North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs

May 8, 2024 5:42 AM

North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs. A local authority has announced it will ban apostrophes on street signs to avoid problems with computer systems. North Yorkshire Council is to ditch the problematic punctuation point as it says it can affect geographical databases. The council said all new street signs would be produced without one, regardless of previous use.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries (97 comments total)

Which solution is more practical, stickers or Sharpies?
posted by Faint of Butt at 5:55 AM on May 8 [9 favorites]

HTH did they find a university lecturer in English who didn't decry this? I would have thought this is serious "Eats, Shoots, and Leaves" territory.
posted by wenestvedt at 5:56 AM on May 8 [1 favorite]

In Melbourne, there's a large street called "St Georges Road", following an apostrophe removal. The main consequence of this is that Google Maps directions pronounces it "Saint Zhorzhe Road".

You can't not affect computer databases.
posted by cogat at 6:05 AM on May 8 [6 favorites]

i believe small bore rifles or handguns are the preferred tool for editing road sign punctuation in rural counties like North Yorkshire
posted by logicpunk at 6:05 AM on May 8 [5 favorites]

Nice of North Yorkshire to advertise that their DB admins and IT staff are dangerously incompetent.
posted by srboisvert at 6:12 AM on May 8 [30 favorites]

Nice of North Yorkshire to advertise that their DB admins and IT staff are dangerously incompetent.

This. You can escape the apostrophe. Convenient tojjust say "computer says no" though.
posted by Zumbador at 6:23 AM on May 8 [2 favorites]

Nice of North Yorkshire to advertise that their DB admins and IT staff are dangerously incompetent.

Yeah, this isn't even Unicode compliance: isn't it just ASCII 39? So that means they're using a character set of 52 letters plus ten numbers? Or, no, I bet it's an old IBM Selectric ball where you use a lower case L for the one digit and a capital o for the zero!
posted by wenestvedt at 6:25 AM on May 8 [6 favorites]

You will never solve this problem. There's a playground clearly labelled "ST MARY'S" nearby and the kids have been pronouncing it "street mary's" for as long as they've been able to read. You may as well lean into the wrong
posted by phooky at 6:25 AM on May 8 [3 favorites]

Sanity prevails at last. Not that it wouldn’t be preferable to keep the apostrophes, but after 60 years of this crap it’s time to recognize reality.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:25 AM on May 8 [2 favorites]

Would be quite funny if they did something similar in South Africa with things like the ë character.

All the high schools would become whore schools (hoër becoming hoer).
posted by Zumbador at 6:31 AM on May 8

Nice of North Yorkshire to advertise that their DB admins and IT staff are dangerously incompetent.

If by “dangerously incompetent” you mean “comply with standards” then yes.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:32 AM on May 8 [1 favorite]

Systems and conventions are fine so long as the magisteria [people; computers; dinosaurs] keep in their separate silos. The problems arise when they interact. There are several options for the tick-superscript
U+0027 = ' apostrophe
U+0060 = ` grave
U+00B4 = ´ acute
U+2018 = ‘ left single
U+2019 = ’ right single [preferred apostr in Cambridge]
U+00B0 = ° bullet hole
U+2024 = ^↩ sharpie
that are all good enough for people but will cause loss and error when software is expected to be as flexible as folks reading each other's handwriting.
posted by BobTheScientist at 6:38 AM on May 8 [3 favorites]

So, the non-flip comment:

Yeah, this isn't even Unicode compliance: isn't it just ASCII 39?
That's the problem. ASCII 39 is a single quote, which is going to be interpreted as "end of string" in a SQL query (and other places!) unless it's escaped. There's a unicode character which suits this purpose (U+2019) that won't trigger that problem, but the thing is this: as long as there's a single quote in there, someone's going to break something. Even if you are sure to sanitize your inputs and train every single person who works for the city to make sure they never get it wrong, somebody's poorly-implemented GPS system will get it wrong, or the post office's system will get it wrong, or the social worker's database will get it wrong, etc.

The number of independently implemented systems that accept street addresses is huge, and many of them are vital. Do you want to make your middle school English teacher happy, or do you want to increase the chances that an ambulance will get to the correct address? Choose one.
posted by phooky at 6:40 AM on May 8 [6 favorites]

I’m pretty sure if nothing unfortunate has occured between the 1994 initial publication of BS7666 and now then all relevant systems have been hardened against Bobby Tables issues, and honestly 1994 was very late in the day not to know about basic data sanitation.

