Tripped over this and thought it was fascinating, thought I’d share.

House Address “Twins” Proximity

If you lived in a house with the address 5 Station Road, it probably wouldn’t surprise you if you learned that there was another house somewhere in the country which also had the address 5 Station Road. There are, after all, over 2000 streets named Station Road in the UK.

The fact that you sometimes get streets quite close together with the same name can be confusing. In London, there’s a sign on the platform at Abbey Road DLR station telling tourists, via the medium of appalling puns, that if they’re looking for the Abbey Road made famous by the Beatles, they are, in fact, in the wrong place. The Beatles’ Abbey Road is 12.5km away from the Abbey Road DLR station.

I found myself wondering what the shortest distance was between two Address Twins – houses with the same number and the same street-name.

Almost as fascinating as the solar system.

Won’t somebody think of the children postmen ?

My address has an exact twin 1.4 miles away in Leeds.

I grew up in Downing Street, roughly 100 miles from the much more famous London one.
Only I lived at 56, No 10 is a terraced house at the other end.

Leeds has 2 hennconner lanes 6 miles apart, but I guess town street is probably the easiest one, there’s loads of them!

I grew up in Pudding Lane, quite far away from that London in Scotland.

odd or concidental addresses? I’ll just leave this here.

Bellenden Gardens
Edinburgh EH16 5TA, UK
https://goo.gl/maps/YaK9QkEAZoF2

geoffj –

Just as software developers leave little easter eggs (such as the ascii art if you “view source” of this very website), other professions will do the same.

– My dad was an architect for a property developer and I can believe that Bellenden Gdns was intentional. Remember him having fun thinking up street names, but don’t have any amusingly rude ones – his just had to include the developer’s name somehow.

– I once worked for a tour operator and one of the holiday brochures was legendary for having the outline of a naked human figure photoshopped into the background pattern. Unfortunately I haven’t got an image I can share. Almost a million copies printed and nobody outside the company ever noticed.

one of the holiday brochures was legendary…..

…..nobody outside the company ever noticed.

There may have been reports or documents I have authored where the capital letters of the sentences or paragraphs have spelt out what I think of the addressee.

Whether that’s unique or not, I don’t know. Anyone else? Typically no-one notices, that’s for sure.

I often get stopped in my village by delivery or taxi drivers asking me where a particular cottage is. The address will be cottage name / village name.

It is barking mad that in 2017 we still use traditional address systems without any reference to GPS. Must be a nightmare for emergency services. Is it not about time we move to a grid type system which expands on post codes to offer up an exact location, one that can be identified form the road or GPS?

Franksinatra we have UPRNs which can be cross referenced with grid refs.

Is it not about time we move to a grid type system which expands on post codes to offer up an exact location, one that can be identified form the road or GPS?

There is already a national address database that records grid references for every property.

In Nottingham addresses do not generally refer to the suburb (too much controversy over where one starts and the other begins and people desperate to be in Sherwood rather than Forest Fields), but there are some roads that have a suburb mentioned so they can be distinguished from the other and will only be a few km from each other.

The distance between the houses “No1 London” and “No1 Yorkshire” is 154 miles.

One of the original aims of the Ordnance Survey grid system was for post codes so something like SH 1234 5678 would refer to a unique location with maybe a couple of properties. It didn’t get used as basically it was too difficult to remember a particular code. GPS values would be even harder to remember.

Post codes are assigned based on expected amount of mail so a large company might use a post code by itself whereas domestic properties have to share. We are out in the country and if you put our post code into something like Streetmap.co.uk then it plonks you in the middle of a field about 500 metres away! It’s probably the central point of all the houses using the code.

We don’t even live on a named road so that system wouldn’t work. Even if it was named then there’s no road/street sign indicating that fact so you’d be back to simply knowing where the house was.

Emergency services? Hmm, the last time I had to ring them: “What’s your post code?” “That won’t get you here, our grid ref is …” “What’s a grid ref?”. I ended up getting the mobile phone number of the ambulance driver and directing him turn by turn as I could see him on the other side of the valley!

It is barking mad that in 2017 we still use traditional address systems without any reference to GPS.

postcodes are one of the best systems i’ve ever sued. much more precise than US/ French/ german systems.

What 3 words project

project to divide the world into a 3m x 3m grid of squares and associate to enable people to get a proper address to allow them to access services they otherwise wouldn’t be able to get. (deliveries, medicine, bank acct and so on)

postcodes are one of the best systems i’ve ever sued. much more precise than US/ French/ german systems

Combined with the US approach for addressing in rural areas they’d be great, i.e. your house number is relative to the distance along the road. Rural areas where a postcode covers a large area are a weakness

There’s a village near where I grew up where every property is numbered. No problem you might think but when a new house is built it just gets the next number no matter what road it’s on! Walking along any road and the house numbers go: 5, 6, 7, 104, 15, … 😯

My mom regularly gets mail for another house with the same number and street in the next town along, 3 miles according to google, probably 2 miles as the crow flies.

