Something that visitors to Britain find confusing (apparently) is our system of house numbering. You hear anecdotes such as “I was looking for number 127, so walked down the even side of the street to 126 and crossed over. But the house opposite 126 wasn’t 127 at all. It was 233 – I’d missed 127 half a mile back”.
It’s quite simple really. Buildings are numbered in sequential order, odds on one side and evens on the other.
However, plot sizes are not all the same. Buildings on one side of the road could have wider frontages, or there could be a large building such as a school or office block. Road junctions can take up the space of several houses. So yes, by the time you get to 127 on one side, the house numbering on the other could well be out-of-synch.
So why do we have odds on one side and evens on the other? It’s so the postman can walk all down one side to deliver to the odd-numbered houses, and then back up the other to deliver to the even-numbered. He doesn’t have to keep crossing the road.
Of course, there are numerous examples where this convention doesn’t apply. I’m sure we’ve all been caught out looking for a house that apparently doesn’t exist. I was once looking for a number 18. The street numbers started off conventionally enough – 2, 4, 6, 8 10. Then there was an alleyway leading to a set of garages so, of course, the house after the alley would be number 12. It wasn’t. It was number 32. No, it wasn’t Diagon Alley. Where had ten houses gone? I walked down the alley and found more houses. Numbers 14, 16 and, er, 20. I then spied a small footway that led to… number 22. But hidden round a corner and down another passageway (and by now I no longer felt that I was in the original street at all) I found number 18.
One of the streets in Whitchurch has an interesting quirk. Halfway along, the house numbers reset to 1. The reason? The road name changes from “Newbury Street” to “Newbury Road”. No warning, no indication – not even any street name signs. Just a change in house numbering. The road name changes, incidentally, because that is the limit of the medieval town. “Street” for thoroughfares inside the town; “road” for those outside. All the roads leading out of the town do this – but it’s only Newbury Street / Road where the house numbers start again from 1.
Would any other country use a building numbering system that is so complicated that signs such as these were needed?
What’s happened to house numbers 22 to 31?
Oh, you get to those via another road –
Odd numbers between 25 and 27?
This one confuses me – what other odd numbers are there between 25 and 27?
I once did some work on an IT system for a commercial estate agency. In the world of commercial buildings things can get even more complicated. For example, the occupier of an office block might rename the building after the company – Amalgamated Durables House, for example. But if the occupier changes, the name of the building will change – so you have a different address for the same building. At the other end of the scale, the building might be knocked down and rebuilt to a different design. So now you have a different building with the same address.
Excellent research – you’ve managed to entertain while explaining a very difficult topic! Poor postmen – how do they do it everyday? What about our local paper boys and girls? What are their strategies? I’ve found the Kingsway sign the most confusing in Chandler’s Ford.
I think that as paper boys and girls deliver only to a few properties, it’s not such a problem.
Streets that have names rather then numbers are the worst. When I was a kid I used to deliver mail from my dad’s work around the town. Finding some houses was so difficult that we went round the streets to record the names of each house and get a list of them in order.
From the photo of the Kingsway Sign, it appears to be at the junction with King’s Road, by the school … this section, of course, never was Kingsway … it used to be King’s Lane from King’s Road through to Brownhill Road … Kingsway started at Brownhill Road and ran right up to Hocombe Road …
When the lane was renamed ‘Kingsway’ were all the numbers changed in the original Kingsway, or did they start again at Brownhill ?
In out-of-town areas in New Zealand, properties are numbered as the distance (in metres) from the road junction. Makes finding houses really easy.
In Western Australia, as in New Zealand, they use the ‘Brazilian System’ of numbering of all ‘out of town centre’ roads, measured from a datum point, in metres, with all numbers ending with 5 or 0, the 5’s being on one side of the road and with 0’s on the other … a much simpler system, the only problem for strangers to the area sometimes can be knowing where the ‘datum point’ is … ‘Town Centres’ use the conventional numbering system, with odds one side, evens on the other …
I was foxed when in Piccadilly in London I saw that number 1 was alongside number 2 (on the same side) and opposite number 500! Apparently one side goes from 1 to 250, and the other side (in opposite direction) from 251 to 500.
The explanation for house numbering makes no sense to me.
If the houses were in sequential order, the postie can deliver 1, 2, 3, 4 etc as easily as they could doing 2, 4, 6, 8.
But if they are 1, 2, 3 down one side of the road, what numbers would be on the other side? If you just turned round at the end of the road and carried on, the postie would have to know what number is at the end, and walk the length of the road twice.
having odds on one side and evens on the other, the postie can cross the road, and it doesn’t matter if the houses on each side of the road are not exactly opposite.
Entertaining, but I wonder what visitors to Britain you talked about?
Most countries I know, at least in Europe, have the same basic system: sequential odd numbers on one side and even numbers on the other side. The odd and even numbers would only match when all buildings had the same size, when all crossings are at the same place at both sides and when there were never changes in the numbering due to rebuilding or demolitions. That is rarely the case. When I would cross the street where I grew up in the Netherlands, the house number on the other side of the road could also be considerably higer or lower. And there are several confusing exceptions to the basic system as well.
The circular numbering which Paul William Dixon described above, is known as ‘horse shoe numbering’; it seems to be quite common in some German city centres.