Last week we looked at some places that have moved. Just as intriguing are places that don’t exist. You might recall in Armchair land referencing #9 we examined local authority areas that don’t exist but somehow are still referred to, like the county or Middlesex. We could add the county of Wessex to that list. And those visiting WSP’s Chancery Lane office might notice street signs that refer to the non-existent London Borough of Holborn. Wessex was the last old English kingdom – but it became defunct when it was unified with England. It still lives on in the minds of many despite this unification occurring thousand years ago, in 927. Holborn’s demise was a little more recent: it was merged with the Metropolitan Boroughs of St Pancras and Hampstead to form the London Borough of Camden in 1965.
There are other parts of London and elsewhere that don’t exist and land referencers should be wary of them. ‘Phantom’, ‘ghost’ or ‘trap’ streets are ones inserted or altered on maps to protect the copyright of the map’s compilers (the idea being that if someone copies their deliberate hidden errors it will be obvious where they got their data from). The London A to Z has included about 100 streets that don’t exist. This street gazette was first published in 1938 by Mrs Phyllis Pearsall who compiled the maps by walking most of the 23 000 streets listed. Until relatively recently this design classic was in the pocket of all Londoners and, whilst the paper version is still going, it is rivalled by convenient digital maps on mobile apps. Many map publishers still add fictitious or deliberately incorrect details to their maps. Examples of non-existent streets in London from various sources include Moat Street off Clandon Gardens in Finchley, Torrington Place, at the end of Arcadia Avenue, again in Finchley N3, and Whitfield Road that supposedly runs across Blackheath. To catch out unscrupulous map makers, I see that in my A to Z Book Mews (just off Denmark Street near Leicester Square - see photo) is deliberately misspelled as ‘Brook Mews’.
Q. What do you call someone who navigates around London using a tube map?
A. Lost!
This is because a schematic tube map doesn’t bear much resemblance to how a city is actually set out, with the locations of and distances between stations changed to make them fit more easily into the schema. They would be even more lost if they used an old map that showed stations that are now closed – they are about 40 of them in London. If you look carefully you can see the platforms at Down Street, abandoned in 1932, as the Piccadilly line trains run between Hyde Park Corner and Green Park.
It isn’t just progress that sweeps away places. Over the past 10 000 years the North Sea has forced the English coastline to retreat a staggering 12 miles and in the last 1 000 years many towns and villages have been lost in the process, and others continue to fight – and will inevitably lose – this battle against nature. Possibly the most famous of these was Dunwich which, at its height, was the medieval capital of East Anglia and about the same size as London. A storm on New Year’s Day, 1286 brought the sea to the town’s walls. The next year two tidal surges followed by a further storm in 1328 took neighbouring villages and started to eat away at the town. Another storm in 1347 swept away 400 houses and nearly all the rest of the town was lost to the ‘Grote Mandrenke’ storm of January 1362 which is thought to have claimed 25 000 lives along the coasts of the North Sea.
Medieval Dunwich was so important that it could return two members of parliament. It wasn’t until 500 years later with the Reform Act of 1832 that this right was finally repealed, and Dunwich stopped being one of the most notorious ‘rotten boroughs’ - constituencies whose representation in parliament were in the gift of just a few individuals.
Another cause of places disappearing has been epidemics. The UK has about 3 000 deserted medieval villages, with depopulation caused by the Black Death being a significant factor in their demise - along with enclosure or other agricultural reform (see earlier issues). Putting the recent COVID-19 pandemic into some startling context, it is estimated that between 40% and 60% of the population of Europe was killed by the Black Death in the four years from 1347 – that was up to 200 million people. The medieval village of Radbourne in Warwickshire hung on a little longer but disappeared from the historic records in 1539. It has been subject to a relatively recent archaeological dig as part of the HS2 Phase 1 preparatory works.
There is another reason why some places disappear. It’s because they are secret. Despite the end of the Cold War, some military installations remain absent from maps. If you thought about checking out free mapping on the internet to plan a UK seaside holiday you might be disappointed to turn up and find that OS’s free internet maps and multimap.com had omitted the airbases right next to the beaches at Leuchars in Scotland or Valley in North Wales, and bemused to find that these ‘secret’ locations are clearly signposted on the local road networks. Nor will you find Aldershot army base in Hampshire (where I once did military training) or RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire (used by US B52 bombers during the Kosovo war) on road atlases, despite Fairford being the location of an annual public air show. I once had a very enjoyable Trafalgar Night dinner at the Clyde naval base at Faslane, western Europe’s largest nuclear submarine base. (I remember watching a ghostly wake progressing down Gare Loch one morning without a ship. It was a submarine heading for the open sea below the surface.) Faslane dominates the local landscape, is by far the area’s largest employer and is clearly signposted - but it’s not shown on free digital mapping. Don’t tell anyone…
This article is written by Ashley Parry Jones, Director – Planning, WSP. The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of WSP or SoLR or its members. The information provided does not and is not intended to constitute legal advice and instead is offered for general purposes only. It does not constitute the most up to date legal information. Any links and references provided are for the readers’ convenience only and do not constitute a recommendation of those sources.