please empty your brain below
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On the Royal Mail website these houses only appear with their names in their addresses, not the numbers, so yes, addressing post to 'Yelverton' would work.
My uncle used to live in a house with just a name but was told that he had to have a number to make it easier to find for emergency services. Having had to collect something from a house with just a name and no number recently, I can confirm it would make it a lot easier and quicker than having to drive slowly along the road looking for the name.
Trevor S | 04.11.23 - 7:22 a.m. | #
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Extraordinary! Here’s my theory of the a-i lettering gap. What if numbers 18a to 18i did previously exist where the block of flats next to 18 now is? When 18a to 18h were replaced by that block 18i might have grabbed to opportunity to renumber itself to 18.
Dan | 04.11.23 - 8:01 a.m. | #
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Where the block of flats next to 18 now is was definitely previously 16, not multiple houses.
See old maps.
diamond geezer | Homepage | 04.11.23 - 8:05 a.m. | #
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Might be the highest letter in the UK, never mind London. Someone with access to the postcode database and also with a software tool like regex could find that.
As someone who occasionally had to deliver stuff, I can confirm that houses with no number are a pain. Should all have numbers forced upon them. Emergency services may be ok these days as they hopefully have better software than Google or open street map (which even now can locate some numberless houses but not all).
Malcolm of Kent | 04.11.23 - 8:17 a.m. | #
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Another theory. The first house in the gap was somewhere near the 18T end, and was called 18A. Then later, the plot between 18 and 18A was subdivided, and allocated letters 18B next to 18A, then 18C to 18J, working back towards 18. Only the last of these was built, 18J, then the builder went bust. Someone else bought the remaining plots, together with 18A which they knocked down and then redivided the whole plot again into 18K to 18T.
dg writes: No. See old maps.
Malcolm of Kent | 04.11.23 - 8:31 a.m. | #
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It is probably just a coincidence but numbers 2 to 16 (even) gives you eight numbers while 18a to 18h (no 18i for the same reason 18o is not used ) is eight letters. No idea why this would be though.
dg writes: Just a coincidence. See old maps.
I suspect that there are many more oddities in house numbering to be found. Are there any roads which use letters not numbers?
AlanJS | 04.11.23 - 8:36 a.m. | #
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Usually anything above D gets me terribly excited!
cau1khead | 04.11.23 - 9:01 a.m. | #
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The first letters of the house names spell Brondesbury. Clever.
Wendy | 04.11.23 - 9:12 a.m. | #
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Genius!
I need to update the post after that revelation :)
diamond geezer | Homepage | 04.11.23 - 9:13 a.m. | #
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Given the above comment from Wendy, someone's having a laugh.
Still Anon | 04.11.23 - 9:20 a.m. | #
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Emergency services can use What Three Words to find somewhere, assuming that they have that info.
I grew up in a new build house with a name and no number. Officialdom told us that we couldn’t have a number (-2 would have been the logical one).
miker | 04.11.23 - 9:34 a.m. | #
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My parents lived in a road where all the houses displayed names only (although the council allocated them numbers too).
If my father was out working in the front garden or washing the car, he often got accosted by baffled delivery drivers wanting to know where a particular house was.
Eventually he drew a plan of all the houses with their names, photocopied it and kept a wodge of these in the garage ready to hand out to any enquirer.
Uncle Baz | 04.11.23 - 9:47 a.m. | #
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I'm sure one or more of your readers will have access to the full royal mail PAF database and be able to query it to find out if you're correct in your belief. Although you might have to wait until Monday
Ian | 04.11.23 - 10:31 a.m. | #
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18T; You can get any combination of characters on a "Show Plate" without the need for documents etc.
fred | 04.11.23 - 10:36 a.m. | #
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The odds & evens are on the "wrong" side of the road, other nearby roads are on the "correct" side.
Mike | 04.11.23 - 11:00 a.m. | #
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I've been up and down Brondesbury Park for decades, and never knew this.
Your post also explains the slightly odd spelling of the nearby Salusbury Road which runs between Brondesbury Park Station and Queens Park station.
Mike | 04.11.23 - 11:29 a.m. | #
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Well done Wendy. The code was hiding in plain sight all along. I had read through it twice this morning.
scrumpy | 04.11.23 - 11:40 a.m. | #
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Re miker: what3words is a proprietary system that is very illogical and problematic for various reasons, especially for those without a smartphone and/or without a 4G signal.
At least postcodes have a logic based on geography/locality, and house numbers are usually sequential, so you know whether you are on the right track. Emergency services should encourage people to use either well-established systems (e.g. longitude & latitude; OS grid references) or an open-source one to pinpoint locations (there are several options).
anon | 04.11.23 - 12:40 p.m. | #
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When I was a child we lived in a Somerset village, the street was all named houses except two: ours which was 1, and number 3 200m down at the other end of the road.
Herned | 04.11.23 - 12:42 p.m. | #
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Well, I guessed with a very blithe attitude the highest letter would be "S"; I'm delighted that not only am I wrong but I'm wrong by underestimating by several houses!
