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Comment by crazal | Hacker News Reader

This would be more interesting if you'd actually identified the higher order concept of a high street not just if it had "High Street" in the name. The removal of streatham which is the longest High Street in Europe is a bit odd. https://www.mystreatham.com/10-facts-you-didnt-know-about-st...

`In the UK, a "high street" refers to the primary business and commercial street in a town, city or borough, where most of the shops, banks, restaurants, and other businesses are concentrated. It is often considered the main shopping area and social hub of a community.`

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Near where I live is Wapping High Street (Just next to the Tower of London, City outwards). There are maybe 1,2,3 shops sprinkled around. A barber. That sort of thing. The rest are Warfs (Warehouse at river Front) which were part of the port of London before it moved down the Thames. If you wanted to go to the main shopping area you nowadays would go to Wapping Lane.

Now, the warehouses are there only for a few centuries and Wapping is much older. I don’t know if Wapping High street at that time was a vibrant shopping street with exciting retail opportunities, maybe. My point is things change over time.

This could be an interesting research project as you suggest and I wait with great anticipation for the first results that you hopefully will present here in some time. I am sure the history of High Streets in London could be fascinating.

Wharf is not an abbreviation.

It sounds like the sort of thing an Estate Agent would make up to emphasise the word river and warehouse living.

It could be a backronym for some buildings owned by someone.

According to the 2010 United States Census, Warf is the 17883rd most common surname in the United States, belonging to 1564 individuals. Warf is most common among White (91.43%) individuals.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Warf

You mean a back-formation. "Warf" as "warehouse at river front" is a backronym, it totally has the same feeling as those other famous nonsense backronyms like "fornication under consent of king" or "port out starboard home".

...except that "wharf" has an 'h' in it, so it's not even a backronym.

Yes, a back-formation of the sur-name “Warf” into an acronym for “warehouse…” Is it known if the buildings were never owned by or associated with someone or a family named “Warf?”

Warf was a typo. The Warehouses are called Wharf.

Oh, ok, my next conjecture would have been the involvement of a Star Trek TNG aficionado. (Albeit with an o->a typo)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worf

https://www.etymonline.com/word/wharf

Diamond Geezer has been blogging for years and definitely understands what a high street is. In fact he’s probably planning a follow-up already about High Roads. (There’s already a visit to the shortest high streets as a follow-up: https://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2024/06/londons-shortest-...)

For those who are unfamiliar with London parlance, the term 'diamond geezer' is London slang for a man of high repute.

That's a pretty misleading way of explaining the term. It's certainly not an unalloyed positive. Urbandictionary or similar might give a broader understanding.

Streatham High Road still seems like a grey area that should be considered a high street.

It probably was a road (connecting 2 towns with no houses) when it was first named, but is more of a street (with housing either side) now, and is definitely the primary commercial street in Streatham.

dg explains in the article

It is also widely referred to as 'Streatham High Street'.

> `In the UK, a "high street" refers to the primary business and commercial street in a town, city or borough

I know exactly what this means, but this is intrinsically a fuzzy category. There is a local shopping street near us that I am sure doesn't make the grade because it is orders of magnitude smaller than the huge shopping areas off in 2 directions, even though it contains in 3 or 4 blocks:

* a drycleaner, * a dentist, * a pharmacy, * a couple of hairdressers, nail bars and similar grooming/beauty businesses, * several takeaway restaurants and coffee shops/cafes, some more upmarket than others, * a deli, * a clothing shop * a couple of "corner shop" supermarkets and hardware / general household goods shops (but no major chains), * a post office and a bank machine (but no bank branch).

I'm sure that if it was scaled up and/or joined up with similar up the road that does contain a small Sainsburys, it would be "a high street". But where do you draw the line? Is there a clear rule that divides it? If a bank or major chain supermarket moves in, does it become one? If a bank branch closes down, as they do these days, is a street no longer a high street? If we all shift to online banking, does the definition change?

This is basically the "bald man paradox" of fuzzy categories. So there never can be a fixed, definitive count.*

If I think about London there are some obvious shopping/eating/drinking streets and districts and there are large areas that are primarily residential, governmental, etc. But there are also a huge number of streets that are something of a mix and you certainly wouldn't point to as a shopping/entertainment destination.

