Many of his points are answers to issues raised here - he has read this thread.
- twic 2y ago> Then it ended up on Hacker News, the behemoth American syndicator Hey, not all HN users are behemoth Americans.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- radicality 2y agoUsed to live London. Didn’t know that it’s actually “Kensington High Street”, since the underground/subway station there is called “High Street Kensington” - why the discrepancy here?