The Alleyways of Britain

In October, YouGov published a small-multiple visualisation showing the popularity of regional names for alleyways in the UK. The maps in What else do Britons call an alleyway? are based on survey data. YouGov asked 39,224 Britons which words they personally use to describe an alleyway. The resulting maps show the percentage of people in each county or region who use particular terms.

I thought it might be interesting to also map the different words for alleyways that actually appear in street names around the UK.

To do this, I downloaded the Ordnance Survey Open Names dataset, which contains millions of named places and geographical features across Great Britain. I searched the dataset for regional alleyway terms such as twitten, ginnel, jitty, vennel and chare, then plotted the locations of the matching records on two maps. Unlike the YouGov maps, which show where people say they use particular words, my maps shows where those words appear in recorded place names.

My Geography of Words map plots the locations of these different alleyway names across Great Britain. Each term is represented by a different colour, allowing you to see at a glance where particular words are concentrated. You can use the legend to switch individual terms on and off, or show all the names together to explore the geographical clusters. It is fascinating to see how some words cluster in particular parts of the country, while others appear much more widely.

A second map, Alleyway Name Clusters, presents the same data as a choropleth map, colouring each county according to the number of recorded street names containing the selected alleyway term. This makes it easier to compare the geographical distribution of the different words and, in particular, to set the Ordnance Survey data alongside the regional patterns revealed by YouGov's survey. Use the drop-down menu to switch between terms and see where each name is most commonly found.

YouGov's maps show the proportion of people who say they use a particular word, whereas my choropleth shows the number of recorded place names containing that word in each area. A high count on my map doesn't necessarily mean that the term is widely used in everyday conversation. It just means that this is where this term is used in actual alleyway place names across the UK.