And for the average resident, the pharmacies, small grocery stores, etc. probably count for a lot more than the high-end luxury clothing places.

Oh, I forgot the pharmacy, just added that in.

But yes, as a resident it's important to have a pharmacy / somewhere to get milk or bread if need be etc, nearby. It counts a lot more than the occasional "high-end luxury clothing" place that is infrequent enough that it doesn't need to be nearby.

That's why these little shopping street are so common. But there's no clear line between that and a high street, it's all just a matter of scale. Everything is a "destination" of sorts be it 5 minutes on foot or half an hour on a bus, and everything is local to some extent - if we wanted to go to a "high street", it would be a local one, be it the borough centre high street east of us or the other borough's centre west of us.

Residents and tourists (whether from the area or not) often have different needs. When I worked in downtown Boston for a bit, I would rarely go to the "shopping areas" and, if I did, it was probably to go to a restaurant with someone.

The article says:

  (If you're wondering where Streatham is, given it's often quoted as London's longest high street, its name is Streatham High Road so it doesn't count)

St Reatham as pronounced by some 80s comedians.

and for those who don't know, it is actually said "Stret-am". Ah, English ...

Stret-um

That's a much harder project IMO. In order to determine which is the main shopping street in a community, you have to start with drawing the communities. That's a tall order in London as the lines are blurry and change over time.

Could start with a postcode approach. Not as accurate but it provides for a consistent and easy to verify methodology.

Or do the reverse? Identify streets with a certain category of commercial business, with quantity above a certain threshold. The area/community can be derived after.

Pretty sure you'd just end up with a map of public transportation lines. All major shops have to be where people regularly pass by on their commute to work in the inner city.

This is probably very different in US suburbia, but it should be true for London and other densely populated areas.

If that happened you probably haven’t refined your whitelist of commercial businesses that would qualify a high street. It’s pretty much the same stuff nationwide.. A McDonald’s, some banks, a foot locker. Etc etc.

I don't think you know how London districts work at all.

London is old enough that it will still reflect patterns from hundreds of years ago. You get old town and villages that have been joined together with newer development. Old roads that used to be a main road and retain some of the inns and shops. Also, development can be separated by parks, walls, administrative boundaries, rivers, canals, railways, new roads etc. Often the effect will persist after those things have vanished.

Google Maps shows such 'commercial corridors' in yellow.

I agree I'm sure the quantity of Nando's, pizza express and Starbucks within a given area is a probably a fantastic starting point for a heuristic to detect this.

My gut reaction was that you’re wrong and it’s easy but actually thinking more about it, even in a small area like my side of London there are a lot of what could be considered high streets, even with different parts of the same street acting as different separate high streets for different communities. A more concrete example is Uxbridge road near Shepherd’s Bush and the section near Shepherd’s Bush Market being two distinct high streets, and then a couple k’s down the road it turns into Acton High Street (Acton itself having multiple distinct high streets). It’d definitely be a challenge to map something like this if you’re not familiar with the area.

Obviously a far younger city, but when I moved to seattle, satellite view on maps was just starting to be a thing, and you could spot all of the areas that were interesting to go to versus residential neighborhoods by the way the light reflected off the roofs. Lighter color along a street usually meant older, flat-roofed buildings where the market streets of the original towns were.

It doesn't really work like that, some people have access to more than one high streets and some aren't in walking distance from any high street.

You could probably pull records like alcohol licensing or food hygiene certificates to identify all streets with a certain number of shops, then use Google Street View to refine the criteria. Eg if a street is mostly residential on the ground floor, adding some shops doesn't make it a high street imo.

Rather ironically the main “High Street” for the whole of London is normally regarded to be Oxford Street, which happens to be very well connected, with 4 stationd on the Central Line, maybe 5 if you include Holborn just beyond New Oxford Street.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Street

Fun fact, the Roman’s called it “Via Trinobantina“.

(Trinobantina = "tri" meaning three + "bantina" meaning inexplicable American candy shop)

It is also important to highlight that high streets work differently depending on cities. Some cities have fewer or unique high streets while others have many ones. This can be unnatural for tourists that are used to one or the other in their local city.

