A short excursion

Regular readers will know that I have been looking at the names of people - on which see, for example, reference 1. Today, I thought I would branch out into the names of places.

Turning up a downloadable list of the names of the streets of Epsom turned out to be ridiculously easy, with Bing taking me straight to reference 2. I have no idea how this list was compiled or how accurate it is, beyond a bit of very basic checking - which did not turn up any problems - but it is good enough for my present purposes, which was to get an idea of how streets were named, what were they named for.

So I get the list snapped above.

From this odd looking outfit, advertisement infested.

Said to be part of this even odder looking outfit. See references 2, 3 and 4.

But the list of names did download into Excel, where a little fiddling around put it into reasonable shape, all 758 streets of it. As luck would have it the letter 'K' is not very common in Epsom street names, and so it made a handy delimiter for the 'text-to-columns' feature of Excel. I dare say there were more geeky ways of doing this, but this way worked well enough for me.

Putting the list into random order, I then tried to classify the first thirty names according to where they came from, which proved a lot harder than I had been expecting.

Some names of big houses. Rather more names of places and names of persons. Quite a lot of names of features. But it was hard to be sure without doing rather more work than I was prepared to do. Bing on 'Garlichill' for example brought up lots of estate agents' stuff about the road in question and nothing much else. While Google on 'Garlichill etymology' brought up some curious material about the landing of garlic supplies and lanes leading up the banks of rivers from riverside wharves. But how did it get to Epsom?

I then tried another tack. What could one say about what letter the streets of Epsom started with?

Fairly quickly leading to the pivot table above. The high frequency of 'W' is probably mostly down to the Woodcote House which featured in the previous list. From which I associated to a neighbour once pointing out that people on the Woodcote Estate like it to be thought that they have money, while those that live on the Chase Estate know that they have.

I learned how to use the TRANSPOSE function, which was easy. But I have not learned how to stop the RAND function recalculating every you time you touch the worksheet - or at least, that was how it seemed. Which is why the random numbers, used for sampling, do not run from high to low down the page.

Other matters

I dare say that the names of streets in places like the City of London or the centre of Exeter, are rather different in this regard than the names of streets in newer towns, never mind housing estates. But no time to go into that.

I think a chap called Proust got well into the names of places too, more than a hundred years ago now. Bing turns up reference 5, but no time to go into that either.

Conclusions

Probably yet another case of it being better to look at a text book than trying to go back to basics. At least, having had a bit of a go, that would be a sensible next step. A bit of delegation needed. 

And what would Gemini have had to say about it all? A lot quicker and easier than turning something up in a book, perhaps Chambers Encyclopaedia in the first instance.

PS 1: the above message arrived in my in-box this morning. To which my response is that I do worry about where all this AI is taking us, but, for the moment, Gemini is well worth what I pay Google for it.

PS 2: the word 'terrorist' seems to be getting badly abused these days, having become a label for anything seriously bad that happens on the streets. I dare say that it is true that counter-terrorism units in territorial police forces do not have all that much to do most of the time - like firemen in the bad old days - so there is no harm in trying to make more use of them. But maybe they need to be rebranded - and maybe the media should be told to calm down a bit. This from the front page of today's Guardian.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/02/more-names.html.

Reference 2: https://geographic.org/streetview/england/south_east_england/surrey/epsom_and_ewell/epsom.html. 

Reference 3: https://geographic.org/.

Reference 4: https://theodora.com/.

Reference 5: https://genius.com/Marcel-proust-place-names-the-name-chapter-4-lyrics.