London street names

Inbunden bok. B T Batsford Ltd London. 1972. 367 sidor.

Mycket gott skick. Skyddsomslag i mycket gott skick. Bra begagnat skick. Språk: engelska.

LONDON STREET NAMES is a comprehensive dictionary explaining the origins of almost 4,000 of London’s streets. It covers the historic City and Westminster and also a broad sweep of later suburbs: north to Hampstead and Highgate, west to Chelsea, east to Aldgate and south to Bankside – an area of over 25 miles.

The reader, interested amateur or student, will see each street, whether medieval lane, Elizabethan alley, Georgian terrace or Victorian square with a fresh eye on discovering how it came to get its name. Gillian Bebbington’s exhaustive study shows how names were derived from, for example, natural landmarks, a particular trade or function associated with a district or from the great estates – Portman, Grosvenor, Bedford, Cavendish – whose impact on London’s complicated geography has been considerable. For not only is LONDON STREET NAMES a dictionary, it is also a history of the growth (and in some cases the destruction) of a richly endowed city from its earliest development to the present.

Reproductions of contemporary prints and maps illustrate the changing face of the city and 8 pages of two-colour reference maps of all the streets mentioned (except the very smallest) mark the vanished streams, city walls, field and estate boundaries, helping the reader to locate what traces of these now vanished landmarks still remain.