Suspect this is someone being pissy.
posted by Artw at 6:40 AM on May 8 [1 favorite]

If by “dangerously incompetent” you mean “comply with standards” then yes.

I looked at the standards (BS 7666) and I can't find where it says not to use punctuation, but I found two places where it says you can use punctuation:

3.2 Street records: Abbreviations and punctuation should not be used unless they appear in the designated name (e.g. ‘Earl’s Court Road’).
4.4 Street names and descriptions: Abbreviations and punctuation should not be used unless they appear in the designated name, e.g. “Dr Newton’s Way”.

Am I missing something?
posted by april of time at 6:42 AM on May 8 [9 favorites]

(and FWIW most places did this long ago; for instance in NYC street signage has been regularized for ages. St. Mark's is labeled "St Marks", and even though the streets are labelled "1st St", "2nd St" etc. on Google maps, the street signs just read "1 ST", "2 ST". AFAIK this is across all the city's systems.)
posted by phooky at 6:50 AM on May 8 [1 favorite]

The U.S. board of geographic names states ;

Since its inception in 1890, the BGN has discouraged the use of the possessive form—the possessive apostrophe and the “s”
posted by yyz at 6:55 AM on May 8 [1 favorite]

It’s pretty annoying when you’re trying to input a destination on a phone and you have to switch keyboards. Sometimes you can get an autocomplete instead, but there’s no earthly reason we need to keep those artifacts if it’s easier to lose them. Once something becomes a place name, it’s a Proper Noun and the rules are different, ie, the name is whatever the name is.
posted by rikschell at 6:58 AM on May 8

As far as I can tell, a local pizza place here won’t deliver to streets with apostrophes. There is a mismatch in client side versus server side address validation, and as such the system returns as undeliverable if you put in an address with an apostrophe. We moved last fall, farther from the shop but to a street without an apostrophe in the name, and we can now get delivery pizza again!
posted by rockindata at 7:02 AM on May 8 [6 favorites]

Not sure I can find the actual standard text anywhere online: it seems to be paywalled. Any interpretation documents I can find don't seem to have a problem with characters outside [A-Za-z]. That may be in context of the use of Welsh and Gaelic. These suspicious characters are of course only for the bloody Taffs and Jockos and have no place in Ingerland, a country invaded by France in 1066.

Then again, this could be some trolling from the council. While North Yorkshire is "no overall control" it's very very very conservative. Of the 90 seats, 44 are Conservative, with 3 Independents shoring up the majority. My sister lives in the area. Her MP is the PM, in the safest Conservative seat in England. It's the kind of place that when the local hunt's pack of hounds come through your garden to dig up stuff and shit on everything, you say “Thank you, m'lud” because the only people you can complain to typically ride with the hunt.
posted by scruss at 7:04 AM on May 8 [1 favorite]

Well I don't even want pizza from someone who who doesn't recognise apostrophes.
posted by biffa at 7:04 AM on May 8 [13 favorites]

Am I missing something?

No, that's the funniest part. The spec clearly allows for such punctuation.

It feels more like some particular system was not coded to manage this properly, and rather than fix the system the signs have to change.
posted by Ayn Marx at 7:05 AM on May 8 [4 favorites]

Did someone’s kid make an app?
posted by Artw at 7:07 AM on May 8 [4 favorites]

Am I missing something?

Indirectly, yes. In order to play nice with GeoPlace you have to follow a superseding set of GeoPlace DEC-Addresses rules.

In section 2.5.3 you'll find an extra rule for BS7666 addresses:

Abbreviations or punctuation must not be used in the Primary
Addressable Object or Secondary Addressable Object, for
example, “First Floor” rather than “1st Floor” and “Marks House”
rather than “Mark’s Hse”.

posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:09 AM on May 8 [1 favorite]

It’s pretty annoying when you’re trying to input a destination on a phone and you have to switch keyboards

a) good keyboards don't make you switch in order to use basic punctuation? (Granted, I do have to do a long press on mine if autocomplete/autocorrect don't do it automatically.)
b) I nonetheless don't usually go out of my way to include apostrophes in map or search apps, yet all the apps and sites I've used are sufficiently not-stupid that they know what street I mean regardless. That's been the case for a long time.

This decision is really odd.

