It's nothing original, lots of other bloggers have done it, indeed you might be surprised I haven't tackled it before. But it had to be done eventually and I've decided 2024 is the year. I suspect it'll be all the better for having waited.
I speak of visiting all the streets in Monopoly.
There are 22 altogether, which if you add in the four stations makes a annual-friendly total of 26. All I need to do is blog about one property a fortnight and we'll wind up back at 'Go' at the end of the year.
OLD KENT ROAD
£60
→
MAYFAIR
£400
I'm using the London version of the board, obviously, and the original 1935 streets rather than any of the silly thematic variations the manufacturers have introduced since.
Monopoly now has an Edinburgh edition, a Kent edition and a Redditch edition. There's an Alton Towers edition, a National Trust edition and a Coronation Street edition. There's a New Zealand edition, a Latvia edition and an Ecuador edition. There's even a Smurfs edition, an Iron Maiden edition and sixteen Star Wars editions. We'll have none of that.
The original game's American and the board was based on the streets of Atlantic City, New Jersey. It's the version I'm most familiar with because we were gifted it by my Mum's transatlantic penfriend in 1976, and many's the night we spent circling the board from Mediterranean Avenue to Boardwalk. I've since had to get used to the version most Britons have been playing for 89 years, not to mention almost living on one of the browns.
In this country the story goes that games company Waddingtons sent two employees down from Leeds to London to decide which streets in the capital would be used on the UK board. One of the researchers was managing director Victor Watson and the other was his secretary Marjory Phillips, and everything you don't like about their choices dates back to that fateful day trip.
Old Kent Road, Whitechapel Road
The Angel Islington, Euston Road, Pentonville Road
Pall Mall, Whitehall, Northumberland Avenue
Bow Street, Marlborough Street, Vine Street
Strand, Fleet Street, Trafalgar Square
Leicester Square, Coventry Street, Piccadilly
Regent Street, Oxford Street, Bond Street
Park Lane, Mayfair
🚂
King's Cross, Marylebone, Fenchurch Street, Liverpool Street
I'm not the first person to display them on a Google Map, but if you'd like to see where they all are then here's my map of London's Monopoly streets.
Victor and Marjory concentrated on the West End, with only the light blues located to the north and the cheap old browns to the east. That means this series will cover an awful lot of very familiar territory, indeed the greens in particular are famous across the world. What's more I've blogged about most of these streets before, some in considerable depth, indeed I once spent a week writing about one of the reds and an entire month writing about one of the yellows. We'll be covering a lot of old ground.
The streets vary in length from 50m to 1¾ miles, while one is an entire neighbourhood covering almost half a square mile. My intention is to distil each location into a single blogpost of just over 1000 words, which in some cases will be a threadbare stretch and in many cases will require ridiculous oversimplification. I also intend to focus on a house and a hotel along each street, not that there are many actual houses in this part of town. I will not be doing "the pub crawl", even over the course of a year.
I'm not intending to write about the other squares like Jail, Free Parking and the utilities, although if I'm feeling chipper I might squeeze in a waterworks and a power station during the relevant weeks. Also I won't be starting at the official location of Go, which according to a press release in 2010 is on the South Bank beneath the London Eye. This was just marketing bluster devised for the 75th anniversary, and I dissected the geographical lunacy of the claim in not onebut two somewhat sarcastic posts.
I also blogged about Monopoly in October 2020 when I wrote about how I'd rename the properties so they made more sense today (with Shaftesbury Avenue instead of Coventry Street, obviously). My first mentions were in local history month in August 2003 (when I explained that Bow Street isn't in Bow) and February 2004 (when the Get London Reading campaign promoted Do Not Pass Go as one of their top 12 books about London).
Do Not Pass Go by Tim Moore was a marketing sensation twenty years ago, and one of the first quirky travelogues about the capital. I got my copy out for a re-read and it's very of its time, quite rambly and mixes historical nuggets with rather a lot of conversational anecdotery. Tim was also somewhat imprecise, often meandering off the main roads in search of points of interest, for example devoting five pages to a whelk stall on Whitechapel High Street when he should have been on Whitechapel Road. I intend to be more nailed down.
We'll start off tomorrow with the longest street of the lot, and the browns should be out of the way by the end of the month.
