4 JANUARY 1957, Page 27

Poaching on Squire Betjeman

By STRIX

ALTHOUGH I have often pondered deeply about what name to give to a dog, and occasionally about what title to put on a book, I have never been concerned in the naming of a street. It was not until I read the account of a recent meeting of the Oxford City Council that I realised the delicacy of the problems involved.

The Council had before them an amendment to a Highways, Sewers and Lighting Committee report on the Housing Committee's proposals for naming three of the roads on a new housing estate. The Housing Committee suggested that these should be named Fanshawe Place, Craufurd Road and Corunna Crescent; Coun- cillor Ingram, moving the amendment, wanted these altered to Poplar Place, Beveridge Road and Spooner Crescent. The people of Oxford, he said, would remember the Poplar Centre at Cowley, which had done much good work for orphans; Lord Beveridge was well known as the 'instigator' of the National Health Act; and Spooner Crescent would commemorate—pre- sumably as Crooner Spescent—a former Warden of New College whose daughter now serves on the Council.

But Councillor Ingram made it clear that the motive underlying his amendment was a dislike of the military associations inseparable from the names proposed by the Housing Committee. 'While some people,' he said, 'appear to glory in war, I oppose it most strongly'; and he argued that when people went to live in council houses they did not want to remember war, they wanted to forget it.

Those who opposed the amendmept found it difficult to understand why the name of Corunna, with which the County Regiment had honourable connections, should not be preserved, and pointed out that Craufurd, besides being a suc- cessful and imaginative commander, had done a great deal for the 'care, maintenance and good life of the common British soldier.' The amend- ment was defeated by a majority vote.

* The British have always stood out against the continental habit of renaming existing streets after victories, revolutions, tyrants and like phenomena; but in the past ten years an enor- mous number of new streets has been brought into being, and a survey of the trends to be observed in their nomenclature would be, to my mind, of much greater interest than the popu- larity poll of Christian names conducted at this time of year in the correspondence columns of The Times.

The one thing, I am told, that you must not call a street is 'street.' This is regarded by coun- cillors as vulgar and invidious. Even 'road' is frowned on, and some idea of the pseudo- rusticity which finds favour with the planners may be gained from the following names, all of which have been conferred on thoroughfares in one of the new satellite towns: Pond Croft, Heather Dell, Hazel Grove and Ferny Glen. It seems that war is not the only disagreeable reality which the inhabitants of housing estates are expected to want to forget.

This euphemism seems to me short-sighted. A new town, through no fault of its own, has no history, and to start it off in life covered with birthmarks of this sort is to do it a lasting dis- service. To call a suburban street 'Heather Dell' is pretentious and silly, and the ghastly name commemorates nothing except the fact (which I admit is curious and ought not to be forgotten) that this particular form of bad taste prevailed among the city fathers when the place was founded.

It is, moreover, an error to believe that No. 11 Ferny Glen will represent, throughout even the shortest chapter of our rough island story, a 'better address' than No. 11 Station Road or No. 11 Inkerman Street. Even in Subtopia there is a tendency for good taste to drive out bad; concrete gnomes are following the monkey- puzzle and the aspidistra into limbo, and Ferny Glen is doomed as surely, and for the same reasons, as Ye Olde Tea Shoppe.

Streets ought to be named after someone or something, but the deliberations of the Oxford City Council are a reminder of how difficult it must be to get general agreement on the most appropriate names, or even on the principles on which they should be selected. Many councils are divided on party lines, so that the names of politicians can scarcely be a practical proposi- tion. Streets could in theory be called after eminent artists, musicians and writers (though not, something tells me, Trollope); these names might not, however, mean very much to some of the people who lived in the streets, and it seems a bit arbitrary to call a row of council houses Ibsen Close merely because you cannot think of anything less controversial to call it.

To -have the whole business centrally regulated by a Royal Commission on Street Names would be repugnant to our ideals of regional initiative; but if on-the-spot spontaneity cannot find a better name than Pond Croft for a suburban street in the south of England there may be something to be said for treating street names in the same way as code words were, to avoid duplication, treated in the last war. An immense list of non-committal words (Wardrobe, Gravy, Henbane, Pelmet) was compiled and divided up between the different theatres, where the code words were doled out to commanders as their needs arose. The system killed regional initiative in this particular field, but it ensured that the Chiefs of Staff did not receive simultaneous and cryptic messages referring to a number of quite different operations all called Bulldog, Thunderbolt or Tally Ho. The Postmaster-General, if nobody else, would probably welcome similar measures to co-ordi- nate the naming of new streets.

But the whole problem is beyond my grasp, and I will conclude by congratulating the Oxford City Council on their firm stand in defence of the county's military traditions. It leaves them with Lord Beveridge's name still up their sleeve; I hope it will remain there when the time comes to decide what to call the fine new boulevard. through Christ Church Meadow.