Hey Ottawans 👋

Do you know where I can find the origin of your street names? I want to know the story behind “Data Centre Rd” and “Tremblay Rd”
- - -
Yo les Ottaviens•iennes 👋

Savez-vous où je peux trouver l’origine de votre toponymie? Je veux connaître l’histoire derrière « ch. Data Centre » et « ch. Tremblay »

#Ottawa #Toponymy #Toponymie

#1225 Adrian Room - Dictionary of British Place Names. Bookmart Limited, 1995, 1st paperback edition.

#AdrianRoom #BookmartLimited #PlaceNames #Toponymy #BookOfTheDay

Jamaica Streets: the thread about how Edinburgh and Leith street names evidence the time of colonialism and slavery

This thread was originally written and published in July 2023.

There are an unusual number of Jamaica Streets in Scotland: there are (or were) streets of this name in Aberdeen, Dundee, Inverness, Glasgow, Greenock, Peterhead and Edinburgh. Street names can tell us many things from the people, events and places that they commemorate. Set in stone or metal signs, they can give us insights into the past. In the case of Jamaica Street, this is a direct link to colonialism in the West Indies and, by extension, slavery. In fact Edinburgh has not just had one Jamaica Street, it has had at least five.

The best known Jamaica Street in Edinburgh is that which was in the Northern New Town, built from around 1805 onwards, marked by the red dot in the map above. It was not amongst the New Town’s most splendid streets or highest quality residences and by the 1950s had been classed as a slum, with demolition following after an order of 1964. The surrounding mews lanes of Jamaica Street North Lane and –South Lane were retained, and in 1981 a new development of courtyard flats called Jamaica Mews was completed in the vacant plot for Link Housing Association. Stubs of the original street remain at the east and west sides as access to the lanes.

But this was not the first Jamaica Street in Edinburgh, that honour goes to a relatively short-lived route through the Southside of the Old Town (yellow dot on the map at the top of this page. This existed prior to the opening of the South Bridge and is shown on maps in the 1780s. Running along the axis of Infirmary Street and North College Street (now Chambers Street), this name never appears to have caught on and by a 1784 town plan was not in use.

A third Jamaica street also existed in the first quarter of the 19th century, forming the foot of what is now known as Morrison Street (orange dot on the map at the top of this page). This land was owned by a William Morrison esq., who lived in the house of Rosemount shown on the below map just below the “J” of “Jamaica”. The streets here were a speculative development on his part. Development of this street was extremely slow, with only a handful of houses completed by the time of the 1849 Ordnance Survey town plan, by which time the name Morrison Street is in use.

A further example could be found in Edinburgh’s port town of Leith. In 1809, a new street was planned along the Ferry Road in North Leith, part of which took the name Jamaica Street (the green dot on the map at the top of this page).

This name was suppressed after the 1850s, however if you are eagle eyed, and look (the best vantage position is the top deck of a bus) on the oldest block of this street – above 142A Ferry Road – you can still spot the original name inscribed in the masonry.

But during the late 18th and early 19th century Leith was formed of two distinct and independent parishes of which North Leith was only one. In the other, South Leith, a further Jamaica Street existed for a period. This one does not show up on maps, and as far as I can tell has been overlooked by the two principal references on Edinburgh Street names (Stuart Harris and Charles Boog-Watson) but is referred to in a number of adverts for the rouping (sale by auction) of land. This street was probably not developed before it was renamed to the present day Duke Street around 1818 (darker blue dot on the map at the top of this page).

There are further connections to Caribbean islands in the street names of Georgian Edinburgh. After around 1790, an upper section of Morrison Street adjacent to the then Jamaica Street was known as Tobago Street, and just off it was a property known as Tobago Place (pink dot on the map at the top of this page). The landowner here at this time was one “Mr Nathaniel Davidson of the Isle of Tobago”.

Stuart Harris – the late authority on Edinburgh and district place names – said that the the theory what is now Bridge Street Lane in Portobello was once another Tobago Street was one where “evidence is lacking“, how there is more than one mention of a street of this name in Portobello in the 1850s.

And around 1804, one of the many “places” along Leith Walk was named Antigua Street (the light blue dot on the map at the top of this page), a name it keeps to this day (although there was a concerted plan by the Corporation to rename it as part of Leith Walk or Leith Street in 1935).

