What Do Street Names Tell Us? An Application to Great Britain's Streets

Abstract

This note conducts an application of the methodology described in Oto-Peralías (2017) [What do street names tell us? The ‘city-text’ as socio-cultural data, Journal of Economic Geography] to the case of Great Britain. In that article, I propose that street names can be used as a rich source of information to create socio-cultural indicators at the regional and local level. To illustrate this methodology for the case of Great Britain, I create an indicator measuring the historical importance of Christianism and another measuring the cultural attachment to Great Britain. Interestingly, both street-name indicators are strongly correlated with the underlying cultural factors they are supposed to capture.

Keywords: Street names, city-text, quantitative analysis, culture

JEL Classification: R19, Z10, Z13