I live in London. I love London. It has a sprawling comlexity to keep one amused for many hours, such that there is so much to learn. One of my favourite facts is that there are no roads in London. This is, surprisingly, true. But only because "London" in this case means the City of London. It's true because the City was already formed by the mid 1600's, when the word is thought to have originated.
(Technically this fact isn't true, because half of Goswell Road has, since 1994, been in the City. But I leave that discussion to other pedants.)
But how many roads are there in Greater London?
Armed with a 773 MB XML file from OpenStreetMap I wrote some tools
that let me investigate.
If you split each road into two elements, the place name, and the type (e.g. road, street) the top ten types are:
There are several instances where only one type appears: Sanctuary, Polygon, and Folgate.
ATM, my parsing is a little rough, and the data is a little dirty (there's typos of 'parage'
and 'parafe' in there) so I'm not confident about my other results. But there's about
110 roads with a single element: like Aldersgate, Dockhead, and Strand.
Probably the most important research was in the number of pubs: 2204.
Here's the list of every pub in London. (Sorted from most common, to least.)
Is Uxbridge Road the booziest in London? There are 6 pubs along its length. Nods to Hertford Road, with 5. Of the several with 5 pubs include York Way, Streatham High Road, Kennington Road, and Bethnal Green Road. Naturally, there are lots on 'High Street', but they are different roads.
Here's the List of booziest roads in London
As for the most popular pub names, the list is exactly what you'd expect:
I then looked at tube stations, and the number of letters within them. The longest single word stations are:
If you include all the letters, then Heathrow is an easy winner (because of the two commas), although Highbury & Islington moves up a couple of places if you write it as 'Highbury and Islington'.
The most abundant letter combinations are single words with 8 letters (there's 25 of them) and the 18 stations with 18 letters. The most common two word stations have 7,4 letters. There's 17 of those:
Here's the full list of second element tube names.
And to finish up, here's the full list of tube stations with a single name. Although I'm never sure if hypenated words count.
Marquis de Geek