Of course these are just streets named directly after colonies and by attachment, slavery in the Caribbean (you can read some of these links for Edinburgh on this blog). There are of course myriad other connections in street names, where they are named after individuals who owned slaves, colonial land or plantations; after their investors; after colonial administrators; and other parts of the British Empire, such as India Street and the now demolished India Place in the Northern New Town (white dots on the map at the top of this page). There is much more work to be done than this simple scratch of the surface by flicking through a few books on place names in order to identify deeper and less obvious links to the past.

Footnote. There is one set of “colonial” names though that do not actually have any colonial links, these are the Colonies houses, of Stockbridge, Abbeyhill, Restalrig Road, North Leith etc. The name may either refer to them being communities outwith the then city boundary (so thought of as a distinct colony of workers) or due to their builder – the Edinburgh Cooperative Building Company – using the beehive – a symbol of worker cooperation – as an identity.

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The town that bricks built: the thread about some history of Portobello and why it has a road for a king

This thread was originally written and published in February 2021.

If you go down to the beach today, you’ll be in for a big surprise… No, the teddy bears are not having a picnic, but the sea and/or Figgate burn have performed one of their semi-irregular uncoverings of the old Portobello Harbour from the sand.

The harbour was built in 1787 for local “brick baron” William Jameson, who had hit the big time when he fued land to the east of the Figgate Burn on which to build a house and instead hit clay, kicking off the town’s brick (and later, pottery) industry.

The other thing needed for brick and pottery kilns – coal – was readily available in the vicinity at Niddrie, around Musselburgh and along the coast at Prestonpans and beyond. Here is the harbour on Wood’s 1824 town plan of Portobello; it lies just east of the Figgate Burn, on the shore, in front of the new flats by the bottle kilns.

The stone pier extended some 100 feet, and a basin was excavated out of the beach between the burn and the wall; but it was doomed to fail thanks to the effects of sand transport along the beach consistently silting it up. Portobello really owes its existence to Jameson and the clay. Before that, there wasn’t much except a few small cottages and hostelries strung along the road from Edinburgh to Berwick. The brickworks drew in workers and a village began to form.

The nascent workers village was known as the Figgate Village.

Long before it was Portobello, the area was know as the Figgate Muir; an expanse of muirland (Scots for moor) along the Figgate Burn which ran down to the sea. The Figgate Whins (whins in Scots are gorse) bordered the old road above the beach from Leith and Edinburgh to Musselburgh. “Figgate” is referenced as early as 1466 as “Fegot”, part of Duddingston Kirk parish. Fegot possibly comes from the norse Fé (cattle or sheep) and Gata (a “way”, as in the Scots Gait, but also pasture). You can also see it spelled Freegate, Frigate, Figate, Figgot, Thicket, etc. on older maps.

John Adair’s map of the area in 1682 shows it to be nameless and uninhabited, the Figgate Burn being the sole feature to help us orientate where Portobello is today. There is a vague suggestion of a track and stippling indicating the muir and whins. E. Didstoun is Easter Duddingston farm, where the King’s Manor Hotel is now.

Roy’s Lowland map of c. 1750 shows the area clearer, but it still appears uninhabited; nothing more than a road, muir and whins. The road was notorious for banditry; in 1762, the Scots Magazine records that the master of a fishing boat, Alexander Henderson, was attacked on the road across the Figgate Whins when making his way between Musselburgh to Leith and relieved of 12s 6d in money, hit on the head with a broadsword and left for dead. Travellers apparently preferred the open beach rather than the track through the whins, or took the longer route more inland from Jock’s Lodge to Duddingston to Musselburgh (via what is now Willowbrae).

A cottage on this road between Leith, Edinburgh and Musselnurgh (now the High Street) built in 1742 was named Portobello, in honour of the victory of Admiral Vernon at Porto Bello in 1739 (its builder, George Hamilton, by legend having served there.) A Court of Session record of has testimony that Portobello House or Hut was built by one Peter Scott. Adverts in 1753 record it as a tavern, proprietor George Hamilton, from where he ran a cobbler’s shop and also horse racing on the shore. Stuart Harris thinks the direct link to Admiral Vernon at the Battle of Porto Bello may just be a “sailor’s yarn”, and the name may just be fanciful, as was the trend at the time. The house was cleared around 1862 when the town hall was built.

In 1814, what was by now being referred to as the area of “Portobello” was detached from the parish of Duddingston to form a parish in its own right, the “chapel of ease” being raised to parish kirk. By the time the town became a burgh in 1833, it had adopted the name formally.

