Not the election: Some notes on house numbering
Horseshoe theory.
Is it just me or has the Tory-gaffe machine slowed down? I'm not sure whether this is because everyone started talking about Labour instead, or whether CCHQ, too, has realised that this is a marathon not a sprint and they can't possibly keep this up for another five weeks.
At any rate: nothing that has happened in the election campaign the last three days has made me feel moved to start typing, so here’s one I made earlier which has absolutely nothing towards the UK's current general election campaign. This went to paying subscribers back in January. If you like this sort of thing, you know what to do.
In all likelihood, your home has a number. Your office, should you have one, probably does too, and so does the little cafe you pop by every morning.
The idea that places should be numbered, that the built environment should be legible in this way, is so universal these days that it passes unnoticed, and likely doesn’t strike you as something that someone had to invent. But they did, and surprisingly recently, too. House numbering – not just houses, obviously, but I’m going to call it that just to make life easier – has its roots in the Age of Enlightenment, the same broad intellectual trends that gave us the Metric System, Napoleonic rationalisation and the modern state.
Once upon a time, if you didn’t know where someone lived, you had little choice but to ask around. Businesses, meanwhile, would identify themselves with certain widely understood symbols, in a manner that persists outside barbers or pawnbrokers shops or in pub names today. All this only began to change in the 18th century. House numbers were recorded on Prescott Street in Goodman’s Fields (today’s Aldgate) in London as early as 1708. Sixty years later and one narrow sea away, King Louis XV decreed that all French houses outside Paris must be assigned a number – if only to make it easier for the army to work out where it was billetting its soldiers.1
Initially, though, such schemes were neither comprehensive nor, necessarily, rational. An article on the website of London’s fantastic Postal Museum tells the story of Rowland Hill, postal reformer and all round Victorian do-gooder, coming across a street where the house numbering ran 14, 95, 16. On asking the occupant of the middle house how her home came to be so out of place, “she said it was the number of a house she formerly lived at in another street, and it (meaning the brass plate) being a very good one, she thought it would do for her present residence as well as any other”.
There were other problems with the address system, too. The same street could have multiple sets of numbers; the same city could have multiple street names. (The London of 1853 had 35 King Streets, 27 Queen Streets and, in a sign of the times, 25 Albert Streets and Victoria Streets apiece.) There was also no standardised way of describing a location, meaning that postmen found themselves trying to deliver post to such delightfully esoteric addresses as (a real one, cited by that same article), “To my sister Jean, Up the Canongate, Down a Close, Edinburgh. She has a wooden leg.”
So as the 19th century ground on, nations and cities began to rationalise their addresses and standardise their house numbering systems, in a manner that made it much easier to deliver post (or, come to that, conscript an army)2. But they did not all do so the same way. And around the world today you’ll find a number of different house numbering systems in use.
Some of the earliest street numbering schemes used a consecutive or horseshoe system, in which the numbers climb along one side of the street and then back along the other, generally clockwise. This makes sense when dealing with a cul-de-sac, or on streets where one side is occupied by a river, say, or a massive cliff. But it becomes quite confusing where you’re dealing with a longer street (Upper Street, in the north London district of Islington, say, which does this, irritatingly, for an entire mile), as once you get to the middle numbers you can’t be sure on which side of the street anything is going to be.
So at some point, someone worked out that you could encode extra information in an address by putting the odd numbered addresses on one side, and the even ones on the other, generally 1 on the left and 2 on the right as you face the direction of increasing numbers. (I can’t be certain this directionality is universal; but after a quick mental check through addresses I know off the top of my head I’ve not found an exception.) Who first came up with this scheme I’ve no idea, but it was propagated at least partly by – so often the source of standardisation in European public life – Napoleon, who in 1805 decreed that houses in Paris should be numbered in this manner. More than that, he demanded that numbers should run either downstream (on streets which paralleled the river), or towards the Left Bank (where they ran perpendicular to it).
But this – the European system – too, has its disadvantages, namely: what do you do when the number of homes on a particular street changes? A reduction may be relatively easily handled – just skip numbers (jump straight from 51 to 55), or use joint ones (“51-53”). Additions, though, are more difficult. Anglophone countries tend to go with lettered suffixes (9a, 14b, etc); fractions are disappointingly rare, although not unknown. (London Councils, an umbrella group for, well, you can guess, is based at 59½ Southwark Street.) Countries which use romance languages instead prefer to use “bis”, “ter”, “quater” – which turn out to come from the latin for twice, thrice, four times and so on. Delightfully, this means those two tiny branch lines of Paris metro, 3bis and 7bis, are actually “3 (or 7), the second time, in Latin”.
To some extent, this problem is a function of a city being old enough to pre-date house numbering: those which popped up after the age of rationalism had the chance to do it differently. That brings us to our third house numbering regime: the North American system, in which buildings’ numbers are determined instead by their location, rather than merely the number of the next house along. Sometimes that means allocating 100 numbers to each block, and jumping to a round number every time you hit a major cross street; sometimes it means actual physical distance, allocating 100 numbers to every kilometre, say.
There are two advantages to this system that I can see. One is that, unlike the European system, you can always infill: on the 300 block of a particular street, say, there will probably be fewer than 50 plots on either side, so if one gets subdivided there’ll be numbers going spare.
The other is that house numbers can contain information beyond where you are on a particular street. It is possible to use a North American numbering regime in which each street is numbered without reference to the others, so that every street will start at number 1. But many cities use a single regime, in which there will be a defined points of longitude or latitude at which the house number is 1, rather like the axes on a grid: that way, a high house number will tell you how far you are from downtown, or a coast or river, or, less usefully, a municipal boundary.3 (I once spent a happy afternoon looking for the zero point of the Vancouver street grid, because even in my early 20s I was extremely cool.)
But there are downsides to this system, too. You ideally need to be building a city from scratch to make it work. You need to be using a grid system, which many cities do not. But the biggest problem, surely, is that those of us who have OCD may be tortured by the existence of house numbers which are either implausibly massive or missing altogether. That, though, is perhaps not a case not to use it.
Last, and most baffling of all, is what one might term the East Asian system, common in Japan and, until recently, Korea, as well as scattered other places around the world. This involves dividing a city into numbered districts and then numbering all the plots within them – sometimes, if it’s a single block, clockwise, but more often in the order that things were built. This too means numbers contain information – but not, alas, information that’s much use when looking for a particular house. And at risk of Eurocentricity, this whole thing sounds absolutely nuts to me as, without foreknowledge or a decent map, you’ve got no chance. (Visitors to Tokyo apparently often have to ask the local police for directions.) This is presumably why South Korea abandoned the system in favour of something more western back in 2011. Honestly, you’d be better off asking for your sister with the wooden leg.
Also not the election
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It’s not entirely clear whether this means excluding Paris or on the outskirts of.
In London,the renaming of duplicate street names and the creation of the earliest elements of the postcode system came as part of the Metropolis Management Act of 1855, which also created the first city wide government, the Metropolitan Board of Works.
Of course, if you want to use a central as your zero point, rather than an edge, you may also need “quadrants” in the manner of Washington DC, too, to tell you what direction you are from something as well as your distance. But that’s another story.