In almost every area of London there is a street called “high street”, and most of them have a “church street” also. Locals (and many maps) helpfully prepend the area name onto the street eg “Chiswick High Street”, “Kensington High Street”[1], “Stoke Newington Church Street” etc, but the actual address is “High street” or whatever meaning just several completely different streets. Not to mention many many other streets that are straight up duplicated (eg there are at least 10 “Bath Road”s) or confusingly similar.
There are also streets that have one name but are not contiguous for historical reasons. Eg my street crosses another road but the two halves are not directly opposite each other. Several times I have been on the phone with a confused delivery driver who is on the wrong side of this and is trying to convince me that my house doesn’t exist because the numbers only go up to 50 or so. Our street is also confusing because for some of the way the numbers are conventional (ie even on one side, odd on the other) but for some of it there are no houses on the other side, so adjacent houses have sequential numbers.
[1] Also the tube names this “High Street Kensington”, not “Kensington High street”. Tube names are also confusing. I live near “Turnham Green” tube which is thus named because it was the site of the battle of Turnham Green in the English civil war. This tube opens out onto a green which is not called “Turnham Green” it’s called Acton Green Common, and it is in Chiswick, not Acton. The green in Acton is called Acton Park. The actual Turnham Green is closer to another tube called “Chiswick Park”, which also opens up on a park that also isn’t called “Chiswick Park”, it’s called “Chiswick Green”. This park is incorrectly named on most online maps because at some point they probably just gave up at the insanity of it all and the boundary isn’t obvious.
”With a turn to the left Mr Verloc pursued his way along a narrow street by the side of a yellow wall which, for some inscrutable reason, had No. I Chesham Square written on it in black letters. Chesham Square was at least sixty yards away, and Mr Verloc, cosmopolitan enough not to be deceived by London’s topographical mysteries, held on steadily, without a sign of surprise or indignation. At last, with business-like persistency, he reached the Square, and made diagonally for the number 10. This belonged to an imposing carriage gate in a high, clean wall between two houses, of which one rationally enough bore the number 9 and the other was numbered 37; but the fact that this last belonged to Porthill Street, a street well known in the neighbourhood, was proclaimed by an inscription placed above the ground-floor windows by whatever highly efficient authority is charged with the duty of keeping track of London’s strayed houses. Why powers are not asked of Parliament (a short Act would do) for compelling those edifices to return where they belong is one of the mysteries of municipal administration. Mr Verloc did not trouble his head about it, his mission in life being the protection of the social mechanism, not its perfectionment or even its criticism.”
So walk in a straight line and you pass along Nicolson Street -> St.Patrick Street -> Clerk Street -> Newigton Road.
Sometimes you see these signposted in a fun way too with signs for both the individual components and the "main" street:
https://thescottishpearl.uk/2022/06/28/streets-with-two-name...
If you want confusing look for an address on El Camino in South Bay. When you cross over to another city, they remember the addresses on El Camino so it’s easy to get lost and not know where a particular address is unless you correlate to a city which pre-GPS was tough.
Yeah that's why everyone just calls it "Geary"
All of that is related to Vanbrugh Castle which is, of course, at the junction of Maze Hill and Westcombe Park Road.
And speaking of Brooklyn, I really wonder what city planners were thinking with that thing in Williamsburg where numbered streets exist twice, once as “<j> North <i>th Street” and once as “South <i>th Street”, which completely clashes with Manhattan naming the Eastern/Western part of the same street (“<j> <E/W> <i>Th Street”). Not to mention the completely separate set of numbered streets (“<j> <i>th Street”, without cardinal direction indicators) in the south or Brooklyn…
The other day I entered my friend's address on Portola Ave in the Tesla, engaged FSD, and it took us to the address in South SF (a township just south of SF, hence "South SF"). We just let it drive, assuming it was somehow lost, but then as we neared the destination, we realized what had happened.
Even wore our portion was originally in Berkeley, the border was moved 100 years or so ago so that someone could open the closest bar to the campus when Berkeley had more stringent liquor licensing
I get it can be confusing, but its no more confusing than Manhattan or seattle, which has a terrible vortex of 45ths and many many 15ths.
Division and Divisidero are generally not anywhere near each other. You can figure that out quickly. Similar to streets and avenues.
Welcome to living in a city.
Also in Brighton Beach there's 1st street, place, path, lane, terrace, walk, and court.
Edit: Once I took a Lyft/Uber in midtown Sacramento. Midtown Sacramento is on a grid where north-south streets are numbered and east-west streets are lettered. The driver wasn’t familiar with the Latin alphabet. So what would seem like the simplest structure was, in that case, inscrutable.
> Mason St. and Masonic Ave., or Divisadero St. and Division St.
then you must be either very distracted or dyslexic.
What was the last time you gave or got an address by word of mouth?