Back to William Jameson. He built himself a mansion to the south of Portobello on his land called Rosefield in the 1760s. You can still see some of the garden walls (built, of course, in Portobello brick) and a few lumps of dressed stone from it in Rosefield Park.

Jameson took on the feu of what would become a significant part of Portobello in 1763, from Baron Muir of the Exchequer. Jameson’s brickworks developed in 1765, and contemporary accounts refer to the area as “Brickfield or Portobello“. There was a Brickfield on Leith Links too where there was an earlier brickworks. Jameson’s clay pit provided the feedstock for the local brick and pottery industry. Part of it would later be filled in and flattened to form the Craigentinny sidings and depot, another part was flooded and landscape to become the Figgate Pond.

Around 1785, a lawyer from Edinburgh by the name of John Cunningham feud a parcel of ground near the beach from Jameson and had built for himself a most curious villa upon it. Portobello Tower was built in red Portobello bricks, but to the beach side of it was attached a great folly tower; a battlemented octagon with a square stair tower adjoining.

It is in-filled with all kinds of curious bits of masonry tracework that were collected by Cunningham from old Edinburgh churches and houses (including parts of the original Mercat Cross and allegedly from the Cathedral of St. Andrews). An 1864 rebuild of the structure consolidated it somewhat from its more ruinous original form as a belvedere into accommodation.

The draw of the sea and the sand of Portobello has long been a draw for Edinburgh residents. Writing in 1806, Sir John Carr in Caledonian Sketches says “Portobello is a beautiful village, embellished with many genteel houses, and stands close to the sea shore… It is much frequented in the season by fashionable families and by respectable citizens of the capital, from which it is but a very short distance, as a delightful sea-bathing place“. In that year, a bath house was built with hot and cold salt water baths at what is the foot of the appropriately named Bath Street.

By the middle of the 19th century, Portobello was a fashionable suburb of large villas that were being built along the High Street in the direction of Joppa. We can get an idea of what it looked like from the below print of 1845. Coillesdene House (where the tower block now is) is the large house on the right, the spire on the left is the old Parish Kirk. It can be seen that the land immediately to the south is still fields and hedgerows.

On Portobello High Street stands the remains of one of the town’s Georgian villas; that of Shrubmount, the last residence of the geologist and evangelist Hugh Miller (1802-1856). The house has since been rebuilt into a Victorian row on the High Street – confusingly what we see of it from “the front” is actually the gable end of it, the pillars of the original portico entrance are buried within the back of a kebab shop now. (Thank you to Fraser Macdonald for correcting the location of Shrubmount, which is mispositioned in a couple of books). Miller had a geological museum in the house, but was tormented by mental illness and committed suicide when Victorian medicine failed him and he feared he might harm his family.

The gentlemen cavalry of the Royal Edinburgh Light Dragoon Volunteers, who counted Sir Walter Scott in their ranks, used to drill on the beach in the early 19th century. They were somewhat lampooned in the contemporary press in the manner of a well meaning Dad’s army that was more of a horseriding, dressing up and drinking club. John Kay caricatured the Edinburgh yeomanry in his typically acerbic style.

In 1822 on his state visit to Scotland, King George IV reviewed the Scottish yeomanry cavalry and a “picturesque force of Highland clans that had come to Edinburgh in honour of his visit.” On Friday, 23 August, the King reviewed 3,000 volunteer horse and “clansmen” on Portobello sands from his carriage, which had approached down a road that we now call the King’s Road for that reason. In the painting by Turner below, the King is on a silver horse dressed as a Field Marshall in the centre of the canvas. The crowds assembled on the sands include many men drinking from glasses and the east coast fishwives in their distinctive striped dresses and garb.

And if you are to wander around the modern housing that occupies the site of the former Buchan’s Pottery in Portobello, you can find all sorts of street names that relate to an earlier time: William Jameson Place, Brickfield, The Pottery, Harbour Place and Pipe Street and Lane.

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The Pipes of Pipe Street: the thread about the Eleventh Day of Christmas

This thread was originally written and published in January 2020.

This part in the Edinburgh and Leith themed Twelve Days of Christmas thread is preceded by a post about Lord Russell Place and the man for whom it was named.

On the eleventh day of Christmas, my true love gave to me; Pipe Street. I could have gone with the Big Pipes of Leith, but they are covered in another post, and this gives me a chance to include something of Old Portobello; “the town that bricks built”.

