Has your house got a name

Our house and the one next door were built on the plot of where a single house once stood and so each house was given a name but no number, the builder didn't want to make one of the houses the " A" number. So our house has a name as does the one next door and we always advise that we are "down a driveway between No. 37 and No. 41" and that when they are looking us up for the satnav we are at the bottom of the list for our road!

We moved to this house three years ago and it already had a name which is, strangely, the first bit of my first name and the surname of my first boyfriend. Ideal if I had married him.

Scones

Our house has a name which it was given by the previous owners, a family who lived here for over 50 years. I love the name and the connection with the people who went before us.

The name sign was obviously made by one of the family. When we moved it it was in a bad state so we refurbished it and now it has pride of place.

A neighbour is a retired policeman and has called his house Duncoppering.

I'd love to think that the new owners of my parents house did the same with my dad's hand made sign. The house was called Rivington, a place close to where they lived and first met.

When we had our first house many years ago we called it Myome!!

According to our deeds out house originally had a name, before the street was numbered back in the Edwardian era. One dau I'll get a sign made

Just a name. No numbers out in the countryside.

It wasn’t a fancy property, a 2-bed retirement bungalow kind of thing. I also pondered on it being Rainbow End and not Rainbow’s End. The traffic lights I was waiting at were exceedingly slow in changing to green, as you’ve probably guessed.

Rainbow End probably cost several pots of gold.

We just have a number but most houses in our village are name-only. Such fun for delivery drivers, especially on dark winter days. They end up chapping on our door asking whether we know XYZ house. Mostly we don’t because we’re a spread out area, not compact.

My DD’s house has only a name, there are no numbers in her village. When they moved in they thought about changing the name but it costs quite a lot of money to do it officially so the post office will deliver. It might have been £300. They didn’t bother.

I did sit in a queue at traffic lights recently wondering why the house next to the road was called Rainbow End. It was by a busy three way junction in town and opposite a police station.

Our off road house has a name but we've recently found that using the What3Words app in our address is a good way for delivery people to find us or, rather, they've no excuse not to.

What I love about our wee peninsula though is that along the coast road, where houses only have names, people use the nearest lamp-post number to help with non-Royal Mail deliveries. Royal Mail have had us sussed for yonks.

My sister in Yorkshire is as Yorkshire as you can get, over their front door is a sign which says "R OUSE", my daughters, not having been raised in the county, just didn`t get it!

Never had an official house name but extended family and family always called our last house after my OHs name with villa on the end e.g. Royvilla. This house is nicknamed after a town in a popular film

Yes we do, our home is hidden in the grounds of a small 'stately home type place, numbers would mean nothing as we are all scattered about. So yes we use the name the house came with which is a derivative of the Scottish for stream...

Some folks can be pretty thoughtless in naming a house, I know of a house called Smutty Croft.
Our house was named after a tree which fell down some years ago we have numerous other types of trees in the garden so the name seems rather odd now.
Our road also has no name and sat nav only covers part of the area and then you lose phone signal so it can be a nightmare as drivers often don’t listen to instructions to phone from the nearest village that does have a signal.
We have a three word identification for the property which would help if delivery drivers had access to the app.

Hazel93. If you are 'getting on a bit', and still have all your marbles, "Still Thinking" isn't a bad name for your house! ?

We have a house number, but our affectionate name for it is “Windy Corner”.
It’s related to the weather - not the state of the folks who live inside !

“The lower classes give their house a name instead of a number to prove it isn’t council” Jilly Cooper, ‘Class’, 1979.
We can have both name and number if we wish, can’t we?
Apart from M0nica’s Law?

madelaine45. I agree about having easy to read, well-lit numbers and names. I helped out our local newsagent for a while, and occasionally went out to deliver newspapers. Trying to pick out house numbers in the early morning darkness was very difficult, often having to spot a large readable number and count along the row to find the one I wanted.
Trying to find the right house on a busy road can be particularly hazardous.
Maybe we should have a law making everyone display a large clear house number/name at the kerbline. They have this where my DD lives, in Australia, plus a compulsory free-standing letterbox so that the Postie can whizz in and out, on his little motorised bike, in seconds. Not so practical with some of our houses though.

I have to say that I didn't realise that house names were 'posh' as in my childhood, they were mostly reserved for the small villages & hamlets, which in those days, mostly housed folk who worked in agriculture, on the railway or canal, and were not all posh.
Now of course, villages in many parts of the country are 'desirable' and it makes me smile when I hear talk of the children going to a 'village school'. In my childhood we felt sorry for the 'village children' as their schools weren't as good!
In my village, there are still a good many folk who bought their houses here (with names) when they were cheaper than the then more desirable market town.

I am all for numbers, where they exist. names are for where they don't.

The first house DH1 and I bought was Bay View and was nowhere near the sea. It has bay windows and overlooked ploughed fields. So we renamed it Holywell Cottage after the road my ex lived in during his last year at Oxford and had very happy memories.

My favourite house I bought with DH2, and was Waterfarm Cottage, Coleman's Hatch which I thought was a wonderful address and deep in the woods. Another with him was Mill House complete with ancient mill stones, on the edge of a lake belonging to a very grand house often seen in films.

Now with DH3 our address is just the hamlet. Brits find it strange that our address is just three lines ,including France. The post code in line 2 covers miles but as this is a very underpopulated area the posters know us all.

When I was a young teen I would pass a house called 'Iniquity' My mum tried to explain it to me! ??

Having spent my working life as a community nurse, I agree with those who say it can be a nightmare finding houses by name alone. That's why, when I applied to the local authority for our official address, I asked for a number - but they said 'not possible' - the road was such a mish-mash. But the name of our house is clear, and lit at night.

Having said that, I didn't work in rural areas, only urban where most houses are numbered. However, 2 estates I worked on had been laid out from a footpath point of view. So as you walked down the path, the houses were conventionally numbered. But if you drove in (as emergency, medical & nursing services normally would) you approached the houses from the back, so each side of the road had a different name, and the odd numbers of, say Rose Walk, were nowhere near the even numbers.

I am enjoying hearing about all these house names.

We moved into a village house called Myholme which we didn’t like. Eventually, after months of discussing alternatives we called it Common View because we did face the village common and we felt, compared to the rest of our neighbours, we were quite common!

We live on an old medieval estate where all the houses have traditional names the old barn, the coach house, the lodge, the farm house the old stables etc. It’s very tricky for delivery drivers to find the correct house!