Random wibblings from the "mind" of Paul Plowman
A few of my previous blog posts have been about quirks in the UK postal address system. As a result of these posts being moderately popular, people have contacted me to tell me about other such quirks. This pleases me greatly – I like quirks.
Mmmmm quirks.
Also, since finding the HM Land Registry property sales data, I’ve discovered some other vaguely interesting stuff, so I thought that I’d collate all this information into one big blog post of address-based quirky goodness.
In a previous post, I did a bit of analysis of the names of towns and streets. However, that clearly wasn’t enough to sate my bizarre interest in all things address-based, so here I am again with more street-name-based nerdery.
I spent far too much effort here, trying to answer a pretty inconsequential question, but I did end up discovering something quite remarkable.
I recently read the book Map Addict by Mike Parker.
One of the things he mentions in the book is that on the Ordnance Survey Landranger map of The Solent & Isle of Wight (number 196), somebody has hidden a number of people’s names in amongst the random craggy lines which make up the cliffs along the southern coast of the Isle of Wight.
Being the kind of person who likes this sort of nonsense, I decided to check it out.
Unless you happen to live in Shitterton, or Twatt, the chances are that you enjoy seeing funny place names.
I wondered if there was an easy way of doing an online search for town and street names, so I could find funny ones. The popular mapping sites are great if you want to search for a specific name, but I was looking for somewhere you could do more general substring searches, or ideally regex searches.
I didn’t really find what I was looking for, so I decided to make my own instead.
So I got hold of street and place name data from the Ordnance Survey, but first I thought I’d do a bit of titting about with it to see what interesting things fell out.
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