High Street or Main Street? The United Kingdom's Street-Name Divide

Street names are among the most familiar place names, yet their geography is rarely mapped as a whole. I map all 913,335 named streets in the United Kingdom: 884,116 named roads in Great Britain from Ordnance Survey's OS Open Names and 29,219 streets in Northern Ireland built from OpenStreetMap. High Street is the commonest street name (2,507), followed by Station Road (2,074) and Church Lane (2,005); Main Street is sixth (1,336). Main Street outnumbers High Street in Scotland (309 to 206) and Northern Ireland (132 to 32), and, unexpectedly, in the East Midlands (414 to 324) and Yorkshire and the Humber (244 to 208), while in London, the South West, the East of England and Wales it makes up under 8% of the pair. The sharper divide is between town and village: in England, Main Street is 8% of the pair in towns and 38% in villages; in the East Midlands and Yorkshire, 13% and 62%. Other names for the main street are strongly regional: The Street in East Anglia and the South East, Fore Street in the South West and Front Street in the North East. A location quotient ranks regional street words, from Wynd, Loan and Brae in Scotland to Garth in Yorkshire, Brow in the North West, Chare on Tyneside and Loke in Norfolk. The data describe where names are today, not when or why they were given. An interactive map lets readers explore any street word or name.

Interactive version: https://maps.tristanhotham.com/street-names/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/street-names. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/28/street-names/.