Are O'Leary and O'Sullivan next?
posted by trig at 7:13 AM on May 8 [1 favorite]

Feels like I'm dreaming. I went to sleep on O Captain My Captain Street and when I woke up, all the signs were blank.
posted by aws17576 at 7:20 AM on May 8 [1 favorite]

In section 2.5.3 you'll find an extra rule for BS7666 addresses:

Okay. But section 2.5.4 says:

The exceptions to these rules are: If the characters form part of the Official Address. [...]

So I think it also doesn't apply here, since the apostrophes were part of the official address? And if there are exceptions, then the system must be able to support them anyway...
posted by april of time at 7:21 AM on May 8 [2 favorites]

just rename the streets so that there's a backslash before every apostrophe. st. mary\'s walk. easy peasy.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 7:21 AM on May 8 [20 favorites]

next theyll be coming for our commas

use them, while you still, CAN
posted by elkevelvet at 7:21 AM on May 8 [3 favorites]

We moved last fall, farther from the shop but to a street without an apostrophe in the name, and we can now get delivery pizza again!

That seems a, perhaps, unusual reason to move house - but if the pizza is really good, then it's really good, so fair enough.
posted by Wordshore at 7:24 AM on May 8 [4 favorites]

We moved last fall, farther from the shop but to a street without an apostrophe in the name, and we can now get delivery pizza again!


You should move to &size=XXL;price=0;extra=12_garlic_bread St.
posted by signal at 7:30 AM on May 8 [21 favorites]

just rename the streets so that there's a backslash before every apostrophe. st. mary\'s walk. easy peasy.

I'd prefer St. Mary'walk, personally.
posted by signal at 7:32 AM on May 8 [4 favorites]

This is also clear discrimination against implementing streets named after Irish people with O' indicating their patronyms.
posted by meehawl at 7:33 AM on May 8 [1 favorite]

The Council is just being full of shit here. Kyzer does the homework, brings the receipts.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 7:40 AM on May 8 [4 favorites]

Meanwhile in the sleepy town of Drop Table, a navigation crisis was unbeknownst brewing
posted by in_lieu_of_fiction at 7:43 AM on May 8 [8 favorites]

So I think it also doesn't apply here, since the apostrophes were part of the official address

It seems to me there is some ambiguity there as they specifically used “Marks House”
rather than “Mark’s Hse” as an example of something that needs to change.

At this point it would be useful to know what the official names of the streets actually are, as opposed to what people may have added locally to make signs grammatically correct.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:45 AM on May 8

Meanwhile, in Hawaii…
posted by Just the one swan, actually at 7:46 AM on May 8 [2 favorites]

The Council is just being full of shit here. Kyzer does the homework, brings the receipts.

Kyzer fails to address the superseding section I pointed to above. Perhaps Kyzer can finish the homework.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:48 AM on May 8

It seems to me there is some ambiguity there as they specifically used “Marks House” rather than “Mark’s Hse” as an example of something that needs to change.

It's saying that if the official name is "Marks House" then you shouldn't enter it as "Mark's Hse". But if the official name really is "Mark's Hse", then that's what it should be entered as.

Kyzer fails to address the superseding section I pointed to above.

It seems like the GeoPlace document has the same exception as BS 7666 itself, which is that the designated or official name takes priority. Kyzer's comment explains that:

The designated streer name here is "St. Mary's Walk" and that's what they should've entered. The standard is merely saying not to change "Saint John Street" to "St. John St" when you enter it, leave it as seen on street signs.

posted by april of time at 7:56 AM on May 8 [1 favorite]

It seems like the GeoPlace document has the same exception as BS 7666 itself, which is that the designated or official name takes priority.

Agreed. But I feel like the GeoPlace document is much more clear calling it out.

The designated street name here is "St. Mary's Walk" and that's what they should've entered. The standard is merely saying not to change "Saint John Street" to "St. John St" when you enter it, leave it as seen on street signs.

The GeoPlace document specifically says "official name" not "designated name". I very much doubt the intention is to make street signs the definitive source for official names.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:01 AM on May 8

I think you're taking the comment too literally - "as seen on street signs" is just an informal way to say whatever the local authority decides is the name, since they are the ones making the street signs. Obviously, vandalizing a street sign doesn't change the official name. But in this case, because the story is about the city council changing the name, we know that the official name was "St. Mary's Walk" and is now "St Marys Walk".

