This would be more interesting if you'd actually identified the higher order concept of a high street not just if it had "High Street" in the name. The removal of streatham which is the longest High Street in Europe is a bit odd.
https://www.mystreatham.com/10-facts-you-didnt-know-about-st...
`In the UK, a "high street" refers to the primary business and commercial street in a town, city or borough, where most of the shops, banks, restaurants, and other businesses are concentrated. It is often considered the main shopping area and social hub of a community.`
Near where I live is Wapping High Street (Just next to the Tower of London, City outwards). There are maybe 1,2,3 shops sprinkled around. A barber. That sort of thing. The rest are Warfs (Warehouse at river Front) which were part of the port of London before it moved down the Thames. If you wanted to go to the main shopping area you nowadays would go to Wapping Lane.
Now, the warehouses are there only for a few centuries and Wapping is much older. I don’t know if Wapping High street at that time was a vibrant shopping street with exciting retail opportunities, maybe. My point is things change over time.
This could be an interesting research project as you suggest and I wait with great anticipation for the first results that you hopefully will present here in some time. I am sure the history of High Streets in London could be fascinating.
Diamond Geezer has been blogging for years and definitely understands what a high street is. In fact he’s probably planning a follow-up already about High Roads. (There’s already a visit to the shortest high streets as a follow-up: https://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2024/06/londons-shortest-...)
Streatham High Road still seems like a grey area that should be considered a high street.
It probably was a road (connecting 2 towns with no houses) when it was first named, but is more of a street (with housing either side) now, and is definitely the primary commercial street in Streatham.
> `In the UK, a "high street" refers to the primary business and commercial street in a town, city or borough
I know exactly what this means, but this is intrinsically a fuzzy category. There is a local shopping street near us that I am sure doesn't make the grade because it is orders of magnitude smaller than the huge shopping areas off in 2 directions, even though it contains in 3 or 4 blocks:
* a drycleaner, * a dentist, * a pharmacy, * a couple of hairdressers, nail bars and similar grooming/beauty businesses, * several takeaway restaurants and coffee shops/cafes, some more upmarket than others, * a deli, * a clothing shop * a couple of "corner shop" supermarkets and hardware / general household goods shops (but no major chains), * a post office and a bank machine (but no bank branch).
I'm sure that if it was scaled up and/or joined up with similar up the road that does contain a small Sainsburys, it would be "a high street". But where do you draw the line? Is there a clear rule that divides it? If a bank or major chain supermarket moves in, does it become one? If a bank branch closes down, as they do these days, is a street no longer a high street? If we all shift to online banking, does the definition change?
This is basically the "bald man paradox" of fuzzy categories. So there never can be a fixed, definitive count.*
If I think about London there are some obvious shopping/eating/drinking streets and districts and there are large areas that are primarily residential, governmental, etc. But there are also a huge number of streets that are something of a mix and you certainly wouldn't point to as a shopping/entertainment destination.
And for the average resident, the pharmacies, small grocery stores, etc. probably count for a lot more than the high-end luxury clothing places.
That's a much harder project IMO. In order to determine which is the main shopping street in a community, you have to start with drawing the communities. That's a tall order in London as the lines are blurry and change over time.
It doesn't really work like that, some people have access to more than one high streets and some aren't in walking distance from any high street.
You could probably pull records like alcohol licensing or food hygiene certificates to identify all streets with a certain number of shops, then use Google Street View to refine the criteria. Eg if a street is mostly residential on the ground floor, adding some shops doesn't make it a high street imo.
My gut reaction was that you’re wrong and it’s easy but actually thinking more about it, even in a small area like my side of London there are a lot of what could be considered high streets, even with different parts of the same street acting as different separate high streets for different communities. A more concrete example is Uxbridge road near Shepherd’s Bush and the section near Shepherd’s Bush Market being two distinct high streets, and then a couple k’s down the road it turns into Acton High Street (Acton itself having multiple distinct high streets). It’d definitely be a challenge to map something like this if you’re not familiar with the area.
Rather ironically the main “High Street” for the whole of London is normally regarded to be Oxford Street, which happens to be very well connected, with 4 stationd on the Central Line, maybe 5 if you include Holborn just beyond New Oxford Street.
Obviously a far younger city, but when I moved to seattle, satellite view on maps was just starting to be a thing, and you could spot all of the areas that were interesting to go to versus residential neighborhoods by the way the light reflected off the roofs. Lighter color along a street usually meant older, flat-roofed buildings where the market streets of the original towns were.
Or do the reverse? Identify streets with a certain category of commercial business, with quantity above a certain threshold. The area/community can be derived after.
