Just as I was beginning to worry that there was little to write about this week, imagine my joy when I stumbled upon this– a recently published technical consultation about how streets are named. Street names are an absolutely fascinating study (odonymy, for those who are interested), which can reveal an awful lot about an area. Traditional naming conventions give us areas named after professions (both every day and somewhat less salubrious…), geographical features, locally prominent people and a variety of other factors. They help, more so perhaps than merely geographically, to place ourselves within history and localities.

In the modern era in the UK street naming is reliant upon three separate acts of Parliament, the Public Health Acts Amendment Act 1907, the Public Health Act 1925 and the London Building Acts (Amendment) Act 1939. These three pieces of legislation however do not match each other, and allow for variance in how names are arrived at. This is a particular problem outside of Greater London, where councils can choose their procedure from either of the first two. Many choose the 1925 Act, as this does not require a vote of local taxpayers to assign names.

The Government is very keen on moving to a single system across the UK, which would require a local vote on changes to street names, which they say will prevent councils from imposing street name changes on unwilling residents. As so often these days, part of the motivation behind this change is making it more difficult for streets named after historical figures now considered to be of dubious morality to be changed, without public agreement, a road-based analogue to the statue issue that has garnered so many column inches.

It’s interesting to see this one labelled as a technical consultation, given that we think it’s unlikely we’ll see a broader consultation on the changes. The names of the streets people live on can be very important for them- many families even adopt their street names as metonymic references to homes and other branches of the family. Whilst the Government would probably argue that their proposals only bolster the ability of people to defend their place names, we do wonder if their cited reason for the change (to stop councils unilaterally changing names without discussion with homeowners) is actually that good a reason. We can’t find any obvious examples of this happening, though we’re willing to be corrected.

This might also be one of those changes that actually is going to have the opposite effect to that which the Government intends. One of the big problems with so-called culture war issues, of which this is an offshoot, is that most polling indicates that the Government are way out of step with the public on it. Most people are either apathetic, unaware of the idea or tend to support the removal of reminders and tributes to controversial figures in the public sphere. Might they instead of making supposed historical erasure more difficult, instead make it more easy?

In light of its technical consultation status, it’s unlikely to reach wide circulation, so it’ll be interesting to see what sort of response it gets. It’ll also be interesting to see how local authorities implement any following changes. If the Government implement a simple majority voting system, that may well be even more controversial with the public than not having any consultation- could we see communities driven to division over referenda? Would consultation and engagement not be better?

Unfortunately, the consultation isn’t really very clear on what exactly it’s proposing. It talks about getting consent for street name changes, which would imply a simple vote, but also refers to engagement, which would imply the vote to be the culmination of a longer process of discussion. We’ll keep an eye on how it does, we may even venture a response suggesting that consultation and engagement might be a better way to handle it than a simple straightforward vote, which might create social frictions.