Template talk:Street name etymologies of London

Background[edit]

I've always been fascinated by the street names in London - I recently found a book (The Streets of London – A dictionary of the names and their origins by S Fairfield) and thought it would be good idea to create some Wikipedia pages based on the information there, esp as it's out of print. There's also a similar book by Gillian Bebbington I'm hoping to get hold of (alas also out of print), which will be useful as a second source.(please bear with me as this will take time - I am adding further sources as often as possible, this is still a work in progress. Sdrawkcab. 10/10/17)

I've concentrated on central London for now, and have endeavoured to list every street and alley etc., hence why there some entries with unknown next to them (hopefully the Bebbington book will help with some of these...) The boundaries are of course arbitrary to an extent (except for well defined areas like Mayfair or the City), however it is a necessary evil as one page with all the streets on it would be far too unwieldy. This is also part of the reason why I've split off certain sub-districts (St Luke's, Hatton Garden etc.), esp when they are well-defined.

In the future people may wish to add suburban areas - however aside from the problem that district boundaries are far more nebulous in the the suburbs, gaining reputable sources for many areas will be difficult, so the level of coverage will likely be much less thorough. Also, I confess that such a Herculean task is beyond me ;O)

Sdrawkcab (talk) 20:59, 7 October 2017 (UTC)sdrawkcab[reply]

update - Nov 2017[edit]

I’m almost ‘done’ with the streets now. Just to clarify, my modus operandi has been as follows:

. Write a list of all the streets/roads/alleys etc. in a given area, using mainly the A-Z Super-Scale London (https://www.az.co.uk/?nid=60&iid=9311) and other sources (inc. sometimes on foot).

. I then added all the street etymologies I could. My main two sources have been: - London Street Names by Gillian Bebbington (1972) and - The Streets Of London: A Dictionary Of The Names And Their Origins by Sheila Fairchild (1983) I’ve also used E. Ekwall’s Streets Names of the City of London for the City, BHO’s Survey of London (https://www.british-history.ac.uk/search/series/survey-london), and various other web sources. For most of the pages I’ve exhausted the above sources (still need to reference a few pages with the Bebbington book – will be done next week).

A couple of people have raised the issue the ‘unknown’ streets. My thinking in keeping them on there is that they are not necessarily unknown, just not covered in the above sources. I’m sure that a more detailed look into things like local history books etc. will reveal them. If they are deleted completely then I/other people won’t know which ones are left to research. Maybe another term could be used, or just left blank?

Sdrawkcab (talk) 14:40, 3 November 2017 (UTC)sdrawkcab[reply]

Who was the other editor, apart from me? It would be good to get a third opinion. However, I'm pretty clear that we shouldn't be saying something is unknown unless we have a source that says it is unknown - deciding that it is for ourselves is original research. I'm not really sure what other term you could use, so leaving blank might be the best option. Cordless Larry (talk) 17:46, 3 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Yes I think that will be best going forward - I'll go back over the old pages at some point. The other user was User:Ritchie333. Sdrawkcab (talk) 21:03, 4 November 2017 (UTC)sdrawkcab[reply]