Gladstone Road or Disraeli Street? Partisan Commemoration in the Street Names of Victorian Britain

Victorian builders, landowners and councils named thousands of streets after statesmen, but did the names they chose follow local politics? I build a national table of commemorative street names from OpenStreetMap (15,593 streets), with a name table that separates unambiguous party commemorations (Gladstone, Cobden, John Bright and Palmerston; Beaconsfield and Disraeli) from names that are mostly places or surnames, using a pre-set co-location test. I link 160 British towns to the general election results of the constituencies named after them, 1868 to 1900. Liberal names outnumber Conservative ones about 3.4 to 1 almost everywhere. In the main model, fixed in a written analysis plan before any outcome model was run (a street-level linear probability model with region fixed effects and errors clustered by town), each 10 points of Liberal vote is associated with a 5.9 point higher Liberal share of a town's party street names (95% CI 0.4 to 11.4; 610 streets). The association survives randomisation inference, leaving out any region and most measurement choices, and is absent with the vote of 1945 to 1970. It is weak, however: it is not significant in an unweighted town-level model, in the boroughs of 1868 alone, in either half of the period, or with the share of seats won, and exploratory checks show it is carried by Beaconsfield names. Battle streets roughly date the party names to the late Victorian decades. The design is correlational: street names record partisan memory, but only faintly the politics of the town around them.

Interactive version: https://maps.tristanhotham.com/pm-streets/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/pm-streets. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/31/pm-streets/.

Sources: OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL) via QLever; UK Parliament and House of Commons Library election results (Open Parliament Licence v3.0); Wikidata (CC0); ONS boundaries (OGL v3.0). Derived street data under the ODbL; text and figures CC BY 4.0; code MIT.