and you should send that info to royal mail and tell them they should bump some numbers up.
I'm not quite sure who does, though. At the end they mention trying to get the local authority to do it. Some random googling found http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shet... , where several streets had no names at all for years and the problem was eventually fixed by the local authority.
What exactly was the problem? (emergency services were concerned that an ambiguous locating would delay their response).
The rationalizing plan associates numbers with distance, so 235 will be very close to 237 and a house 3 miles further will be numbered 873 or so, even with no other addresses in between.
As long as they are re-addressing, they also remove all twin addresses in the same ZIP code -- only one 125 Main St allowed per ZIP. Sometimes this means re-naming streets.
The house I grew up in changed from 85 to 421; our neighbor on the left was 417 and on the right was 435.
I guess if a 999 call said that they're "on the lane near Gorden's Saddlery", that would add a significant delay as the paramedics might have to check 9 lanes.
Edit: Found it: Our local authority (Fife) has an online form where you can request changes to property details and even request a new street be given a name:
https://www.fifedirect.org.uk/topics/index.cfm?fuseaction=se...
Also, for example, roads that didn't actually connect in a navigable way in the middle were given different names as are roads with branches.
A similar issue to that in the article exists in the US--perhaps especially in the Northeast where there are lots of relatively small towns that connect to each other and restart numbers. (Though in New England, they do often change street names.)
[ADDED: Apparently they're assigned by local authorities in the US. [1]]
[1] https://ribbs.usps.gov/npfpresentations/documents/tech_guide...
> West Virginia entrusted most of the mapping project to individual counties, tasking 911 directors with naming thousands of streets. Different directors subscribed to different naming philosophies. Mercer County’s director pulled names from local history books and Scrabble Web sites. Others Google-Mapped out-of-state towns for inspiration. Some directors gave residents the right to name their own streets, despite the risk that future generations would have to endure, in the case of one town, Crunchy Granola Road. In Raleigh County, some communities named their streets after Disney characters or Vietnam War battles.
That is actually a rather awesome street name, but I wonder if using registered trademarks as part of a public street name is something local government should allow at all.
Odd though; I can't find this nominative oddity on OpenStreetMap (or Google Maps for that matter).
How is a common description of a standard breakfast cereal still a trademark? If granola is an RTM then I'm afraid it's become generic (in UK at least, it's just "what US Americans call muesli").
Wikipedia have it as an RTM only in Australia and NZ.
The towns also deduped street names, so if one town had a Green St, Green Ave and Green Rd, only on kept its name.
In London this is granted to them under Local Government Act 1985 (Schedule 8, 14/1); not sure about outside London though.
Note to Americans: in the UK, the floor at street level is the ground floor, the one above that is the first floor, above that is the second floor, etc.
According to the Royal Mail, the addresses here are 29, 29A, and 29B. The normal convention is for 29 to be the ground floor, and 29A and 29B to be the first- and second-floor flats; that appears to be the case based on current and previous occupants' post etc. All well and good.
When i moved in, i was left some documentation from the letting agency who were running the place before that gave the address as 29C. I have seen no other mention of 29C.
The Land Registry knows about three leaseholds here: 29, 29B, and 29. Yes, 29 appears twice. Based on the diagrams and descriptions in the registrations, one 29 is the ground floor flat, 29B is the first floor, the the second floor is 29.
Mostly, this has no impact, and is just annoying. The one real-world consequence is that the bank who issued my neighbour's mortgage thinks her address is 29B, because that's what's on the leasehold they lent against, so i get her mortgage statements.
I thought i'd get this corrected, so i wrote to the Land Registry, and they replied that they would change it if i sent them documentation from my street numbering authority, ie my council, stating the correct numbering.
The council think the flats are called Flat 1, 29 Acacia Avenue, Flat 2, 29 Acacia Avenue, and Flat 3, 29 Acacia Avenue! I don't want the Land Registry to use those designations, as they're even further from the ground truth of what the Royal Mail thinks. I also don't want to risk triggering the Royal Mail updating its database, as that could screw up postal delivery. So i'm stuck.
Meanwhile, and the Valuation Office Agency thinks the flats are called Ground Floor Flat, 29 Acacia Avenue, First Floor ... you get the idea.
Fortunately, all these designations seem to interoperate alright. The VOA sets the bands for council tax, which the council collects, so somehow, the council are mapping those designations to their own ones. The council send me the bills for council tax at Flat 3, and the Royal Mail delivers them.
Oh, and there's another 29 Acacia Avenue in N14, four files north. I get their post sometimes.
EDIT: I spoke too soon. After writing this comment, i thought i'd register to manage my council tax online. The bill is actually sent to "Second Floor, 29 Acacia Avenue", but that address isn't in the list of options on the council's website, which only has "Flat 3, 29 Acacia Avenue". I can't select the former, and the latter is rejected as not matching my account number. Checkmate!