This would be more interesting if you'd actually identified the higher order concept of a high street not just if it had "High Street" in the name. The removal of streatham which is the longest High Street in Europe is a bit odd.
https://www.mystreatham.com/10-facts-you-didnt-know-about-st...
`In the UK, a "high street" refers to the primary business and commercial street in a town, city or borough, where most of the shops, banks, restaurants, and other businesses are concentrated. It is often considered the main shopping area and social hub of a community.`
Near where I live is Wapping High Street (Just next to the Tower of London, City outwards). There are maybe 1,2,3 shops sprinkled around. A barber. That sort of thing. The rest are Warfs (Warehouse at river Front) which were part of the port of London before it moved down the Thames. If you wanted to go to the main shopping area you nowadays would go to Wapping Lane.
Now, the warehouses are there only for a few centuries and Wapping is much older. I don’t know if Wapping High street at that time was a vibrant shopping street with exciting retail opportunities, maybe. My point is things change over time.
This could be an interesting research project as you suggest and I wait with great anticipation for the first results that you hopefully will present here in some time. I am sure the history of High Streets in London could be fascinating.
It could be a backronym for some buildings owned by someone.
According to the 2010 United States Census, Warf is the 17883rd most common surname in the United States, belonging to 1564 individuals. Warf is most common among White (91.43%) individuals.
You mean a back-formation. "Warf" as "warehouse at river front" is a backronym, it totally has the same feeling as those other famous nonsense backronyms like "fornication under consent of king" or "port out starboard home".
...except that "wharf" has an 'h' in it, so it's not even a backronym.
Yes, a back-formation of the sur-name “Warf” into an acronym for “warehouse…” Is it known if the buildings were never owned by or associated with someone or a family named “Warf?”
Diamond Geezer has been blogging for years and definitely understands what a high street is. In fact he’s probably planning a follow-up already about High Roads. (There’s already a visit to the shortest high streets as a follow-up: https://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2024/06/londons-shortest-...)
Streatham High Road still seems like a grey area that should be considered a high street.
It probably was a road (connecting 2 towns with no houses) when it was first named, but is more of a street (with housing either side) now, and is definitely the primary commercial street in Streatham.
That's a pretty misleading way of explaining the term. It's certainly not an unalloyed positive. Urbandictionary or similar might give a broader understanding.
> `In the UK, a "high street" refers to the primary business and commercial street in a town, city or borough
I know exactly what this means, but this is intrinsically a fuzzy category. There is a local shopping street near us that I am sure doesn't make the grade because it is orders of magnitude smaller than the huge shopping areas off in 2 directions, even though it contains in 3 or 4 blocks:
* a drycleaner, * a dentist, * a pharmacy, * a couple of hairdressers, nail bars and similar grooming/beauty businesses, * several takeaway restaurants and coffee shops/cafes, some more upmarket than others, * a deli, * a clothing shop * a couple of "corner shop" supermarkets and hardware / general household goods shops (but no major chains), * a post office and a bank machine (but no bank branch).
I'm sure that if it was scaled up and/or joined up with similar up the road that does contain a small Sainsburys, it would be "a high street". But where do you draw the line? Is there a clear rule that divides it? If a bank or major chain supermarket moves in, does it become one? If a bank branch closes down, as they do these days, is a street no longer a high street? If we all shift to online banking, does the definition change?
This is basically the "bald man paradox" of fuzzy categories. So there never can be a fixed, definitive count.*
If I think about London there are some obvious shopping/eating/drinking streets and districts and there are large areas that are primarily residential, governmental, etc. But there are also a huge number of streets that are something of a mix and you certainly wouldn't point to as a shopping/entertainment destination.
And for the average resident, the pharmacies, small grocery stores, etc. probably count for a lot more than the high-end luxury clothing places.
But yes, as a resident it's important to have a pharmacy / somewhere to get milk or bread if need be etc, nearby.
It counts a lot more than the occasional "high-end luxury clothing" place that is infrequent enough that it doesn't need to be nearby.
That's why these little shopping street are so common. But there's no clear line between that and a high street, it's all just a matter of scale. Everything is a "destination" of sorts be it 5 minutes on foot or half an hour on a bus, and everything is local to some extent - if we wanted to go to a "high street", it would be a local one, be it the borough centre high street east of us or the other borough's centre west of us.
Residents and tourists (whether from the area or not) often have different needs. When I worked in downtown Boston for a bit, I would rarely go to the "shopping areas" and, if I did, it was probably to go to a restaurant with someone.
That's a much harder project IMO. In order to determine which is the main shopping street in a community, you have to start with drawing the communities. That's a tall order in London as the lines are blurry and change over time.
It doesn't really work like that, some people have access to more than one high streets and some aren't in walking distance from any high street.
You could probably pull records like alcohol licensing or food hygiene certificates to identify all streets with a certain number of shops, then use Google Street View to refine the criteria. Eg if a street is mostly residential on the ground floor, adding some shops doesn't make it a high street imo.