For example, Buenos Aires in Argentina has many many high streets in areas separated by ~20' in car, in some cases just 5' walking.

It's not just if it has High St in the name, but if the full and entire name is High Street.

That's why none of the inner ones are on there, because they are disambiguated e.g. Kensington High Street.

Thank you for explaining this. I kept looking for an explanation of what it means to be a "high street" – After not finding said explanation, I assumed it had to do with elevation, and whether this person was exploring elevation "peaks" in London.

So it seems to be sort of like what are typically called "Main St" in American towns.

Going by this definition, isn't there only one?

Or is this more about counting the towns, cities and boroughs in the London metro area?

Yeah, only a tiny proportion of a multitude of roads that people would be likely to consider high streets near me in South London has High Street in the name.

It's also a very difficult concept to quantify, because depending on what scale you're thinking at a whole range of roads may or may not qualify.

Was also hoping this would be what it’s about. That would have been fascinating and actually quite useful!

If you read the article it actually says why Streatham High Road is not included.

And that is my point, It just says it's not which makes the whole thing feel redundant...

Thank you, I was hoping the site wold give exactly that description, but alas it didn’t

The author is victim of the Fallacy of shared context

The UK really needs to ditch the high street. It's just such terrible town planning, that the intended "social hub of the community" is a main road filled with through traffic and parking spaces.

That's just not an environment where anyone wants to spend their time, and the decline is so painful to see. So many now are just betting shops, letting agents and kebab takeaways - but if these were pedestrian zones these could be so much more. See large European cafes with people eating and drinking outside on the street until late.

There are many high streets in London that show removing cars, or expanding pavements, improves the high street. I would rather see more effort made to divert cars another way rather than close the high street. Too often that means making a privately owned public space as the prime spot.

The main high street in my town is fully pedestrianised (although fully concrete too) and attracts a lot of foot traffic. The second in line is pretty much buses / taxis only and is also quite popular.

The key point is removing car traffic.

We did, starting about four decades ago.

Shopping is now concentrated on retail estates and the "high streets" are almost always pedestrianised making it harder to injury the various drunks, junkies and homeless which now (ironically) call the high street "home".

There are many pedestrianized high streets in the UK.

If you go to OpenStreetMap Overpass with this query: https://overpass-turbo.eu/?template=key-value&key=highway&va... then browse to somewhere in the UK and click "Run" you'll get a map.

If your town doesn't have them, write to your local council! And don't vote Conservative, as they have announced further opposition to anything restricting motor cars.

Are you forgetting the weather and how poorly prepared most of the British are for it? Even in new build pedestrianised areas like.. Coal Drops Yard, outdoor seating is limited and normally nearly empty once the midday heat has passed.

I haven't spent a lot of time in that immediate area but I'm not sure why that complex wasn't designed with more of an outdoor orientation. That's not universal in London. I'd say Covent Garden and Camden Town were at least somewhat more outdoor/quasi-outdoor friendly.

There's a gap somewhere between "main road" and full pedestrianisation.

King's Road in Chelsea is an example that immediately comes to mind.

Really what it comes down to is that nice areas with approximately the right density of people have nice high streets.

You could pedestrianise Oxford Street but it'd still be a grim place to be because there are hordes of people - at a certain point the people have a similar effect to cars in that it's not really pleasant to pause outside any more.

I don’t see King’s Road as being a good example. King’s Road has a lot of traffic and the pedestrian experience is very poor.

Really this reflects how much "planning" is (a) historical accident and (b) powerless against bigger economic forces. The old high street concept was very dependent on having someone in the house who could go shopping during the weekday. Which, in the present era, basically limits you to pensioners and other benefit recipients. Pedestrianisation would probably help in some of those cases but it's not a magic wand. And of course many of London's "high streets" are completely vital to its sluggish surface transport movement.

I dunno, there's probably more gainfully-employed people with the opportunity to go shopping during weekdays than there were 5 years ago. Home working often comes with flexitime, as if a company doesn't care where you do the work as long as it gets done, they usually don't care when as long as you meet your deadlines and show up for meetings.

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