Ken and Fin (London Toponymy 2)

When I first began to get interested in the geography of London, at around the age of eight or so, I found it hard to believe that extremely important central places had bizarre names - like St Pancras or Waterloo, Piccadilly Circus or Trafalgar Square. Whaaat? Were these names remotely English? If not, what on earth were they? Shouldn’t such notable locations be called something logical and solid like London Central, or High Street, or England Square, or Royal Avenue? And what about Soho, Marylebone, Pimlico, Euston, Pall Mall? Really? What kind of words were they? Not sensible English ones by any stretch, not for a serious child whose other precocious interests would before long include astronomy and chemistry.

Going through a phase of wanting things to be ordered and straightforward is presumably not uncommon, even if mildly Aspergery. Eventually I grew out of it, but it took long enough, and not everyone does. So no wonder some unimaginative über-rationalist plonker has in more recent times wanted to call Holborn “Midtown”, as though it was an escapee from Manhattan, half way between business and pleasure. Great Britain never became great by being ordinary and predictable, but as a child I had no inkling.

One of my Welsh relatives, who enjoyed a modest degree of dylsexia coupled with an obsession over kitchen accessories, insisted – following a coach trip to the capital - that there was a major thoroughfare called Eggware Road. Perhaps there was, or should have been. Never mind. Gradually, as I explored London, initially via the medium of the A to Z (the best 3/6-worth I ever owned) and from free maps blagged from Piccadilly Circus station, I became aware of features that recurred or sneaked around the capital while nobody was looking. Lots of Kings and Queens as you would expect, lots of Georges and Victorias, dukes and duchesses, castles and cathedrals, country estates and county towns, but some other rather more  unexpected items in the toponymic bagging area.

In time I learned to tell the difference between Gloucester Road, Gloucester Place, Gloucester Terrace and Gloucester Crescent and though - as with any phonetically irregular word “Gloucester” looks more peculiar and improbable the more you stare at it - here, try it in caps: GLOUCESTER - I found that I would never confuse them and, except in artificial circumstances (such as this blog), mention of any one of them would never trigger thoughts of any of the others. Evidently I categorise spatially rather than index alphabetically. That was a discovery that took a while for the penny to drop.

Other themes, insidious or otherwise, began to reveal themselves. There’s the Ken thing, to start with. There’s far too many Kens; so unkind to tourists. We’ll ignore Kennington and Kenton, irrelevant outliers as they are, but just stop a minute and consider all those proper in-town Kens: Kensington – as in High Street Ken (a friend of Portland Bill), plus its South, West and North variants, socially worlds apart. Then there’s Kensal, as in Rise, Green, and Town (sometimes New Town). What’s that all about, then; some kind of adjective meaning “slightly Kensington but not quite Kensington enough”? Then why not Hampstal or Wimbledal? And if so, are Dulwich, Greenwich and Woolwich not quite dull, green or woolly enough?

Close by the Kens are obsessions with Brompton and Westbourne. Westbourne, a long ago culverted river that nerdishly/famously crosses Sloane Square station in a big tube before dribbling into the Thames near Chelsea Bridge, pops up in a variety of places loosely associated with the old borough of Paddington – in Westbourne Green (north of Harrow Road and an area now mostly a dreamy memory), Westbourne Terrace (not recommended when your feet hurt), Westbourne Grove (properly farty nowadays) and Westbourne Park (with a station that helpfully points you to the Sortie and the Ausgang). Westbourne also occurs in Bournemouth, but then, so does almost everything. Brompton is a name that comes and goes between Knightsbridge, South Ken, Earl’s Court, Chelsea and Fulham, and is entirely unpredictable. There’s the Oratory of course, but even more sinister – according to my faithful Martindale, 27th edition -  it lends its name to a Cocktail containing morphine, cocaine, chloroform and 90% alcohol.

Which brings us fairly rapidly, and hopefully painlessly, to Fin. As in Financial, I hasten to add, not the French variety preceded by a definite article – if it’s Finsbury Circus or Finsbury Square – but less so if it’s just Finsbury (a dead borough of UV-heavy health centres), and a lot less so if it’s Finsbury Park (the unnatural home of bridalwear). Then there’s Finchley, really a rather unpleasant word if you hover over it too long. Unpleasant in a peculiarly English way. Finchley appears in the name of four tube stations (including Finchley Road, which is both a long way from the financial hub and from Finchley itself), so it’s more than a little intrusive. Overall, Fin is sort of always there as a persistent though recessive London lexeme.

As is Brent, as in River though not as in David, which crops up in a long arc across what used to be Middlesex, not least as a Greater London Borough, but also as Brentford, Brentham, and Brent Cross. But not Brentwood, which is somewhere else.

Another thing. Old boroughs (and railway termini) have a habit of flavouring widely separated districts that stretch out from the centre, so you get hints of St Pancras up towards Hampstead, and Paddington into the juicier bits of Notting Hill and Maida Vale. Lambeth, a largely destroyed inner district, now finds itself more at home in Stockwell and Brixton, which is rather comforting. Lewisham has a street named after it in Charlottenburg, Berlin, just possibly one of Spike Milligan’s absurdist ingredients in his grand plan for the downfall of the Führer. This has probably gone far enough.