My gut reaction was that you’re wrong and it’s easy but actually thinking more about it, even in a small area like my side of London there are a lot of what could be considered high streets, even with different parts of the same street acting as different separate high streets for different communities. A more concrete example is Uxbridge road near Shepherd’s Bush and the section near Shepherd’s Bush Market being two distinct high streets, and then a couple k’s down the road it turns into Acton High Street (Acton itself having multiple distinct high streets). It’d definitely be a challenge to map something like this if you’re not familiar with the area.
Rather ironically the main “High Street” for the whole of London is normally regarded to be Oxford Street, which happens to be very well connected, with 4 stationd on the Central Line, maybe 5 if you include Holborn just beyond New Oxford Street.
Obviously a far younger city, but when I moved to seattle, satellite view on maps was just starting to be a thing, and you could spot all of the areas that were interesting to go to versus residential neighborhoods by the way the light reflected off the roofs. Lighter color along a street usually meant older, flat-roofed buildings where the market streets of the original towns were.
Or do the reverse? Identify streets with a certain category of commercial business, with quantity above a certain threshold. The area/community can be derived after.
Pretty sure you'd just end up with a map of public transportation lines. All major shops have to be where people regularly pass by on their commute to work in the inner city.
This is probably very different in US suburbia, but it should be true for London and other densely populated areas.
London is old enough that it will still reflect patterns from hundreds of years ago. You get old town and villages that have been joined together with newer development. Old roads that used to be a main road and retain some of the inns and shops. Also, development can be separated by parks, walls, administrative boundaries, rivers, canals, railways, new roads etc. Often the effect will persist after those things have vanished.
If that happened you probably haven’t refined your whitelist of commercial businesses that would qualify a high street. It’s pretty much the same stuff nationwide.. A McDonald’s, some banks, a foot locker. Etc etc.
I agree I'm sure the quantity of Nando's, pizza express and Starbucks within a given area is a probably a fantastic starting point for a heuristic to detect this.
It is also important to highlight that high streets work differently depending on cities. Some cities have fewer or unique high streets while others have many ones. This can be unnatural for tourists that are used to one or the other in their local city.
For example, Buenos Aires in Argentina has many many high streets in areas separated by ~20' in car, in some cases just 5' walking.
Thank you for explaining this. I kept looking for an explanation of what it means to be a "high street" – After not finding said explanation, I assumed it had to do with elevation, and whether this person was exploring elevation "peaks" in London.
So it seems to be sort of like what are typically called "Main St" in American towns.
Yeah, only a tiny proportion of a multitude of roads that people would be likely to consider high streets near me in South London has High Street in the name.
It's also a very difficult concept to quantify, because depending on what scale you're thinking at a whole range of roads may or may not qualify.
The UK really needs to ditch the high street. It's just such terrible town planning, that the intended "social hub of the community" is a main road filled with through traffic and parking spaces.
That's just not an environment where anyone wants to spend their time, and the decline is so painful to see. So many now are just betting shops, letting agents and kebab takeaways - but if these were pedestrian zones these could be so much more. See large European cafes with people eating and drinking outside on the street until late.
If your town doesn't have them, write to your local council! And don't vote Conservative, as they have announced further opposition to anything restricting motor cars.
There are many high streets in London that show removing cars, or expanding pavements, improves the high street. I would rather see more effort made to divert cars another way rather than close the high street. Too often that means making a privately owned public space as the prime spot.
There's a gap somewhere between "main road" and full pedestrianisation.
King's Road in Chelsea is an example that immediately comes to mind.
Really what it comes down to is that nice areas with approximately the right density of people have nice high streets.
You could pedestrianise Oxford Street but it'd still be a grim place to be because there are hordes of people - at a certain point the people have a similar effect to cars in that it's not really pleasant to pause outside any more.
Are you forgetting the weather and how poorly prepared most of the British are for it? Even in new build pedestrianised areas like.. Coal Drops Yard, outdoor seating is limited and normally nearly empty once the midday heat has passed.
I haven't spent a lot of time in that immediate area but I'm not sure why that complex wasn't designed with more of an outdoor orientation. That's not universal in London. I'd say Covent Garden and Camden Town were at least somewhat more outdoor/quasi-outdoor friendly.
Really this reflects how much "planning" is (a) historical accident and (b) powerless against bigger economic forces. The old high street concept was very dependent on having someone in the house who could go shopping during the weekday. Which, in the present era, basically limits you to pensioners and other benefit recipients. Pedestrianisation would probably help in some of those cases but it's not a magic wand. And of course many of London's "high streets" are completely vital to its sluggish surface transport movement.
I dunno, there's probably more gainfully-employed people with the opportunity to go shopping during weekdays than there were 5 years ago. Home working often comes with flexitime, as if a company doesn't care where you do the work as long as it gets done, they usually don't care when as long as you meet your deadlines and show up for meetings.
The main high street in my town is fully pedestrianised (although fully concrete too) and attracts a lot of foot traffic.
The second in line is pretty much buses / taxis only and is also quite popular.
Shopping is now concentrated on retail estates and the "high streets" are almost always pedestrianised making it harder to injury the various drunks, junkies and homeless which now (ironically) call the high street "home".