It is also important to highlight that high streets work differently depending on cities. Some cities have fewer or unique high streets while others have many ones. This can be unnatural for tourists that are used to one or the other in their local city.
For example, Buenos Aires in Argentina has many many high streets in areas separated by ~20' in car, in some cases just 5' walking.
Thank you for explaining this. I kept looking for an explanation of what it means to be a "high street" – After not finding said explanation, I assumed it had to do with elevation, and whether this person was exploring elevation "peaks" in London.
So it seems to be sort of like what are typically called "Main St" in American towns.
Yeah, only a tiny proportion of a multitude of roads that people would be likely to consider high streets near me in South London has High Street in the name.
It's also a very difficult concept to quantify, because depending on what scale you're thinking at a whole range of roads may or may not qualify.
The UK really needs to ditch the high street. It's just such terrible town planning, that the intended "social hub of the community" is a main road filled with through traffic and parking spaces.
That's just not an environment where anyone wants to spend their time, and the decline is so painful to see. So many now are just betting shops, letting agents and kebab takeaways - but if these were pedestrian zones these could be so much more. See large European cafes with people eating and drinking outside on the street until late.
If your town doesn't have them, write to your local council! And don't vote Conservative, as they have announced further opposition to anything restricting motor cars.
There are many high streets in London that show removing cars, or expanding pavements, improves the high street. I would rather see more effort made to divert cars another way rather than close the high street. Too often that means making a privately owned public space as the prime spot.
There's a gap somewhere between "main road" and full pedestrianisation.
King's Road in Chelsea is an example that immediately comes to mind.
Really what it comes down to is that nice areas with approximately the right density of people have nice high streets.
You could pedestrianise Oxford Street but it'd still be a grim place to be because there are hordes of people - at a certain point the people have a similar effect to cars in that it's not really pleasant to pause outside any more.
Are you forgetting the weather and how poorly prepared most of the British are for it? Even in new build pedestrianised areas like.. Coal Drops Yard, outdoor seating is limited and normally nearly empty once the midday heat has passed.
Really this reflects how much "planning" is (a) historical accident and (b) powerless against bigger economic forces. The old high street concept was very dependent on having someone in the house who could go shopping during the weekday. Which, in the present era, basically limits you to pensioners and other benefit recipients. Pedestrianisation would probably help in some of those cases but it's not a magic wand. And of course many of London's "high streets" are completely vital to its sluggish surface transport movement.
The main high street in my town is fully pedestrianised (although fully concrete too) and attracts a lot of foot traffic.
The second in line is pretty much buses / taxis only and is also quite popular.
Shopping is now concentrated on retail estates and the "high streets" are almost always pedestrianised making it harder to injury the various drunks, junkies and homeless which now (ironically) call the high street "home".
The diamondgeezer site is one my favourites along with ianvisits.co.uk and londonreconnections.com - there's all sorts of content on there about the absolutely most 'niche' things you can think of in London.
And then you find out about things like the Pocket Parks, what's on in London, mudlarking, and so on. Odd things like the Cannon St. to Mansion House tube run, and then a parkour version to Barbican https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXMPRK2LQAE
If anyone wants to make a similar map in their own city or with a different street name, you can use Overpass Turbo to query OpenStreetMap data for this. Just comparing the maps visually, they seem to match. [1]
[out:json][timeout:25];
{{geocodeArea:London}}->.searchArea;
nwr["name"="High Street"](area.searchArea);
out geom;
I'm not sure. It's because the streets are made of multiple segments ("ways" in OSM terms), which are being counted separately. I think the query would need to join connected segments to get a true number of streets.
I think a lot of inner London roads were renamed to disambiguate hence the X High Street pattern. A lot of roads used to have signs saying “formerly Y road” when I was a kid in London.
Indeed, and presumably well before 1965, which is when Greater London was created. Most of the non-disambiguated High Streets will be in the Greater London boroughs (Bromley, Bexley etc.)
When I was a kid, Bromley was already a London borough. But we sure as heck didn't consider Orpington to be proper London! ;-)
Readit News
`In the UK, a "high street" refers to the primary business and commercial street in a town, city or borough, where most of the shops, banks, restaurants, and other businesses are concentrated. It is often considered the main shopping area and social hub of a community.`
Now, the warehouses are there only for a few centuries and Wapping is much older. I don’t know if Wapping High street at that time was a vibrant shopping street with exciting retail opportunities, maybe. My point is things change over time.