The GeoPlace document specifically says "official name" not "designated name".

There's no difference. BS 7666 defines "designated name" as "provided by the Street Naming and Numbering Authority" and GeoPlace defines "official address" as "officially approved by the SNN Authority." So they're both based on what the SNN Authority says which I guess is the North Yorkshire Council.
posted by april of time at 8:12 AM on May 8 [1 favorite]

Thank goodness sanity has prevailed. Now to get on to many of the other areas of human behavior and culture that have not been optimized for the convenience of technocrat overlords:
- Append a unique alphanumeric string to all baby names to differentiate individuals in databases
- Clean your car license plate weekly to allow police location tracking systems to read them effectively
- Ban sunglasses, they interfere with facial recognition software
- Always wear a high-res 1:1 scale image of your own face on the back of your head so machines can recognize you from every angle
- Ban all slang and contractions to improve voice-recognition
- Legally mandate that all clothing contains standardized RFID tags and machine-vision targets to facilitate targeting by police robot dogs
- All covid masks must be certified pepper-spray permeable
posted by Krawczak at 8:28 AM on May 8 [12 favorites]

“In writing you could say they might disambiguate things that could be ambiguous, so they differentiate between two St Marys walking down the street arm in arm, and 'I live on St Mary's Walk'”

Pardon me Professor of English but shouldn’t that be “two Sts Mary”?
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 8:30 AM on May 8 [4 favorites]

note that when you enter the name of the newly renamed st. mary\'s place you need to escape the special characters, so what you actually type is "st. mary\\\'s place"
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 8:32 AM on May 8 [4 favorites]

this is why i only ever use the what3words system to describe where I am.
posted by chavenet at 8:34 AM on May 8 [2 favorites]

Honestly if we are going to change one thing to make it more convenient for data entry and it’s not date/time what are we doing?
posted by Artw at 8:37 AM on May 8 [1 favorite]

>"St. John St"

also if we're changing street names to avoid annoying errors, may i humbly suggest "sinjin st"?
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 8:41 AM on May 8 [3 favorites]

Honestly if we are going to change one thing to make it more convenient for data entry and it’s not date/time what are we doing?

I've favored the format YYYYMMDD.HHMMSS for decades now, so hear, hear!
posted by grubi at 8:42 AM on May 8 [4 favorites]

Which timezone?
posted by Artw at 8:44 AM on May 8 [2 favorites]

I’m pretty sure if nothing unfortunate has occured between the 1994 initial publication of BS7666 and now then all relevant systems have been hardened against Bobby Tables issues

Maybe not so much.
posted by flabdablet at 8:46 AM on May 8

Which timezone?

...

Damn your eyes!
posted by grubi at 8:48 AM on May 8 [6 favorites]

In section 2.5.3 you'll find...
Okay. But section 2.5.4 says...
Oh, it's going to be one of those arguments.

Regardless of regulations, a system must allow people to use proper names properly, not force proper people to use improper names. The regulations and protocols should STFU about it except to say "People and places have various names. We need to accommodate common name formats without error or complaint."
posted by pracowity at 9:26 AM on May 8 [4 favorites]

It's saying that if the official name is "Marks House" then you shouldn't enter it as "Mark's Hse". But if the official name really is "Mark's Hse", then that's what it should be entered as.

Exactly. In saying that it's recognizing that the common name that is used for something may not be the official name.

There's no difference. BS 7666 defines "designated name" as "provided by the Street Naming and Numbering Authority" and GeoPlace defines "official address" as "officially approved by the SNN Authority." So they're both based on what the SNN Authority says which I guess is the North Yorkshire Council.

Okay, that seems reasonable.

Which returns us to wanting to know the official name as opposed to what someone wrote on a street sign.

For the general case it does appear that Official Names can contain can contain apostrophes, so it would appear that indeed the new policy exceeds what is asked for in BS7666 and the exception from DEC probably applies.

(Ironically though the official name of the "St. Mary's Walk" in Harrogate is, in fact, "St Marys Walk")
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:29 AM on May 8

If your friendly, neighborhood Database-Person can't handle string input, I am available starting at $1,000 per day plus expenses.

Artw: “Honestly if we are going to change one thing to make it more convenient for data entry and it’s not date/time what are we doing?”

grubi: “I've favored the format YYYYMMDD.HHMMSS f”

ISO-8601 or Death!
posted by ob1quixote at 9:38 AM on May 8 [4 favorites]

Oh, it's going to be one of those arguments.

