Taking the Low Road

Streets change names.


If you live on our East Coast in an older city or town that sort of evolved higgledy-piggledy over the two or three centuries of our nation’s brief history, then you’re already accustomed to this.

We live in the West, where most towns were carefully platted in nice, neat squares. Newly annexed properties and subdivisions are very carefully, for the most part, mated into the original town or city plan. Very seldom do streets change names in our neck of the woods.

You can imagine our surprise when we kept coming across new names every other block or so. Apparently, in the UK and Europe, this is rather common. Streets, especially in Edinburgh, can – and do – change names A LOT. Look sharp. As some streets intersect others at odd angles, we assumed, when we found a different street name at the next block, that we must’ve unknowingly left the street we meant to stay on. Most of the time, we hadn’t; the street had just changed names.

We haven’t used GPS in the UK yet, so I’m not sure how accurate GPS devices are, given the multiple intricacies of older UK cities. If you have, we’d like to hear about it.