This could be an interesting research project as you suggest and I wait with great anticipation for the first results that you hopefully will present here in some time. I am sure the history of High Streets in London could be fascinating.
It probably was a road (connecting 2 towns with no houses) when it was first named, but is more of a street (with housing either side) now, and is definitely the primary commercial street in Streatham.
I know exactly what this means, but this is intrinsically a fuzzy category. There is a local shopping street near us that I am sure doesn't make the grade because it is orders of magnitude smaller than the huge shopping areas off in 2 directions, even though it contains in 3 or 4 blocks:
* a drycleaner, * a dentist, * a pharmacy, * a couple of hairdressers, nail bars and similar grooming/beauty businesses, * several takeaway restaurants and coffee shops/cafes, some more upmarket than others, * a deli, * a clothing shop * a couple of "corner shop" supermarkets and hardware / general household goods shops (but no major chains), * a post office and a bank machine (but no bank branch).
I'm sure that if it was scaled up and/or joined up with similar up the road that does contain a small Sainsburys, it would be "a high street". But where do you draw the line? Is there a clear rule that divides it? If a bank or major chain supermarket moves in, does it become one? If a bank branch closes down, as they do these days, is a street no longer a high street? If we all shift to online banking, does the definition change?
This is basically the "bald man paradox" of fuzzy categories. So there never can be a fixed, definitive count.*
And for the average resident, the pharmacies, small grocery stores, etc. probably count for a lot more than the high-end luxury clothing places.
You could probably pull records like alcohol licensing or food hygiene certificates to identify all streets with a certain number of shops, then use Google Street View to refine the criteria. Eg if a street is mostly residential on the ground floor, adding some shops doesn't make it a high street imo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Street
Fun fact, the Roman’s called it “Via Trinobantina“.
Deleted Comment
For example, Buenos Aires in Argentina has many many high streets in areas separated by ~20' in car, in some cases just 5' walking.
That's why none of the inner ones are on there, because they are disambiguated e.g. Kensington High Street.
So it seems to be sort of like what are typically called "Main St" in American towns.
Or is this more about counting the towns, cities and boroughs in the London metro area?
It's also a very difficult concept to quantify, because depending on what scale you're thinking at a whole range of roads may or may not qualify.
Deleted Comment
The author is victim of the Fallacy of shared context
That's just not an environment where anyone wants to spend their time, and the decline is so painful to see. So many now are just betting shops, letting agents and kebab takeaways - but if these were pedestrian zones these could be so much more. See large European cafes with people eating and drinking outside on the street until late.
If you go to OpenStreetMap Overpass with this query: https://overpass-turbo.eu/?template=key-value&key=highway&va... then browse to somewhere in the UK and click "Run" you'll get a map.
If your town doesn't have them, write to your local council! And don't vote Conservative, as they have announced further opposition to anything restricting motor cars.
King's Road in Chelsea is an example that immediately comes to mind.
Really what it comes down to is that nice areas with approximately the right density of people have nice high streets.
You could pedestrianise Oxford Street but it'd still be a grim place to be because there are hordes of people - at a certain point the people have a similar effect to cars in that it's not really pleasant to pause outside any more.
The key point is removing car traffic.
Shopping is now concentrated on retail estates and the "high streets" are almost always pedestrianised making it harder to injury the various drunks, junkies and homeless which now (ironically) call the high street "home".
And then you find out about things like the Pocket Parks, what's on in London, mudlarking, and so on. Odd things like the Cannon St. to Mansion House tube run, and then a parkour version to Barbican https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXMPRK2LQAE
Too many to list.
Her recent video on railings in London is vastly more interesting than one might suspect.
https://youtu.be/JHvKvOUSor4
And half the bollards are old cannons. https://stephenliddell.co.uk/2022/11/28/the-london-street-bo...
And the old cobbles were wooden. - https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/the-time-when-londons-s...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Road
London Liverpool Street Liverpool Lime Street
- It introduces the list as "There are twenty six in London itself. They are:" but the list contains only 23 items.
- There are three separate entries for a single London Road (the one that goes through Norbury, Thornton Heath and Croydon).
It always puzzled me that this doesn't appear to exist in the UK, since "Street" is actually the name of at least one town.
When I was a kid, Bromley was already a London borough. But we sure as heck didn't consider Orpington to be proper London! ;-)
London's shortest and longest High Streets
https://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2024/06/londons-shortest-...
There are 32 London boroughs, and several "primary business and commercial street" per borough, call it 3 or 4?
So about 90-120 high streets, as a ballpark.
The Article says: "You could argue that makes a total of 103 High Streets."
So close enough.