Seven London streets are named after days of the week.
But only ever the same day of the week, and that's today.
There's no Saturday Road, no Sunday Drive, no Monday Avenue, no Tuesday Terrace, no Wednesday Walk and no Thursday Close.
When it comes to naming London streets it's always Friday.
London's most central Friday street is Friday Street in the City of London. Today it's a runty thing joining Queen Victoria Street to Cannon Street, within sight of Mansion House station, but it used to be four times longer and ran all the way up to Cheapside. In medieval times this area was the City's chief marketplace and various streets were named after the traders setting up there, for example Milk Street, Bread Street and Poultry. This particular thoroughfare was the preserve of a weekly fish market, hence Friday Street, because that was the one day of the week the Catholic church discouraged the consumption of meat.
Friday Street used to have threechurches but only one was rebuilt after the Great Fire, St Matthew, which as "the smallest and cheapest of the Wren churches" was itself demolished in 1885. Most of the northern half of the street disappeared under the postwar New Change office development and has subsequently been utterly lost beneath the shops at One New Change, leaving a southern stub that's mostly for the benefit of queueing traffic. The most important building in modern Friday Street is Bracken House, a salmon-coloured office block built for the Financial Times in the 1950s, whose front door is topped by an astronomical dial with the face of Sir Winston Churchill as its sunburst centrepiece. But you need to walk round to Cannon Street for that, because Friday Street really isn't what it was. In summary: named after fishmongers
And so to Chingford, or more specifically Chingford Hatch, a pleasant patch of suburbia alongside one of the narrower threads of Epping Forest. Friday Hill is half a mile of former country lane which both climbs and descends a proper little hillock, and gets its name from John Friday who owned the land round here in the late 15th century. The summit proved the ideal spot for a Jacobean manor, then for a Victorian whitebrick replacement called Friday Hill House where the local vicar lived. The London County Council bought the estate in 1940 and created an extensive leafy estate, again called Friday Hill, and Waltham Forest council recently offloaded Friday Hill House to become several flats. Everything is Friday-related round here.
The original country lane, Friday Hill, is mainly for driving these days. Separate residential streets - Friday Hill West and Friday Hill East - have been jammed in parallel behind grassy verges so that front gardens open out onto much quieter roads. Little Friday Road performs this function to the northeast to complete a full-on Friday quartet. Points of (relative) interest along Friday Hill include the dubiously-named Pimp Hall Park (which has a 17th century dovecote), a pub called TheDovecote and notmuch else. Indeed you got lucky with this one because Friday Hill is officially the B146 and I abandoned my B Road safari after the B142. In summary: named after medieval landowner John Friday
Brace yourself. This one's near Tooting station but officially in Mitcham, and looks like an innocuous street of fifteen interwar houses. One side's all walls and fences and the other is a terrace of what would be semi-detached houses if only they weren't all joined together. The tarmac's not terribly well repaired, there's a 20mph speed limit throughout and the S1 bus stops at the bottom the road close to the gate into London Road Cemetery. And that'd be about all there is to say about Friday Road were it not for the street it joins onto, up by the double garage...
Hang on, Crusoe Road leading into Friday Road, that can only mean... and yes it does. What we have here is a cluster of streets dedicated to Daniel Defoe's most famous novel, Robinson Crusoe, with Friday Road named after his trusty companion/manservant/slave.
The other street which joins onto Friday Road, halfway down, is called Island Road, and round the back of Crusoe Road is Pitcairn Road. In Defoe's book Crusoe is cast away in the Caribbean, not the Pacific, but the real life events that inspired him took place 400 miles off the coast of South America on a volcanic hump the Chilean government have since renamed Robinson Crusoe Island.
The reason for the Mitcham cluster is that Defoe once lived at nearby Tooting Hall, or it's said he did, while hiding from non-conformist persecution in the 1680s. 200 years later a woman called Mrs Taylor started a dairy on neighbouring pasture and, knowing the literary rumour, decided to call it Crusoe Farm. Her one-cow start-up grew into one of the largest milk businesses in south London, so it made sense that when the first residential streets spread south of Swains Lane one of them should be called Crusoe Road. Pitcairn Road is a contemporary, and Friday Road and Island Road came later replacing orchards. But oh man... Friday, who'd have guessed? In summary: named after the day of the week a fictional castaway met a fictional tribesman.
And finally to Erith, not quite by the river but further inland above main road and railway. Several working class terraces were built here in Victorian times to serve a swathe of manufacturing and engineering works, one of which is Friday Road. It has 48 houses numbered up one side and down the other, as befits a cul-de-sac, and leads to a fairly unloved public footpath at the far end. Everyone parks on the road, assuming they can find space, with excellent reversing skills a key qualification. I only met one resident, a ginger cat who seemed somewhat wary, but I've marked down those at number three as 'borderline twee' and those at 46 as 'impressively green-fingered'. And that looks like all there is to say about Friday Road except once again the adjacent street is called Crusoe Road, and here we go again...
Alexander Selkirk was a Scottish buccaneer who in 1703 joined a privateer's plundering voyage around Cape Horn. After one skirmish too many he asked to be left behind on an uninhabited island rather than remain on board for fear the ship was unseaworthy and would sink, which it later did. Selkirk survived alone for four years and four months, sustained by feral goats and wild turnips, before finally being rescued by another privateer and resuming his original career. His ship eventually returned to England on 14th October 1711 and he stepped back onshore in... of course, Erith.
Bexley Council commemorated the 300thanniversary of Selkirk's return by erecting a pink signpost in Riverside Gardens. Not only does it point towards his birthplace of Lower Largo, Scotland (460 miles) but also towards Juan Fernández Island, Chile (7750 miles) where he was marooned.
Selkirk quickly became a celebrity, insofar as 18th century society allowed, and could have retired on the profits from his booty. But he was soon back out on the waves, this time on the right side of the law, until in 1721 he finally succumbed to yellow fever off the coast of West Africa. By this time Daniel Defoe had already fictionalised his story, creating what some have called the first English novel, and Selkirk's place in literary history was assured. The dubious honour of an Erith backstreet would follow later. In summary: named after the non-existent companion of a fictionalised pirate
Seven London streets are named after days of the week, but only ever the same day of the week, and that's today.