Incredibly niche content like this is why I still keep reading DG's stuff, and I wish an excellent Saturday to you all!
Penny | 04.11.23 - 1:48 p.m. | #
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Possibly a cautious attempt to avoid confusion with flats A to E over at 18 Brondesbury Road, NW6 6AY. Quite possibly not.
Pre-numbering, the house names are given as an example of “a curious ordering principle” in Brian Butterworth’s 1999 book The Mathematical Brain: “The postman, the inhabitants, and their visitors understood the ordering principle, so there was no difficulty in finding the right house.”
Too much difficulty for today’s orderly brains.
Rich G | Homepage | 04.11.23 - 3:52 p.m. | #
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I'm surprised that you snapping lots of very posh houses in a very concentrated area didn't result in an enquiry from the local constabulary.
"I blog about London and some of its curiosities".
"'Course you do sir. Now if you'd like to turn and face the car and spread your hands out along the roof..."
Ian | 04.11.23 - 3:57 p.m. | #
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How extraordinary! Well spotted.
Stuff like this just makes my day!
Cornish Cockney | 04.11.23 - 5:06 p.m. | #
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What a find! The highest lettered houses I've seen were 34a-34h Oakleigh Park South in Whetstone (N20).
JS | 04.11.23 - 6:27 p.m. | #
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All houses have numbers, unless it’s the only one in its postcode. I learnt this when working with a local council once… it really wound up poshos when you told them, no matter how much they exhorted “no, my house only has a name”, I had the actual street plans to prove them wrong and it was the best part of that crap job.
(Ian - it’s still legal to take photos in public areas, despite all the illiberal rules the government has tried to bring in over the years)
Nick | 04.11.23 - 6:33 p.m. | #
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Sadly the website doesn't tell us how the flats in 18N will be numbered. 18N(i)? 18Nb? 18N-Γ?
HTFB | 05.11.23 - 11:24 a.m. | #
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I remember seeing some very creatively numbered addresses off harley street. as doctors wanted the harley street address so would be 117e harley street or whatever. all very confising and looking around it looks like this might have been clamped down upon a i can't find any now
Alistair Twin | 05.11.23 - 12:24 p.m. | #
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Military Road in Plymouth has house named after greek letters - Alpha, Beta and Gamma.
Also, the section of Gloucester Rd in Bristol known locally as Pigsty Hill has ordering whereby 247 and 247A are separate houses approx 7 buildings apart, repeated for 249 and 251.
Colly | 05.11.23 - 12:43 p.m. | #
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I ran a query on OSM to find all addresses it knows about in London where the housenumber field ends in U, V, W, X, Y or Z.
You can view the findings here (click "Run" in the top left):
https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1CWl
Most of them look like errors or typos, but there are a few candidates like "55V The Bishops Avenue" if anyone fancies an outing to check.
Ken | 05.11.23 - 5:25 p.m. | #
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Fabulous Ken, thanks!
Yes, some of those look odd, some look wrong, some look like data entry issues and some are flats but some do indeed look worth checking...
diamond geezer | Homepage | 05.11.23 - 6:10 p.m. | #
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It's actually fairly easy to find some number-letter combinations by just trial and error on the Royal Mail postcode finder. Here's what I've found from a few minutes of playing around:
• I thought I'd found a full run from 2A to 2X on Fair-a-Far in Edinburgh, but this turned out to be a single block of 22 flats so probably doesn't count.
• Heywood Road in Bury has 7V, 7W, 7X and 7Y - it looks like there's a long gap between these and 7 so perhaps this is a developer leaving as much room for future construction as possible. (No 7Z because there's a 72 up the road.)
• Hinde House Crescent in Sheffield has a run from 8A to 8Y. It skips quite a few letters but it still manages a run of 16 lettered houses in a row, which beats Brondesbury Park's 11.
• But Portland Road in Dorking might take the crown in a way, with 17 houses simply lettered A to Q, no numbers at all.
• From the other end of the alphabet, Cedar Road in Southampton appears to have been extended at some point and 1A to 1F were added before 1. So far so normal, but another house was added at a later date bearing the slightly mad number 1AA.
Gregg | 05.11.23 - 9:04 p.m. | #
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By the way, I verified all of these against the official OS base vector map - the kind you'd find on a council's GIS mapping application, for example Dorset Council's - which accurately shows house numbers at 1:1000 and below.
Gregg | 05.11.23 - 9:21 p.m. | #
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Nick - all houses have numbers. Really? Let's start with:
Buckingham Palace
LONDON
SW1A 1AA
What's the number?
AC | 06.11.23 - 11:54 p.m. | #
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Sorry. Bad example given the one address caveat. Let's try this one instead.
Admiralty Arch
Whitehall
LONDON
SW1A 2DY
AC | 06.11.23 - 11:56 p.m. | #
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I guess that once there were no houses between 18 and 20, a big long empty patch, perhaps a remnant of an estate or similar (perhaps a Manor House, given the Manor House Drive there).
Yes, the Manor House was number 18.
It was easier to add 18j-18u than renumber all the houses up to 122 on the road.
Sykobee | 24.11.23 - 5:59 p.m. | #
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