Plaza Joe Strummer will always have more cred than Julio Iglesias Street

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/16/plaza-joe-strummer-julio-iglesias-street

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These matters are handled with greater exuberance elsewhere in Europe. It is hard to trace any British equivalent of the decision this week by the Spanish city Granada to rename a plaza after the British punk icon Joe Strummer, who moved there from London in 1984 to escape ructions in his band, the Clash.

A walk through many a continental city leaves you contemplating street after street and square after square named for long-forgotten local eminences. Compare the London tube map with that of the Paris metro to see how Britain lags. The latter is full of stations whose names commemorate heroes even from countries other than France. At the heart of the city you stop in succession at Franklin D Roosevelt, George V and Charles de Gaulle. Writers, scientists, politicians and revolutionary heroes of distant places qualify too.

The underground has hardly any stations named after people. An exception is Russell Square, named after the Russell family, who along with the Grosvenors, Bedfords and others gave their names to areas they largely owned. And inevitably, since we mostly confine our enthusiasm in such matters to royals, there's Victoria. She's by far the best commemorated of all British figures across the land. Few self-respecting cities in the Victorian age failed to name a square after her, or failing a square, then at least a predominant street. Around a hundred Victoria avenues, closes, crescents, embankments, roads, streets, ways and wharfs throng the London A-Z. Your next best chance of making the grade was to be a military hero. Nelson has around 40 entries, including one Nelson Square – leaving him well behind Wellington, who has around 70, and two squares. And of course there is Trafalgar Square, and Waterloo.

I have failed to find any streets in London, let alone squares, named after Spanish musicians. No Albéniz Avenue, no Manuel de Falla Mews, no Granados Gardens; no nod to popular Spanish musicians that I could spot, not even to Julio Iglesias. But then we are not exactly lavish in honouring our own musicians, except in the kind of block solutions to which developers turn when in need. Poets – Wordsworth next door to Tennyson, with Southey, perhaps, and Keats – do well in this context, as do birds, flowers and rivers. But Shakespeare is not well represented in London; nor even, in terms of streets rather than blocks of flats, is Dickens.

Once these decisions were simple. There weren't many roads to name. The one that ran towards London was London Road. The main street was called High Street, or sometimes Main Street. The lane to the church was Church Lane or a name derived from the appropriate saint. The serious trouble began in the factory age when street after huddled street was run up to accommodate the newly arrived working poor. Many have gone in successive waves of slum clearance, but Leeds for one was a city full of these sequences: Bayswater Avenue, Bayswater Crescent, Bayswater Grove, Mount, Place, Row, Street, Terrace, View.

These were names bestowed with little regard for their nature. Many Crescents were straight and Mounts flat. A street in the Leeds district of Holbeck was called Danube View. Even the most long-sighted householder was afforded no view of the Danube: it was just part of a package of six streets called Danube. Out in the newer suburbs the practice continued. A postwar estate at Moortown had 15 Lingfields; Middleton Park, 15 Throstles.

Occasionally a hero of the people is honoured. Lately in extensively modernised Stratford, east London, they've named a square after Gerry Raffles, who managed the Theatre Royal there in Joan Littlewood's heyday. South London has a Bevin Square and a Tillett Square (after the labour champion Ben Tillett). John Lennon, of course has a whole airport named after him. On any calculation of acreage that must be worth several hundred squares.