Waterloo Road and the Clock in the Streets: Battle Street Names and the Growth of British Towns

Nineteenth-century builders often named new streets after recent victories, so battle names may record when a street was laid out. I match 6,885 OpenStreetMap highways in the United Kingdom against a table of 111 battles, join the pieces of each street into 3,352 streets, and set aside streets named after battles before 1793 (1,008) and names that usually refer to something else (654: Nile, Quebec, Kimberley and others). Of 1,690 streets named after 54 battles from 1793 to 1944, Waterloo (367), Alma (340) and Trafalgar (241) lead; the four Crimean battles gave 425 streets, more than both world wars together (315), and world-war names are much more often modern estate names (39.4% Close, Drive, Way and the like, against 12.9% for 1854 to 1902). Within towns, streets named after later battles lie farther from the centre: the mean within-town Spearman correlation of battle date and distance is 0.25 across 75 towns (53 positive, 19 negative; permutation p < 0.001, or p < 0.01 with clusters of same-war streets counted once). Ranked within their towns, Napoleonic streets sit at 0.54, Crimean at 0.58 and Boer War streets at 0.68 of the way from centre to edge. The clock is real but coarse: it separates wars half a century apart, not neighbouring ones.

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

Sources: OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), queried with QLever; Wikidata (CC0); ONS boundaries (OGL v3.0). The street tables are derived from OpenStreetMap and released under the Open Database Licence; text and figures CC BY 4.0; code MIT.