Pipe Street dates back to the very beginnings of Portobello in the 1770s, when the lands to the east of the Figget (Figate) Burn were feud to an Edinburgh mason by the name of William Jamieson by the landowner, the Dukes of Abercorn. Jamieson was looking to build a villa but instead when he dug down he found a clay bed on the river bank. He built his house – Rosefield – but being an industrious and entrerprising man, he also opened a brick and tile works. He had clay and coal was plentiful in the district. Below is a sketch of John Ainslie’s plan of Portobello, or “Village of Figget”, of 1783.

Jamieson built housing here – from his own brick and tile and known as Brickfield – for his workers and laid a pipe (or pipes) from the Figgate Burn near his house at Rosefield, well enough above the industry of Portobello, to bring fresh water to his employees. The pipes discharged into a communal trough or cistern near where Pipe Street meets Bridge Street, and gave its name to the former.

Despite Jamieson’s early attempts to bring fresh water into the district, in 1832 and 1836 there were outbreaks of cholera amongst the workers “with a heavy mortality, and again in Pipe Street and neighbourhood many deaths occurred.” Cholera returned in 1853 and 1854, despite there now being piped fresh water from Edinburgh and most houses having water closets. Pipe Street was again badly afflicted, this being on account of the sewage drainage from the area running down to the old, abandoned pier on the beach where it lingered in pools. The Town Council gained powers in a Parliamentary Act in 1856 to deal with this nuisance – however it obviously was not completely solved as in 1893, when Portobello was amalgamated with Edinburgh, “improvement of the sanitary condition of Pipe Street and lanes adjacent” was one of the conditions.

In 1857 the Burgh drew up plans for sewers that would send the untreated effluent of the burgh far enough out into the Firth of Forth that the sea would carry it away. Two outlets, one at the east and the west of the beach of Portobello were built, and the pipes of the interceptor sewer that fed these ran along the sea front and was built over, providing the town with the seaside promenade for which it is known.

Somewhat fittingly, Pipe Street was later the site of a public gasometer to provide the town of Portobello with town gas from Edinburgh for lighting, and the gas main supplying this ran down Pipe Street. And when the potteries and old houses off of Pipe Street and its lanes were cleared away in the 1970s, new houses were built in 1979 with street names including Brickfield, William Jameson Place and The Pottery.

The Edinburgh and Leith-themed Twelve Days of Christmas thread concludes with a post about The Drum and Drum House

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Edinburgh’s Egypt: the thread about the Morningside “Bible Belt” and Scotland’s earliest Gypsies

This thread was originally written and published in March 2020.

There is a part of Edinburgh described by the travel writer Wilfred Taylor as its “bible belt”, not on account of it being particularly religious but on account of its unusual concentration of place names recalling the Holy Land; Egypt, Canaan, Jordan and more.

In fact in cartographic terms, these are older placenames than Morningside itself, with Canaan and Egypt first appearing in Adair’s map of 1682, a full 55 years before Morningside. Egypt is the oldest of these names, recorded in documents back to 1585 .

The name comes from the medieval idea that the Romany people came from Egypt; a Gipcyan or Gypsy being someone of Egypt in old English. What became Egypt Farm was at this time Little Egypt, just outside the Edinburgh boundary which was the rivulet of the Jordan or Pow Burn. This was held in tradition to be a gathering place of the Lowland Scottish Gypsies. In 1717, the location was on the “march line” or the boundary between jurisdictions and was described as Egypt village in the burgh records.

Romany Gypsies probably first arrived in Scotland at the end of the 15th century, being received by the court of King James IV in 1505. The Stuart King is recorded as corresponding with the “King of Rowmais” (Romanies) and at this time they were looked upon favourably. Their dance, dress and music would have been exotic to the aspiring Renaissance monarch and the King presented them with 10 French Crowns. His son, James V, made payment to them as court dancers in 1529. In 1540 he granted a letter to Johnne Faw (Johnnie Faa) making him “King of the Gypsies“. This letter was addressed to “oure louit Johnne Faw, lord and erle of Litill Egipt” (“our beloved Johnne Faw, Lord and Earl of Little Egypt“). This granted Faa’s authority over all Gypsies in Scotland and sheriffs were obliged to assist “in executione of justice upoun his company and folkis“, who were in turn to “conforme to the lawis of Egipt“. That is, Gypsies lived under their own authority, granted by the crown and their King was based at a settlement or encampment was known as Little Egypt.

