A Street Named Desire

CAUTION: Some words and juxtaposition of words in this Fryday may cause unintended offence.

A few years back the council invited the residents of our small side road to name the road. We promptly had a neighbourhood meeting and almost as promptly decided on a name which the council agreed to.

We intended the name we chose to be our homage to a young boy who died in the area in tragic circumstances back in the early pioneering days. It remains that. Except the name is also that of New Zealand’s most litigious and high-profile former criminal/prisoner, which was decidedly not our intent.

However, it got me thinking—what other streets and roads have been misnamed or can be misinterpreted? So I did a little research, confining myself to English names, and this is what I came up with.

I started in Nova Scotia Canada where the residents of the small community of Porter’s Lake used all their imagination to name their three streets: This Street, That Street and The Other Street.

A more descriptive name was given a road in Montana: Bad Route Road. And the residents of Gansevoort New York must have had too much on their plate when they named a road Anyhow Lane. Same goes for Idaho, which named one of its roads Chicken Dinner Road.

Nor are weird names confined to North America. Truro in the United Kingdom boasts Squeeze Guts Alley, and just down the road in Ivah Lancashire is a very silly name indeed: Silly Lane.
Elsewhere in the UK if you are not thin-skinned you can live in Crotch Crescent or Slag Lane. Castleford has Tickle Cock Bridge and if none of those appeal you can always gird your loins and choose to live in Dumb Woman’s Lane. I am too dumb to find out where that is though I know it can’t be far from Titty Ho.

We in New Zealand have no reason to feel superior. We have also come up with some fairly strange ones. With Halloween coming up you might want to contemplate moving to Vampire Street in Dunedin. And  Christchurch had Godley Avenue, which was anything but when I lived there, and Wellington gives us Handyside street, which comes in handy.

But New Zealanders pale into insignificance against Australians, whom we go to next.
However, I couldn’t leave New Zealand without making a mandatory trip to Hamilton to visit Johnnybro Place and Allgood Place; I believe Hamilton’s Hooker Street is a popular destination.

Australian street names deserve a Fryday of their own (and will probably get one) but here is a sample: we start with the quintessential Australian Beer Bottle Road in Darkan and Upperthong Street in Bullswick; we have Baldknob Road in Peachester, Pisspot Creek in Ross, while Tasmania offers (true) Boobs Flat, Crack Pot, Misery Knob and  Guys Dirty Hole.
And lastly, the place where your average Aussie reckons all we New Zealanders should live when in Aussie, but where more fittingly they should feel right at home—Wanka Road in Darby.

An Aussie by any other name…

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