Every named street in the United Kingdom, 913,335 of them, mapped by its name. Where does High Street give way to Main Street, and which street words belong to only one corner of the country?
Every town in Britain seems to have a High Street, and every village in Scotland a Main Street. Somewhere between the two, the name changes. Ordnance Survey publishes the name and position of every named road in Great Britain as open data, and OpenStreetMap's volunteers have mapped the streets of Northern Ireland, so the line can be drawn rather than guessed. I took all 913,335 named streets and sorted them by name, by the word at the end (Road, Lane, Close, Wynd) and by the word at the start (Heol, Back, Church).
The map below starts with the big question: in each 20 km square, how many of its High Streets and Main Streets are Main Streets? Then switch to the most common name in each square, pick any of 79 street words to see where it lives, or type your own street's name and see where its namesakes are.
Across the UK there are 2,507 High Streets and 1,336 Main Streets. High Street is the commonest street name in the country, and in England (2,103) and Wales (166, against just 9 Main Streets). Scotland has 309 Main Streets to 206 High Streets, and Northern Ireland 132 to 32.
But the divide is not a clean north and south. London has 54 High Streets and one Main Street. The South West, the East of England and Wales all keep Main Street under 8% of the pair. The surprise is the middle of England: in the East Midlands Main Street wins, 414 to 324, and in Yorkshire and the Humber 244 to 208. The North East, closer to Scotland, has only 18 Main Streets.
Of England's 296 councils, 33 have more Main Streets than High Streets. Most lie in a belt from Leicestershire and Rutland through Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire into Yorkshire and on to Cumbria: North Yorkshire (94 Main, 61 High), the East Riding (72 to 22), Harborough (49 to 11) and Melton (33 to 4). In Scotland it is the other way round: only 6 of 32 councils have more High Streets than Main Streets, led by Highland, East Lothian and Moray.
The clearest pattern is not about latitude at all. Ordnance Survey records the town or village each street belongs to, so I matched each street to that settlement's type. In England's towns, Main Street makes up 8% of the pair; in England's villages, 38%. In the East Midlands and Yorkshire the gap is wider still: 13% in towns, 62% in villages. Even in Scotland, towns lean to High Street more than villages do (27% Main against 78%).
High Street is a town name. Main Street, across the Midlands, the north and Scotland, is a village name.
This fits the usual reading of the names, though the map cannot prove it: "high" in High Street once meant chief or principal, as in high road, and the name was used for the main street of a market town; a village's one street was simply its main street. The data show where each name survives, not when it was given.
High and Main are not the only names for the main street. Three others belong almost wholly to one region each. Click a card to map it.
Put the five together and give each 20 km square the one it has most of. Of the 416 squares with at least three, High Street wins 240, Main Street 110, The Street 38, Fore Street 19 and Front Street 9.
Most street names end in a handful of words. Road ends 19% of all names, Close 14%, Street 9% and Lane 8%. The rare ones are the interesting ones, because many of them belong to one place. The table ranks every ending and first word used at least 150 times by how concentrated it is in one region, compared with that region's share of all streets. Click a row to map it.
Some of the patterns are about history, some about landscape, and some about how a place was built. Drove (1,792) is the fen and marsh word for a track for driving stock, and 228 are in East Cambridgeshire. Names ending in -gate as one word, or in Gate, number 3,490; 55% are in the north of England and the East Midlands, where gate in a street name is usually traced to the Old Norse word for a street, as in York's Micklegate. Bolton has 667 names starting with Back, the named back streets behind its terraces. In Northern Ireland, 11% of streets end in Park, against 0.7% in Great Britain: the housing estate is a Park there, where in England it is a Close.
Ordnance Survey records Welsh and Scottish Gaelic names alongside English ones. 9,480 streets have a Welsh name or start with a Welsh street word, 22% of the streets in Wales. Heol, road, is the most common (1,418, with 250 in Carmarthenshire), then Ffordd (971), Clos (784) and Lôn (663). Gwynedd has the most and Ceredigion the next highest share. Scottish Gaelic street names are far rarer in the data: 146, mostly in the Western Isles and Highland. In Northern Ireland, 2,399 streets (8%) carry an Irish name in OpenStreetMap, 659 of them in Newry, Mourne and Down; that measures where mappers have added the bilingual signs, not where Irish is spoken.
After High Street come Station Road (2,074), Church Lane (2,005), Church Street (1,573) and Mill Lane (1,415). Yet most names are rare: the UK's streets share 388,197 different names, and 75% of those names belong to one street only.
Royalty is everywhere. Names with King or King's number 2,735, Queen or Queen's 2,378, Victoria 2,032, George 1,215 and Albert 962. Celebrations leave their own traces: Jubilee 808, Elizabeth 605 and Coronation 535. Not every George or King is a monarch, of course; many are people or pubs.
High Street is the commonest name in 90 of the UK's 361 councils, Main Street in 41, Station Road in 37 and Church Lane in 32. More revealing is each council's signature name: the name, used at least four times there and 25 times in the UK, that is most over-represented compared with the UK as a whole. These are usually the road to the next town (Lynn Road in King's Lynn and West Norfolk), a landscape word (The Loke in North Norfolk) or history (General Wade's Military Road in Highland, Perth and Kinross).
Great Britain. OS Open Names lists every named road in Great Britain as a point, with the town or village it belongs to. I kept the 884,116 features of type Named Road. Ordnance Survey also lists sections of named roads inside settlements; those duplicate a road already counted, so I left them out. A Named Road is Ordnance Survey's grouping of road stretches that share a name, so a very long road may appear more than once and two short streets of the same name may be one.
Northern Ireland. Ordnance Survey's open data stop at Great Britain, so for Northern Ireland I used OpenStreetMap: 66,824 named road ways (residential to trunk roads; no paths, tracks or service roads). OpenStreetMap splits a street into many pieces, so I joined pieces with the same name that share an end or have ends within 50 m, giving 29,219 streets, and dropped 441 short pieces named as bridges. The two sources group streets differently, so I compare shares rather than counts across the Irish Sea.
Places. Each street is placed in a current council area (ONS local authority districts) by its point, and on 10 km and 20 km squares of the British National Grid. Regions in England are those of Ordnance Survey. For the town and village comparison, each street's Ordnance Survey settlement name was matched to the nearest settlement of that name in OS Open Names, within 8 km.
Words. The ending is the last word when it is one of 128 common street words (Road, Lane, Wynd, Loke and so on); otherwise a name has no ending (The Green, Briggate). Exact names (High Street) are counted exactly, so High Road, Upper High Street and Main Road are not included. Welsh names are those Ordnance Survey marks as Welsh, plus names in Wales starting with a Welsh street word. Origins of words in the text are the usual dictionary readings; the data show only where names are, not why.
Limits. Street names change, and new estates bring names chosen by developers and councils, so this is a map of today's names, not of when they were given. Counts depend on how Ordnance Survey and OpenStreetMap divide streets. OpenStreetMap coverage in Northern Ireland is good on named roads but not complete.
All the numbers on this page, the tables by council and by 10 km square, and the code are in the GitHub repository and archived with the paper at doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23757702.
Related: Beck, brook or burn?, the same idea for Britain's streams, valleys and hills.