Rude Britannia

It's easy to get confused when asking for directions in the UK. If someone tells you to take 'Bell End up Butthole Lane' they could be giving you real directions. Alternatively they might be inviting you home for a night of x-rated fun.

Back in the Middle Ages it was fairly common for streets to be named after the main economic activity taking place along them. The result was that many roads ended up with names which can seem rather offensive to our modern sensibilities.

For example, many towns and cities in the UK had streets named 'Gropecunt Lane'. These streets are believed to have been named for the prostitution taking place there. Unfortunately over the years all the Gropecunt Lanes in the UK have been replaced with less innocuous names, such as Grape Lane.

Fortunately however some rudely named streets still exist. You can see some of them on Rude Streets. Rude Streets is a Street View slideshow which takes you on a panoramic tour of some of the UK's most interestingly named streets.


If you want to create your own map of rude place names then you can download a GeoJSON file of rude locations from the Vaguely Rude Places GitHub page.

The Vaguely Rude Places Map is a  faithful compendium and atlas of rude place names around the world. The map allows you to view the location of numerous rude sounding place names, such as the famous town of Fucking in Austria.

You might also like the Talking Rude Map. The map animates through some of the more NSFW place names around the world and reads the names out loud. To hear the map talking you will probably need to use the Chrome browser.