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The American custom of numbering and lettering streets is almost always ascribed by English writers who discuss it, not to a desire to make finding them easy, but to sheer poverty of invention. The English apparently have an inexhaustible fund of names for streets; they often give one street more than one name. Thus, Oxford street, London, becomes the Bayswater road, High street, Holland Park avenue, Goldhawke road and finally the Oxford road to the westward, and High Holborn, Holborn viaduct, Newgate street, Cheapside, the Poultry, Cornhill and Leadenhall street to the eastward. The Strand, in the same way, becomes Fleet street, Ludgate hill and Cannon street. Nevertheless, there is a First avenue in Queen’s Park, London, and parallel to it are Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth avenues—all small streets leading northward from the Harrow road, just east of Kensal Green cemetery. I have observed that few Londoners have ever heard of them. There is also a First street in Chelsea—a very modest thoroughfare near Lennox Gardens and not far from the Brompton Oratory.

Next to the numbering and lettering of streets, a fashion apparently set up by Major Pierre-Charles L’Enfant’s plans for Washington, the most noticeable feature of American street nomenclature, as opposed to that of England, is the extensive use of such designations as avenue, boulevard, drive and speedway. Avenue is used in England, but only rather sparingly; it is seldom applied to a mean street, or to one in a warehouse district. In America the word is scarcely distinguished in meaning from street. 74 Boulevard, drive and speed-way are almost unknown to the English, but they use road for urban thoroughfares, which is very seldom done in America, and they also make free use of place, walk, passage, lane and circus, all of which are obsolescent on this side of the ocean. Some of the older American cities, such as Boston and Baltimore, have surviving certain ancient English designations of streets, e. g., Cheapside and Cornhill; these are unknown in the newer American towns. Broadway, which is also

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