However in 1541 the Town Council of Edinburgh expelled the Gypsies from their jurisdiction on accusations of “great thiftis and scaithis done”; great theft and damage done, and it is the supposition that this caused them to move their encampments across the Jordan Burn from the city’s land of the Burgh Muir to the Braid estate on the other. By 1585, Robert Fairlie, the Laird of Braid, granted the city the use of his house called “Littil Egypt” for brewing ale outside the city boundary for the residents on the Burgh Muir afflicted by the plague.

Queen Regent Mary of Guise renewed the status of the “Egyptians” in 1553, when “John Faw, Lord and Earl of Little Egypt” was engaged by her government to assist in the apprehension of dealing with Gypsy rebels. However her grandson, King James VI, chose to persecute “the idle people calling themselves Egyptians”, with strong support from The Kirk, effectively expelling those “following the Gypsy way of life” from Scotland. This was on pain of being nailed to a tree by their ears and then having their ears cut off. In 1603 James’ Privy Council made an order raising the punishment to pain of death, ratified by Parliament with an “Act Anent the Egiptians” in 1609. This act did not have the desired effect of eradicating the Gypsies as a race of people from Scotland, but it forced them to live a more “settled” way of life that required the tolerance and guarantee of a laird, and pushed them and their way of life to the very edges of society.

The Gypsies were forced to live “under the radar” of the Kirk and state in Scotland and retreated south, particularly to the area around Yetholm. But their name lived on in the south of Edinburgh and as a place name Egypt Farm existed until the 1880s or so at which point it was encroached upon and built over by the expanding Victorian suburb of Morningside. Although Egypt was lost as a placename, the street of Nile Grove commemorated it and it was fully rehabilitated a century later in 1985, when the redevelopment of an old Mews at the end of Cluny Place was named Egypt Mews.

Back to the Holy Land place name theme, it is likely this was established as a precedent by Little Egypt. Canaan is recorded as far back as 1661 when the city leased the grazing for 11 years to a woman called Margaret Whilleis. Its lands originally constituted an estate of 65 acres feud off of the Burgh Muir in 1586. Canaan is appropriately on the opposite bank of the “Jordan burn” watercourse from Egypt. For a time, the neighbourhood was known as the Land of Canaan.

The Jordan burn‘s alternative name is the Pow Burn, Pow being a Scots word (from the old British or Gaelic “poll” for a slow moving river, pool or mire); see also places like Polmont. The Pow is a collective term for the whole length of this burn, from its origin until it joins the Braid Burn at Duddingston. Only the section south of Morningside, between Egypt and Canaan, was known as the Jordan. To the east of this it is known as the Cameron Burn (around the locality of Cameron Toll), with Cameron likely comes from the British Cam Rynn, referring to a bog in the crook of a river.

When the Georgians began to split the Canaan estate up into plots for fashionable villas, the theme for biblical names was continued.

Other names in the area, not shown on these maps, were the villas of Arkland and Mount Zion on Canaan Lane and to put a cherry on the top of this biblical smorgasbord, what is now The Canny Man’s pub was originally a villa called… Paradise!

If you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site – including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget to find further stories to bring you – by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

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Servitude: the thread about why James Craig’s New Town isn’t as regular as he would have liked

Have you ever wondered why at the far western end of Queen Street, where it meets North Charlotte Street, the regular, right-angled Georgian grid of the First New Town does something odd and has a bevelled corner? You have? Great! Lets find out why that is.

No, the Georgians weren’t future-proofing the street corner here for a 20th century traffic engineer’s filter lane. This has to do with something much more predictable than that – land ownership disputes!

You see, when Town Council first had a plan of land ownership drawn up for the planning of the New Town, they didn’t actually yet own all the land on which they intended to build. In fact, they only owned about three quarters of it. Standing in the way to the west was “Allan’s Park“, owned by Dean of Guild Allan (Thomas Allan), and “Barjarg’s Feu” – owned by James Erskine, Lord Barjarg of Drumsheugh House.

Allan’s Park was relatively easy to acquire, and was done so by the time the above plan was released to James Craig and other prospective architects for the design competition in April 1766, but Barjarg’s Feu still formed a salient into it. But planning proceeded on the basis that the Council hoped to acquire the land anyway and James Craig’s winning entry therefore drew the western town blocks over it.

