On the counsel (municipal) side, you have a bunch of people who have convinced themselves that we need to punctuation to let computers more easily read names, which is ill-informed in the way computers work.
On the other side, you have the classic “it’s just not right” garbage with a tinge of “our great English standards are going to hell in a hand basket” which is ill-informed on how language evolves.
Ooooh I think this is a bit harsh, no? Language does evolve. But Mary’s Walk should have an apostrophe no matter what you say. That apostrophe does work: it conveys information about the thing.
Not that it’s important in this context, but in others, it is. So casting as curmudgeonly the desire to keep it is, I think, going too far.
I mean, Mallard Road and Duck Road are both grammatically fine, but if some bureaucrat somewhere decides "Duck is easier to understand and read"...
> Mary’s Walk … [the] apostrophe … conveys information about the thing. Not that it’s important in this context, but in others, it is
The only information being conveyed here is a hint at the etymology, though, and as you rightly point out, that’s not important in this context, but it’s also sufficiently incomplete that the inclusion of the apostrophe could mislead. Was Mary a specific local woman, a reference to a biblical figure, a church, the surname of a local farming family, or a weird Northern word for something else? Is it a perversion of an old Danelaw word? Was it always a possessive name, or was that added by an enterprising local sign writer in the 1810s? St Albans is always written without an apostrophe or a dot, where ironically St. Kilda sometimes does have one.
I would suggest there are no situations in which this information is important to include in the name itself, and doing so adds a false layer of confidence that place and street names in the UK can be trusted.
Where I live we have a major road called the Princes Freeway/Highway. The name originally came from "Prince's", but the apostrophe got dropped a long time ago, well before my memory, and now everyone pronounces it like Princess, despite being spelled Princes.
Maybe it should have retained its apostrophe, but it didn't and as a result it's now effectively a different word. As you are right to point out, language evolves.
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