The diamondgeezer site is one my favourites along with ianvisits.co.uk and londonreconnections.com - there's all sorts of content on there about the absolutely most 'niche' things you can think of in London.
And then you find out about things like the Pocket Parks, what's on in London, mudlarking, and so on. Odd things like the Cannon St. to Mansion House tube run, and then a parkour version to Barbican https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXMPRK2LQAE
If anyone wants to make a similar map in their own city or with a different street name, you can use Overpass Turbo to query OpenStreetMap data for this. Just comparing the maps visually, they seem to match. [1]
[out:json][timeout:25];
{{geocodeArea:London}}->.searchArea;
nwr["name"="High Street"](area.searchArea);
out geom;
I'm not sure. It's because the streets are made of multiple segments ("ways" in OSM terms), which are being counted separately. I think the query would need to join connected segments to get a true number of streets.
I think a lot of inner London roads were renamed to disambiguate hence the X High Street pattern. A lot of roads used to have signs saying “formerly Y road” when I was a kid in London.
Indeed, and presumably well before 1965, which is when Greater London was created. Most of the non-disambiguated High Streets will be in the Greater London boroughs (Bromley, Bexley etc.)
When I was a kid, Bromley was already a London borough. But we sure as heck didn't consider Orpington to be proper London! ;-)
The decision to prefix some 'High Street's with the name of the local town or village was probably taken by the General Post Office in order to reduce ambiguity in addressing letters. They did something similar with the names of some towns (adding 'by sea' or 'on Thames' for example).
Where I live, there is a suburb called Crookes - one of the oldest settlements in the area, called Krkor by the Vikings - which has a high street named Crookes. Not Crookes High Street, or Crookes Road - just Crookes. Confuses the hell out of delivery drivers and people new to the area (and of course the locals become belligerent if you dare refer to it as "Crookes High Street"). The road itself is over 1000 years old, according to local records.
“High streets in Great Britain
Mapping the location and characteristics of high streets in Great Britain, working with experimental Ordnance Survey High Street extents and Office for National Statistics data.”
I was there on business a few years back. It's honestly infuriating. It would seem that the majority of roads are named by some combination of Cardinal/Ordinal direction (North, South, East, West, Northeast, Southwest, etc.) + " Peachtree " + Road Type (Road, Street, Avenue, Boulevard, Lane, etc.)
Used to live London. Didn’t know that it’s actually “Kensington High Street”, since the underground/subway station there is called “High Street Kensington” - why the discrepancy here?
Seeing may of the comments here leads me to the conclusion that some are not reading the whole article (but then again I have read dg's blog for 15+ years and realise that he usually deals with all exceptions in the article and you have to read it all)
There's a very easy way to determine if they're in London or not: look at the city at the end of the address. They are in London whether you like it or not.
Do I also find ridiculous that some people live 2 hours away from London and say they live in London? Yes. Do they actually live in London? For some yes.
When I visited London in the late '70's, most of the street signs said "City of Westminster". I was told that the "City of London", properly speaking, was only a small part of what outsiders would call "London", and that the Lord Mayor of London was only the Lord Mayor of that much smaller part.
From what folks are saying here, I gather that that's changed; but that's how it was then.
Haha, I guess everyone downvoting my comment is sore that they don't live in London proper!
Otherwise, I'm not sure why so many people have downvoted a comment pointing out that an article talking about roads in London is excluding on a technicality the roads in Central London that fulfil the criteria (the technicality being that they were renamed to include a determinant precisely because it was confusing) but includes roads that are only considered as being in London if you think everything inside the M25 is London. And yet, these weren't renamed because they weren't in Central London and so weren't deemed to be in conflict with each other. The residents in many of these places would consider them to be towns in their own right, and not in fact part of London.
Everything inside the M25 is part of London, yes. This may annoy the residents of Watford who think they are not part of London because they aren't in the GLA, but morally it's London. If you are in a London postcode or a "London Borough of .." you are definitely in London.
That was kind of my point. Many of these places don't have London postcodes nor are in the 020 phone district, and have had their own identity for a very long time as towns in their own right.
Some of them have in recent years been subsumed into boroughs that are now Greater London, but they have historically never been considered to be London. Some of these places inside the M25 are not even in Greater London boroughs. Despite your baseless claim that they are "morally" part of London, factually they aren't.
But anyway, my point was that these places in the article aren't really "in London" - they're merely on the periphery, and while it might be administratively convenient to sometimes lump them together as "Greater London", the fact remains that someone in e.g. Ealing when someone says "Let's meet on the High Street" isn't going to get confused and trek over to Acton or any of the other High Streets even further away, because the place feels like its own little area distinct from and separate to the real London.
London here is Greater London - all but a tiny bit of which is inside the M25 (see dg's blog for the exception). There is much inside the M25 that is not in Greater London.
`In the UK, a "high street" refers to the primary business and commercial street in a town, city or borough, where most of the shops, banks, restaurants, and other businesses are concentrated. It is often considered the main shopping area and social hub of a community.`