On 24/09/10 20:24, Basil Jet wrote:

While I'm here, the LCC renaming of the 19020s-30s seems to have missed
the fact that there were two Brook Streets in London W. Now that one is
in W1 and the other is in W2, it's not a problem, however, is this the
only case of two roads of the same name in the same 1930s postcode which
the LCC failed to deal with, and if so, I wonder why? Perhaps both had
someone influential living there and they didn't want to upset them.

Back in the 20's and 30's, surely the postal address would have included
the named locality of London. The purpose of the postal district would
have been to make it easy to sort the letters according to the post
office that handled delivery for that area. The idea that the postcode
would be used to disambiguate similar addresses (rather than just
optimise mail sorting) is far more modern, I think -- some time in the
80's. Prior to that it was the locality that disambiguated and the
postcode just optimised sorting.