London’s Rudest Street Names

There’s always “Newington Butts”, off the south roundabout at the Elephant and Castle. A Butts, by the way, seems to have been a place where archers practiced before going into battle.

Once upon a time, the City had a Gropec**t Lane. Tragically it survives no longer.

gaywood street? it’s close to the imperial war museum.

Gee street off Goswell Road is quite rude but only if you grew up in Dublin and are of a juvenile disposition. Fortunately, in my case, both apply.

Peckarmans Wood in Sydenham is moderately filthy.

Gropecunte Lane still survives in a euphemistic form; Love Lane – half the streets off Poultry form the remnant of the City’s medieval markets and are named after the things that were typically sold there.

(e.g. Wood Street, Bread Street, Milk Street, Poultry.)

So ‘Love Lane’ is still pretty rude by implication…

Aye, York had one of those too. If memory serves it softened to Grope Lane and is today called Grape Lane.

There’s also Sherbourne Lane in the City, which is derived from Shitteborn Lane.

Bird in Bush Road in Peckham.

Mafeking Rd, Enfield, Middlesex EN1 3SS

Great Peter Street may produce some mild double-taking from the American contingent.

there’s a Bellenden Road in Peckham

If you go past Ennis road, it’s about 50/50 as to whether someone has recently daubed a P on the sign…

Also:
Prince Albert Road, Paddington
Balls Pond Road, Sach Road & Shaftesbury Street, all in Hackney
and Dickenson Road, Tottenham.

Coped an eyeful of Solomons Passage from the bus past Peckham Rye yesterday.

Bonner Road in Bethnal Green. Always makes me snicker.

Tuck Road in South Hornchurch has a roadsign that is perpetually vandalised.

Gay Gardens in Dagenham (admittedly not rude as such) was so named (having formely been Stockdale Gardens, IIRC) at the request of the residents there in the 1950s (not foreseeing any advance in the changing of the implications of words in the years ahead), who needed a new name for the road because the Royal Mail were getting it mixed up with another road with a similar name elsewhere in Dagneham, and chose this because they felt it most accurately represented the jolly and happy spirit of the place. (The hardest old-school skinhead at my primary school lived down there.)

I’ve been told that bus conductors used to have great fun shouting out the name of the stop at Clitterhouse Crescent in that strange and not terribly pleasant nomansland between Cricklewood, Golders Green and Hendon. (thinks: must get a bus up there to see how the electronic voice-box thing enunciates it)

Whereas I read that it had become Grope Lane, then Grove Lane, then (incongrously) Milton Street.

Oh well.

Mincing Lane in the City. Not particularly rude but quite snigger-worthy.

Oh, and Crutched Friars.

Clitheroe Road, Lambeth.

Here’s a late entry for ladies’ parts, spied on Maggie’s Night Hike on Friday.

Oxford has a Cumnor Rise Road.  Try saying it out loud.  That’d ruin your mascara.

Swallow street, just of regent street!

And, of course Bush Wood in Leytonstone

Horniman Drive in South London

Cockfosters and St John’s Wood and for pubs there’s The Famous Cock in Islington and The Horniman at Hay’s Galleria. Bath has Gay Street.