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…

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