"Dave Arquati" a écrit dans le message de
...
John Rowland wrote:
From: Benjamin Lukoff )
Subject: High Street Kensington Station
Date: 2000/01/29


If the actual name of the street is KENSINGTON HIGH STREET,
why is the station called HIGH STREET KENSINGTON?


Only 54 months late, but I think I've figured it out.

The London County Council decided at some point (1930s I think) that it
was
going to ensure there were no duplicate road names in its area, and took
to
renaming vast tracts of the county of London. I suspect that prior to
this
date, Kensington High St, Clapham High St, Stepney High St etc, and the
biggest mouthful of them all St Johns Wood High St, had all been called
"High St". Obviously "High St" would have been a crap name for a
station.
The station could just as well have been called ""Kensington High St"
but
they happened to pick "High St Kensington" instead. When the streets
were
renamed, all of the High Streets in London had the district name
prefixed,
creating the present anomaly. I suppose this was also when the mouthful
"Stoke Newington Church Street" was created.

Interesting, I've wondered that too... the problem is that many people -
especially visitors or newcomers - use Tube stations as landmarks, so
just as when someone refers to "Tottenham Court Road" they invariably
mean St Giles Circus, most students at Imperial refer to Kensington High
St as High St Ken. It seems to roll off the tongue a bit better too.

Is it only me who thinks 'High St. Ken' sounds more like the name of a
church ;-)

IMHO the basic problem is that general English usage requires any additional
word(s) specifying which of various options applies to precede the generic
name (IOW: we say eg 'East Acton' rather than 'Acton East') but the
convention in making lists is to adopt a simple alphabetic order. So such
lists fail to group closely related names together, and anybody consulting
one has no simple way of finding out if a particular name is part of such a
group or not.

One solution would be to adopt the 'army' practice of putting the generic
name first : eg 'brush, hair' followed by 'brush, paint' ; so that a list of
station names would have eg Acton followed by Central, East, North, South,
Town and West, regardless of the presentation on station nameboards. Or
would that only compound the confusion?

Regards,

- Alan (in Brussels - mind the spamtrap)