In this follow up to Two Rivers’ best selling A Much Maligned Town Adam Sowan explores Reading’s history as it is encoded in its street and place names. This book, a mixture of fact, speculation, gossip and trivia includes a gazetteer exploring a hundred of the most puzzling and interesting names.

read an extract from Abattoirs to Zinzan

find out about A Much Maligned Town also by Adam Sowan

'We humans all have names, and almost everyone's once meant something, unless they were deliberate inventions like R D Blackmore's Lorna Doone. Surnames can be derived from physical attributes (Redhead), place of origin (Scott), or occupation (Smith); forenames often originated with a hopeful suggestion of beauty or power or fame. But personal names hardly ever tell us anything about the current bearer: my own first and last refer to a messy combination of 'red earth' and 'fermenting porridge'. 'Adam' was then a fashionable whim; 'Sowan' at least indicates a distant Scots ancestry. There is, however, rather more in a name when it's attached to a place. Standard reference works, such as Ekwall's 'Oxford Dictionary of English Place Names' and Room's 'Modern Place Names in Great Britain and Ireland', show that a great deal of history can be learnt from the names of villages, towns, cities and counties. When we focus down to street level, however, the sheer numbers of names mean that only a minority - including most of the older ones - have a meaningful local meaning. Over the last two centuries, those whose job it is to name new roads have often tried to think of something relevant to the locality; but in many urban areas dozens of names were needed in a hurry, so they resorted to arbitrary themed groups. These I deal with in chapter 5. Occasionally they just used numbers: London has sixteen First Avenues, but Reading was never so desperate as that.'