Regardless of regulations, a system must allow people to use proper names properly, not force proper people to use improper names. The regulations and protocols should STFU about it except to say "People and places have various names. We need to accommodate common name formats without error or complaint."

Yeah, I totally agree, computers should adapt to human culture. If the standards did say that the punctuation should be removed, I'd argue that the standards should be changed. I just wanted to point out that in this case, the standards (which the council referenced in their justification) don't even say that.

(Ironically though the official name of the "St. Mary's Walk" in Harrogate is, in fact, "St Marys Walk")

Wait, how is that ironic? Isn't that what we're talking about, that the official name was changed from "St. Mary's Walk" to "St Marys Walk"?
posted by april of time at 9:47 AM on May 8 [1 favorite]

Thank goodness sanity has prevailed. Now to get on to many of the other areas of human behavior and culture that have not been optimized for the convenience of technocrat overlords:

Are you sure that adding apostrophes into the English language wasn't the direct road to fascism? Or are you just used to them now so they don't terrify you?
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:49 AM on May 8

this thread just keeps getting better and better

edit to add: sincerely, I mean this sincerely
posted by elkevelvet at 9:51 AM on May 8 [3 favorites]

adding apostrophes into the English language wasn't the direct road to fascism

Do you want umlauts? Because that's how you get umlauts.
posted by flabdablet at 9:54 AM on May 8 [6 favorites]

As a retired, prescriptivist English teacher I am OUTRAGED that deletion of the apostrophe would even be considered!!

But street signs... okay, so we're talking about its removal where it marks possession, not contractions (whew). Given German as my second language, I can't really argue against this practice (since that's how they mark possessive, if we disregard their implementation of the Genitive case). So, maybe I could adapt. But...

Are O'Leary and O'Sullivan next?
posted by Rash at 9:57 AM on May 8 [1 favorite]

Is there a reason why the street signs can't have a place in the database? With another column in the table you could keep track of changes and make sure the street signs match the traditional name. Since anyone looking for the street can easily just ignore the apostrophe in the real world signage, there shouldn't be any problem for emergency vehicles.

But then the local government would have to care, so there's that.
posted by Vegiemon at 10:07 AM on May 8 [1 favorite]

As a retired, prescriptivist English teacher

Thank heavens they still exist!
posted by grubi at 10:10 AM on May 8 [3 favorites]

the official name was changed from "St. Mary's Walk" to "St Marys Walk"?

No, the official name has always been “St Marys Walk”. No change there. The change to the sign, while being done under a broader mandate from North Hampshire authority, is actually just changing it to match the actual official name.

There are streets officially named “St. Mary’s Walk” in England, but this was never one of them.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 11:08 AM on May 8

Are O'Leary and O'Sullivan next?
That boat already sailed. At the Institute of Technology in the Irish Midlands, where I worked 2013-2020, official institutional names were O Leary and O Sullivan - and Mc Carthy and Mc Grath. I came within an ace of mangling grades when I added a late-registering student as O'Leary and thereby swapped marks between students when I was sorting and melding data from different Excel sheets.
posted by BobTheScientist at 11:14 AM on May 8

There are streets officially named “St. Mary’s Walk” in England, but this was never one of them.

Actually, I don’t have the data to say never but no time recently.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 11:19 AM on May 8

Why would you name something Street Mary's Walk?
What did Street Mary do that was so special she'd get a whole street named after her?
posted by signal at 11:20 AM on May 8 [1 favorite]

Is there a reason why the street signs can't have a place in the database?

Major lack in these stories of any kind of identification of what database we are talking about. All the scenarios I can think of are homebrew stuff like the excel example above - god knows enough of the world runs on excel sheets maintained by non-developers - or corrupt IT consultants selling shoddy goods that probably fall over in a number of other ways.
posted by Artw at 11:30 AM on May 8

No, the official name has always been “St Marys Walk”.

Can you share how you found that out? I couldn't find anything, other than it being listed as "St Mary's Walk" (with an apostrophe but without a period) in Google Maps and Apple Maps.
posted by april of time at 11:32 AM on May 8

> ISO-8601 or Death!

