On 2010\09\24 23:57, Roy Badami wrote:
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.

It wasn't the Post Office who renamed the roads, it was the LCC. This
was when "High Street" became "Kensington High Street", jarring with the
station which was already called "High Street Kensington". The post
office might have been happy with multiple High Streets in London W, but
the LCC apparently wasn't.

As I typed that I realised that the signs from the era, such as this
fine example which still has the NE postcode on it,
http://maps.google.co.uk/?ie=UTF8&ll.... 86,,2,-6.23
, don't bear a borough name... here's a presumably older one without
even the postcode letters
http://maps.google.co.uk/?ie=UTF8&ll....1 6,,1,-3.38
.... I would suspect that the LCC might have been responsible for street
name signs at the time, were it not for Hampstead having very
distinctive signs, most of which are still up. Nowadays most street name
signs bear the borough name, although still not in Haringey AFAIK. If
the LCC had been responsible for street name signs, that might have
explained why they felt multiple High Streets in London W was their problem.

I wish there was a web resource distinguishing the styles of street name
sign produced by various bodies in various eras.