Thats the thing with living in a small town/village on a main road that goes into a larger town near by. There’s probably about 50 birmingham roads not far from here.

How many towns must have a London Road?

Another source of confusion is when the road name gets a “north” or similar added. We like in Knowsley Road but further up there’s Knowsley Road West, which often causes problems. It’s equally bad when the same name is split by a major road or another feature so gets broken into two bits.

Definitely here in Elgin that’s the case.
As, across the railway line there is New Elgin, sometimes with same street names. Off top of my head, North Street. Elgin to New Elgin versions, 1 mile.

Guys I used to work with run an address database company. One of them gets or got very excited about such matters!

There’s a village near here called ‘Streat’ near Hassocks.

I had a freind who lived at Home Farm, Streat, Hassocks.

The number of failed deliveries or calls they got from drivers lookign for Farm Street, Hassocks was unbelievable, especially on phone orders where they dictated the address. I think GPS has helped as drivers are sent to the right place to start with.

It’s worse in Wales. The Land Registry and Post Office has my house name spelled differently. Our road does not have a name but the village has two recognised spellings. Add to that 15 dwellings on the same postcode, some being farms so it covers quite an area.

My street in Leeds also has a twin in Leeds. 8.5 miles apart.
Leeds planners are bloody lazy!

I have the luck of living in a street that spreads across 2 villages.

The numbering starts from either end hence there is someone that lives on the same street as me, with the same number, though we live in different villages. GPS brings you in from the ‘other end’…..
(it is about 2km end to end)
(and in Belgium) 🙂

There’s a village near where I grew up where every property is numbered. No problem you might think but when a new house is built it just gets the next number no matter what road it’s on! Walking along any road and the house numbers go: 5, 6, 7, 104, 15, ..

Austrian villages work on the same principal. It’s crazy confusing to find any address.
Find no.1 and it’s the first house built that the village grew up around.

Grew up in a National Trust house.

Gettig anything delivered was a PITA, either no one believed when you gave the address, they refused to deliver as it was ~2 miles from the gate which is where the postcode is centered, or “there was no one available to sign for it” because they couldn’t be bothered to ask any of the hundreds of people milling around.

Leeds planners are bloody lazy!

That’s one explanation for the one way system, yes.

This always makes me chuckle

Pigs on police cars

My mail still gets here without a postcode. Can’t remember many but I do know addresses. Suppose it comes from growing up without such trivia.

Every one of the flats in my block has 3 different addresses, depending upon which database you look at!

To make it worse there are 5 different versions, each flat has 3 of the 5 so you really are clutching at straws whether each one fits your flat!

You can have flat number, name of block then one of the following:

Blobby Place
Blobby Street
Curvy part of town (we’re not in Curvy part of town)
Squidgy Square (there is an actual Squidgy Square 1/4 miles away)
Nothing whatsoever – as in it’s blank.

Then you either get just Cardiff or Caerdydd and sometimes you get South Glamorgan included too. Bloody nightmare when it comes to online address forms.

* Actual address names changed for safety!! But you get the idea.

My understanding is that Ireland doesn’t have a national postcode system, and the introduction of one is opposed by the Irish Post Office, as it would open the market up to rival delivery companies, whereas the Irish PO currently have the monopoly of the feet-on-the-ground knowledge of individual addresses and their locations.

Why go for just same street name and number in a twin, when you can have same town/village name and county too?

Augustine Road, Minster, Kent (Sheppey)
Augustine Road, Minster, Kent (Thanet)

You’d think the posties would use postcodes consistently, but nope, apparently not, judging by the amount of my grandparents mail and that of their address twin ended up at the wrong house.

My address has three local duplicates (distances are walking via google maps)

2.9 miles
9.2 miles
21.6 miles

I just punched them into google to check the distances, and it randomly threw up another near Melbourne, Australia! Suspect it worked out I was navigating to similar addresses and suggested the furthest as well as the closest!

10,506 miles (flying, not walking)

More address nerdery; I really like this idea…especially useful for places where you have no official address

https://what3words.com/

When I first moved into my flat it was not on the post office / post code database. the number of folk who told me there was no residentialk dwellings there was really funny. No you can’t have “residental broadband, that address is all offices”

Also the official address is 4F3, 2 something street. The 4F3 is a reasonably common system in Scotland – it means 4th floor flat 3. This however seems to really confuse many english companies and does not fit many of the forms you fill in. the street number is 2, the flat is 4f3

My address doesn’t exist in Google – which is a mixed blessing. Some systems won’t allow me to sign up – Uber being one of them.

I do exist in the postcode checker but the council sold our road off and just left the even numbers down a path. This causes a lot of confusion. My bank’s system of addresses struggled for some reason so I had all envelopes from them written by hand for a few years before I could opt for paperless statements.

The council still managed to give our non existent road a 20mph speed limit!