Building commenced at the eastern end within short order and by the late 1760s or early 1770s, the New Town was creeping westwards. By the time it reached the boundary of Barjarg’s Feu in 1785, in the vicinity of Castle Street, the the owner – by now styled Lord Alva having inherited that estate – agreed to sell to the council and the plan could continue uninterrupted (although it took until 1820 to conclude, and was not on entirely favourable terms for the Cityand subsequent proprietors). But if we look closer at the western edge of Craig’s plan, and compare it with what is on the ground, we notice that Queen Street should meet North Charlotte Street on a regular grid (it doesn’t) and both Queen Street and the city grid should extend for another block west from where it does (it doesn’t!). Something else stood in the way. (P.S. Charlotte Square was originally to be St. George’s Square)

So what went wrong? Well, it wasn’t just Lord Alva’s land in the way. In 1782, the Trustees of Heriot’s Hospital (who had sold much of the land for the northern portion of the New Town to the city) had sold a portion of land to Francis Stuart, 9th Earl of Moray and on this he had built for himself a mansion, Moray House, and laid out extensive gardens. And Moray wasn’t for selling, so the New Town plans had to be hurriedly altered to build around his land.

This explains why the north western corner could not be completed as planned, and why Queen Street stopped short at North Charlotte Street, but not why they build that awkward and incongruous bevel on the corner? Well that’s because of a little legal thing called “servitude”. What does servitude mean? “A right that an owner of heritable property has over property owned by another. A servitude runs with the land and not the owner“. The Earl of Moray and Lord Alva had servitude over each other that neither could built within 90 feet of their boundary. When Edinburgh bought the land from Alva, Moray maintained his servitude over it. And can you guess what the distance from the bevelled façade on the corner of Queen Street and North Charlotte Street is from the boundary with the Earl of Moray’s land? Yes, that’s right, it’s *exactly* 90 feet.

This old boundary cut through what is now Glenfinlas Street and explains why the pavement suddenly changes width about 1/3 of the way down – it was built at two different times.

It wasn’t until the intransigent Earl of Moray’s son began to be feu the ground in 1822 that the owners of the properties on the north side of Charlotte Square got the change to buy the rest of “their” gardens. The maps below show 1817 compared with 1849 (slide to compare). You can see at this time, a garden wall still existed on the old boundary at the very west of these gardens, and that the formal portions (marked out by the perimeter paths) also conform to the boundary.

You can find the result of this boundary dispute in other places too. It is the reason for instance that Randolph Lane takes an odd, irregular form if you follow it northwards.

Amazingly, the last of the legal niceties over this portion of land weren’t resolved along this boundary for almost 170 years! Those nicely cleaned and restored “Georgian” townhouses at 1-3 Glenfinlas Street? They were only built in 1990 to finally finish this corner of the New Town (almost) as planned.

There’s actually a few more of these incongruous and awkwardly non-right angles scattered through the New Town – it’s always about old boundaries. This thread details the Gabriel’s Road boundary and the line it still cleaves across the New Town. If you want to understand why any New Town street in Edinburgh isn’t on a right angle – overlay an old land boundary plan on it (in this case, the eastern end of John Laurie’s 1766 plan) and it will probably reveal the answer. Broughton Street and York Lane? Cathedral Lane and the foot of Leith Street? St. James Square and Gabriel’s Road? Truncated southern side of Abercrombie Place? Property boundaries are your answer.

If you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site – including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget to find further stories to bring you – by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

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#1201 P.A.S. Pool - The Field-Names of West Penwith. Author, Penzance, 1990, 1st edition.

#PASPool #PeterPool #Toponymy #PlaceNames #Penwith #Cornwall #Kernewek #BookOfTheDay

Our new article is now published in the Journal of Geography, Politics and Society. A small but telling case: how one signature on Air Force One turned “Gulf of Mexico” into “Gulf of America” — and a new headache for authors and editors, choosing between scientific facts and political pressure:

 https://doi.org/10.26881/jpgs.2025.4.05

#GulfOfAmerica #AcademicFreedom #Toponymy #ResearchIntegrity #ScienceAndPolitics

Mapping Diversity from OBC Transeuropa analyses street names in 32 European cities showing how many are named for men or women. Christianity skews the numbers just a bit as Mary takes top spot. https://mappingdiversity.eu/

More detail https://www.balcanicaucaso.org/en/cp_article/the-most-popular-figures-in-the-street-names-of-european-capitals/

#LinguisticLandscapes #OSM #maps #toponymy