How many High Streets are there in London?
diamondgeezer.blogspot.com
diamondgeezer.blogspot.com
`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.`
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.
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.
...except that "wharf" has an 'h' in it, so it's not even a backronym.
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.
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.*
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.
(If you're wondering where Streatham is, given it's often quoted as London's longest high street, its name is Streatham High Road so it doesn't count)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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Street
Fun fact, the Roman’s called it “Via Trinobantina“.
This is probably very different in US suburbia, but it should be true for London and other densely populated areas.
For example, Buenos Aires in Argentina has many many high streets in areas separated by ~20' in car, in some cases just 5' walking.
That's why none of the inner ones are on there, because they are disambiguated e.g. Kensington High Street.
So it seems to be sort of like what are typically called "Main St" in American towns.
Or is this more about counting the towns, cities and boroughs in the London metro area?
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 author is victim of the Fallacy of shared context
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 you go to OpenStreetMap Overpass with this query: https://overpass-turbo.eu/?template=key-value&key=highway&va... then browse to somewhere in the UK and click "Run" you'll get a map.
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.
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.
The key point is removing car traffic.
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".
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
Too many to list.
Her recent video on railings in London is vastly more interesting than one might suspect.
And half the bollards are old cannons. https://stephenliddell.co.uk/2022/11/28/the-london-street-bo...
And the old cobbles were wooden. - https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/the-time-when-londons-s...
[out:json][timeout:25];
{{geocodeArea:London}}->.searchArea;
nwr["name"="High Street"](area.searchArea);
out geom;
London Liverpool Street Liverpool Lime Street
- It introduces the list as "There are twenty six in London itself. They are:" but the list contains only 23 items.
- There are three separate entries for a single London Road (the one that goes through Norbury, Thornton Heath and Croydon).
It always puzzled me that this doesn't appear to exist in the UK, since "Street" is actually the name of at least one town.
When I was a kid, Bromley was already a London borough. But we sure as heck didn't consider Orpington to be proper London! ;-)
London's shortest and longest High Streets
https://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2024/06/londons-shortest-...
There are 32 London boroughs, and several "primary business and commercial street" per borough, call it 3 or 4?
So about 90-120 high streets, as a ballpark.
The Article says: "You could argue that makes a total of 103 High Streets."
So close enough.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...
There are a few other contenders though:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest_points_in_Lond...
Many of his points are answers to issues raised here - he has read this thread.
Hey, not all HN users are behemoth Americans.
There are probably a lot more I can’t remember right now
> The reason for this is that all the High Streets in Inner London are called Something High Street. [...]
> Something High Streets in Inner London: Aldgate, Battersea, Borough, Bromley, [...]
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)
The second map with the red ones is more like the proper answer.
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.
From what folks are saying here, I gather that that's changed; but that's how it was then.
Aha: Wikipedia on "Greater London": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_London
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.
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.