1. the text of iso-8601 is only available if you pay money for it, a thing that has upon occasion frustrated me for semi-professional reasons (professional-adjacent reasons?)
2. if our options are iso-8601 or death, this means that iso controls the lives of us all. we must pay dearly, must pay whatever price they may demand, lest we be cast from iso's nurturing bosom and into the outer darkness
3. iso, its cold inhuman fist wrapped around our fragile bodies, has as such established itself as a hydraulic despot
4. iso is both an echo of the terrible sublime god-kings of old and a harbinger of the far more awful god-emperors who may come

in conclusion: the standard must flow.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 11:34 AM on May 8 [6 favorites]

I’m gonna use something more human and sensible like microseconds since the dawn of UNIX.
posted by Artw at 11:42 AM on May 8 [4 favorites]

the standard must flow.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 11:45 AM on May 8

Can you share how you found that out?

Find My Street allows you to search the entire GeoPlace database for the listed street names.

There are other North Hampshire streets who’s official names do have apostrophes in them, so there hasn’t been any sort of mass change that I can see.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 11:55 AM on May 8

I’m gonna use something more human and sensible like microseconds since the dawn of UNIX.

To name streets?
posted by signal at 12:07 PM on May 8 [4 favorites]

"Turn left at the corner of 954398973495875423 and 20075237489436509234089."
posted by grubi at 12:08 PM on May 8 [2 favorites]

If the streets were established before UNIX, would the names just be negative numbers?
I'm in favor of this reform, I just want to get the details straight before I paint my address on my roof in 4 foot MICR characters to aid drones in locating it.
posted by Krawczak at 12:32 PM on May 8 [1 favorite]

“Turn left at the corner of 954398973495875423 and 20075237489436509234089."

Every street in England does in fact have a long number assigned to it. We could start this today!
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 12:41 PM on May 8 [1 favorite]

Find My Street allows you to search the entire GeoPlace database for the listed street names.

Does it have historical data? I can only find the current street name.
posted by april of time at 12:57 PM on May 8

To name streets?

Sure, fuck it.
posted by Artw at 1:00 PM on May 8

streets should have only sporadically marked names left off of all maps so that the only people who actually know the street names are those who live nearby or who otherwise find themselves going to the area regularly, resulting in outsiders often needing to rely on assistance from locals if they want to find anything.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 1:05 PM on May 8

> a broader mandate from North Hampshire authority

North Yorkshire.
posted by paduasoy at 1:07 PM on May 8

It’s pretty annoying when you’re trying to input a destination on a phone and you have to switch keyboards.
Another way in which crappy technology encourages crappy writing. "Oh, fuck it. I'll just type everything lowercase, abbreviated, and unpunctuated."
posted by pracowity at 1:09 PM on May 8 [3 favorites]

The earliest reference to the street in the British Newspaper Archive that I can see is in 1889, and is as "St. Mary's-walk". The hyphen or dash is at the end of a line, so not clear whether it just represents the run-over name. Other streets in the same article which do not run over lines do also have a hyphen ("Pontefract-lane, York-road"), but on the other hand an article in the same newspaper a few weeks later calls it "St. Mary's Walk". There is a 1915 mention which omits the full stop.

There is another street of the same name in Scarborough, which appears in the paper earlier, 1864. "a most heartless attempt was made to break into the house of Widow Hatton, in St. Mary's Walk. The distressing circumstances of this woman's bereavement were recently brought before the public by the Rev. R. Balgarnie, who had elicited much public sympathy on her behalf, and a considerable sum of money was raised for her and deposited in the Savings Bank. No doubt the villain who attempted to break into the poor woman's house expected to obtain possession of this money, and thus to rob her of her all. A few days before, a strange-looking man called at the house and described himself as a cattle dealer from Norfolk, saying he was acquainted with her sister at Yarmouth; he made particular inquiries as to the funds that had been raised for her, and seemed anxious to assist her in obtaining a livelihood with the money. ... Early on Tuesday morning, Widow Hatton heard a noise at the outer door, as if some one was boring the lock with a gimlet ... the burglar instantly took off. The policeman caught sight of him running up the stops leading to the churchyard and gave chase, but the fellow eluded him among the tombstones."
posted by paduasoy at 1:24 PM on May 8

MetaFilter: the fellow eluded him among the tombstones.
posted by wenestvedt at 1:33 PM on May 8

>a broader mandate from North Hampshire authority
North Yorkshire.

I have been doing that continually all day.


