Readers left 40 comments.
I put it on Twitter and got 20 more comments.
Then it ended up on Hacker News, the behemoth American syndicator, and got 80 more comments.
The latter also attracted thousands more visitors to the blog, making it the 12th best day ever on diamond geezer.
When this kind of inrush happens I like to go all introspective and try to work out what drove the commotion. And in this case I think it's two things. a) not realising the significance of capital letters b) not reading the post
So here are some of the questions people asked, from pertinent to eyerolling, and my attempts at a response.
Keep reading and there will be new data and two new maps.
Q: You seem to have missed Clapham High Street
Q: Have you missed out Greenwich High Street? (Zone 2)?
Q: Is Kensington High Street not inner London?
Q: Oh and what about Marylebone High Street too?
Q: Missed at least Borough High Street
Q: Hampstead High Street?
Q: Deptford would like a word...
These are fairly typical of the comments on Twitter. Readers saw London has 57 High Streets (none of which are in Inner London) and instantly thought of examples which were in Inner London. They hadn't clicked though to read the post where I explained I was only counting High Streets, not High Street Somethings. They simply responded, convinced I was wrong because they hadn't read my caveats.
And OK this is a spurious case, but I think it's emblematic of a huge amount of sound and fury generated by social media. Someone asserts something, knowing precisely what they meant. Someone else then tears into it, assuming they meant something else. Life would be a lot quieter if people sometimes stopped and thought "I wonder what they actually meant by that?" and perhaps kept quiet. But we don't, we leap in and raise the temperature based on our own misconceptions, and I can be just as guilty of that as the rest of us.
Q: There also seem to be quite a few examples of 'High Road' in London?
Q: There are some High Roads on top of that, such as Greenwich High Road?
Q: This ignores all the High Roads...
Q: Chiswick High Rd is not included.
Q: My parental shopping locale was a Something High Road. Hope we learn about those too.
Q: One of our High Streets is a High Road - surely they count too?
Never risk a surely. If you'd read the post it should have been clear it was only about High Streets, not High Roads. Yes they do exist but that wasn't what I was writing about, a man can't research everything.
But since Saturday I've done more research and tallied all the High Roads in London too. There are 13 of them.
London's High Roads: Cowley, Eastcote, Finchley, Harrow Weald, Ickenham, Ilford, New Southgate, South Woodford, Tottenham, Wembley, Willesden, Woodford Green, Wood Green
Again all of these are in Outer London, not Inner, and this time every single one is north of the Thames, The longest is the High Road through Finchley and Whetstone at almost 4 miles, followed by the High Road between Ilford and Chadwell Heath which is 3½ miles.
And yes, there are also Something High Roads with an extra placename added.
London's Something High Roads: Balham, Chiswick, Greenwich, Kilburn, Lee, Streatham London's High Road Somethings: Leyton, Leytonstone
If you tot up all the High Roads and Something High Roads there are 21 altogether. But they're very much outnumbered by the High Streets and Something High Streets, of which there are 103.
Q: What’s the difference between (any) 'High Street' and (any) 'High Road'? Is it that the 'Street' was a focal point of local activity and 'Road' was a route?
Good question. But whatever the reason it's not going to be black and white like that, contexts will vary.
OK, back to the misconceptions.
Q: I’ve counted 20 high streets from memory that aren’t mentioned in this article.
Q: Streatham High Road still seems like a grey area that should be considered a high street.
Q: Searching just for the name limits a bit. The great Muswell Hill ends up not being there, for example.
Q: I think Surbiton & Tolworth also have high streets (albeit I’m not sure if they call it that)
Q: Kentish Town Road?
A lot of people who only saw the headline thought I was talking about high streets rather than High Streets. Unsurprisingly they took exception to my conclusion. Such is the importance of capital letters.
Some people noticed, but didn't like it.
Q: This would be more interesting if you'd actually identified the higher order concept of a high street not just if it had "High Street" in the name.
Q: Is it not more meaningful to identify actual high streets, not streets named “high street”?
These questioners pointed out that a high street is more important than a High Street, geographywise, and I agree. The problem is that a 'high street' is incredibly difficult to define, thus an entirely subjective concept. High Streets, by contrast, are fundamentally countable which is why I chose to focus on them. If you want to waffle endlessly about what a high street is (and many people did) then go ahead. But you're not going to come up with a number at the end of the exercise, only a woolly discussion.
Q: A high street is 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.
Interestingly the Ordnance Survey has had a go at quantifying high streets (lower case). In an experimental2019 study they defined a high street as "a named street predominately consisting of retailing, defined by a cluster of 15 or more retail addresses within 150 metres." According to their definition London has 1204 high streets. Even better they made a map which you can swoosh round and look at your local area and it's fascinating. Some of the longer London 'high streets' are Oxford Street/High Holborn, Upper Street/Holloway Road and Balham/Tooting/Colliers Wood, although technically these are all comprised of shorter chunks, so 1204 is undoubtedly an overestimate.
Q: Thank you, I was hoping the site wold give exactly that description, but alas it didn’t. The author is victim of the Fallacy of shared context.
I'm sorry I didn't write about what you wanted, Andrew. Refunds are available in the usual place.
Let's finish with three good ones.
• If anyone wants to make a similar map in their own city or with a different street name, you can use Overpass Turbo to query OpenStreetMap data for this. Just comparing the maps visually, they seem to match.
That map is brilliant, thanks William. It's not the first time Overpass Turbo has helped to confirm a London-based query on this blog.
• Which High Street is the highest?
Ironically it's Downe.
• All the Inner London boroughs were once part of the London County Council, and they undertook a street renaming exercise to ensure that street names were not duplicated.
Indeed they did, mostly in the 19th century under the auspices of the Metropolitan Board of Works. This explains why Inner London no longer has any High Streets. I found this on Bruce Hunt's comprehensively excellent website, London Miscellany.
What Bruce has done, which is brilliant, is patiently list every single street in (Inner) London which changed its name between 1857 and 1945. He's made an 1857-1929 list and a 1929-1945 list, in both cases one ordered Old→New and another New→Old. From this I've learned that 17 High Streets stopped being called High Street and were called something else, and these are they...
Used to be called High Street: Battersea High Street, Borough High Street, Bow Road, Camberwell Road, Dartmouth Road, Denmark Hill, Eltham High Street, Great Garden Street, Hoxton Street, Kensington High Street, Kingsland High Street, Lewisham High Street, Newington Butts, Shoreditch High Street, Stepney High Street, Stoke Newington High Street, Upper Tooting Road
The one that fascinates me most is Bow Road, the road I live on, because I never realised it was originally called High Street. Indeed I'm a bit suspicious because I've found an 1850 map where Bow Road is already called Bow Road, not High Street, so maybe take Bruce's list with a pinch of salt.
What hasn't changed, even after all this discussion and two days of interrogation, is my assertion that London has exactly 57 High Streets. And if you disagree, even after reading everything I've written, feel free to do your own research.