Does it have historical data? I can only find the current street name.

For a historical checkpoint I used this collection of names.

However, now that I look at it again it appears my search was too detailed. As of October 2023 the name was "St Mary's Walk", just not "St. Mary's Walk". So that apostrophe was removed sometime since then.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 1:47 PM on May 8

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.
posted by clavdivs at 1:58 PM on May 8 [2 favorites]

> Another way in which crappy technology encourages crappy writing. "Oh, fuck it. I'll just type everything lowercase, abbreviated, and unpunctuated."
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 2:45 PM on May 8

St Mary’s Walk has a certain something
posted by scruss at 5:09 PM on May 8 [3 favorites]

Every street in England does in fact have a long number assigned to it. We could start this today!

Really? That would be awesome, but where are they listed?

(And if they are just 1:1 with post codes, then they aren't per street really. I currently live on a street with a block of 12 flats halfway down, where the flats have their own postcode different to the street. So this street has two post codes associated with it - the one for the flats, and another for the street either side of it. Similarly, I have lived on some long roads where the post code changed several times along its length.)
posted by Dysk at 6:44 PM on May 8

They’re called USRNs and you can get them here.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:53 PM on May 8 [1 favorite]

Awesome! But I have just found that one of the long streets I mentioned in my previous comment does indeed have three separate USRNs, despite being very much one street.
posted by Dysk at 6:57 PM on May 8

The mystery of the Trinity is not for mere mortals such as us to apprehend.
posted by flabdablet at 8:01 PM on May 8 [1 favorite]

Awesome! But I have just found that one of the long streets I mentioned in my previous comment does indeed have three separate USRNs, despite being very much one street.

Are the USRNs for different legs of the street? If that were the case, it could just be treated as three different streets.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:23 PM on May 8

Escaping to deal with single quotes is not recommended, especially if it's user input being concatted into a SQL query. That's cruising for an injection vulnerability.

Use parameterized queries.


But yeah... legacy systems.
posted by Mister Cheese at 8:55 PM on May 8

Banning punctuation from place names isn't new and is done in other places, for example New Zealand and Australia and dates back to before the computer age:

Geographic Board secretary Wendy Shaw said the practice of not using possessives had been around since the board began in 1924. “The criteria has been there since then, it hasn't really changed,” Shaw said.

If someone put forward a proposal for a new name that included a possessive apostrophe, the board would discourage it. If the proposed name was a plural, the board would look at dropping the “S”.

Shaw said the practice may have started to avoid any potential misinterpretation of an apostrophe in a name on a topographic map as “something on the ground”.

As a software developer myself I naturally warm to the idea of us autocratically bossing everyone else around to make our lives easier but in this case I think we're possibly being made scapegoats.
posted by L.P. Hatecraft at 11:17 PM on May 8 [1 favorite]

Are the USRNs for different legs of the street? If that were the case, it could just be treated as three different streets.

Yes they are, and it is indeed treating different "legs" as different streets, but some of the examples have the USRN changing not at a junction, halfway down a short close. That is definitely one street with two USRNs no matter how you slice it. It's based on where local authority boundaries are, seemingly.

So, despite what all the official guidance also says, it is not strictly true that "[a USRN] is an eight-digit unique identifier for every street across Great Britain" in that all streets in Great Britain have one or more unique identifiers.
posted by Dysk at 11:37 PM on May 8

Birmingham did this in 2009, so "King's Heath" - so named because that piece of land once belonged to the King - became "Kings Heath". Reports at the time said they did this because "many people find it confusing" but there were a lot of comments that this wasn't useful when trying to teach children grammar at school.
posted by 43rdAnd9th at 3:07 AM on May 9

I want to hear from the contractors who can confirm the "database" is Excel. You don't need to admit that anyone messed it up, or that this change comes from, say, a CSV import.
posted by k3ninho at 3:59 AM on May 9 [2 favorites]

It's based on where local authority boundaries are, seemingly.

That would make sense, as the source of the data is the local authorities and they’re all keeping track of the bits that they are responsible for.

I live in a city where it is unusual for any long straight piece of pavement to NOT change its street name multiple times, so at this point it wouldn’t bother me to change the street name at the local authority boundaries (which is basically what happened here). However, it took me forever to get used to the system, and it continues to baffle tourists regularly. I wouldn’t recommend it.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:26 AM on May 9