The 10 most famous street names in the UK — and the stories behind them

A British street sign carries about a dozen words and no pictures. A street name in black capitals, a postcode in red, a borough underneath. It's one of the plainest objects in public life — and yet a handful of them have become so well known that you'd recognise the nameplate on its own, with the road, the buildings and the country stripped away.

That's a strange kind of fame. Nobody set out to make Abbey Road famous. It got that way because four men walked across it one August morning and a photographer had ten minutes to get the shot.

Here are the ten British street names that have earned that status, what actually happened on them, and why the sign itself — white enamel, red lettering, one thin black rule — turned out to be a small masterpiece of design.

The 10 most famous street names in the UK, at a glance

1. Abbey Road, NW8, London — the Beatles' zebra crossing, and the only road crossing in Britain with listed status.
2. Downing Street, SW1A, London — the most photographed front door in the country.
3. Penny Lane, L18, Liverpool — a suburban bus terminus turned into a number one single.
4. Baker Street, W1U, London — home to an address that didn't exist when it was invented.
5. Carnaby Street, W1F, London — the shorthand for the Swinging Sixties.
6. The Royal Mile, EH1, Edinburgh — castle to palace, and not really one street at all.
7. Savile Row, W1S, London — the home of bespoke tailoring, and the roof the Beatles played on.
8. The Shambles, YO1, York — a medieval butchers' row whose name means exactly that.
9. Portobello Road, W11, London — named after a battle in Panama, famous for a market.
10. Fleet Street, EC4, London — 500 years of printing, over a buried river.

1. Abbey Road, NW8 — City of Westminster

On 8 August 1969, a photographer called Iain Macmillan stood on a stepladder in the middle of a St John's Wood road while a policeman held up the traffic. He had about ten minutes and took six frames. The Beatles walked back and forth across the crossing; the fifth frame became the album cover.

Everything about the picture is accidental. The studio it was taken outside had been EMI Studios since 1931 and was only renamed Abbey Road Studios afterwards, because of the record. Paul McCartney had kicked off his sandals because it was hot. The white Volkswagen Beetle parked on the left belonged to someone in a nearby flat, and its number plate spent the next decade being stolen.

In December 2010 the crossing was given Grade II listed status on the advice of English Heritage — the first road crossing in Britain ever listed, on the grounds of "cultural and historical importance". It has been resurfaced and re-marked many times since 1969, so the tarmac is not the original tarmac, but the listing recognises what most tourists already believed: this is a monument that happens to be a bit of road.

The nameplate itself has its own problem. It gets stolen and covered in graffiti so relentlessly that Westminster mounted it high up on a wall and repaints it on a schedule.

2. Downing Street, SW1A — City of Westminster

The street is named after Sir George Downing, who was, by most accounts, thoroughly unpleasant: a diplomat, a spy, a man who turned on his old comrades after the Restoration, and — a detail that delights Americans — the second person ever to graduate from Harvard. In the 1680s he built a terrace of houses here, quickly and cheaply, on poor foundations. Winston Churchill later described the result as "shaky and lightly built".

In 1732 George II offered the house to Sir Robert Walpole. Walpole declined it as a personal gift and accepted it instead for the office of First Lord of the Treasury — which is why, to this day, the front door belongs to the job rather than the person, and why the brass plate reads what it does.

Look closely at that door and you'll notice the 0 in "10" is tilted, at about 37 degrees. The romantic explanation is that it copies a wonky numeral on an earlier door. The likelier one, argued by the typographic historian James Mosley, is that it isn't a zero at all but a capital O from the Roman Trajan alphabet the Ministry of Works favoured, whose inner ellipse leans to the left by exactly that much. There is no handle on the outside, either — the door can only be opened from within.

3. Penny Lane, L18 — Liverpool

Released in February 1967 as a double A-side with Strawberry Fields Forever, Penny Lane is McCartney's photograph of an ordinary Liverpool bus interchange: a barber's shop, a bank, a fire station, a shelter in the middle of a roundabout. All of it is real, and most of it is still there.

The street signs were stolen so persistently through the seventies and eighties that Liverpool City Council eventually gave up replacing them and simply painted the name onto the buildings instead.

In 2020 the name became the subject of a genuine controversy, when it was suggested that the lane honoured the 18th-century slave trader James Penny, and signs were defaced. Liverpool's International Slavery Museum commissioned research and concluded that summer that there is no historical evidence linking Penny Lane to James Penny. A number of other Liverpool streets do carry that history; this one appears not to.

4. Baker Street, W1U — City of Westminster

When Arthur Conan Doyle gave Sherlock Holmes rooms at 221B Baker Street, the address was safely imaginary: the street's numbers didn't run that high. Later renumbering caught up with the fiction, and the 200s landed in the lap of the Abbey National building society, which moved in during 1932 and ended up employing a secretary specifically to answer letters addressed to Holmes.

When the Sherlock Holmes Museum opened in 1990 — physically sitting at 239, between numbers 237 and 241 — Westminster gave it special permission to use 221B, and a fifteen-year tussle over who should receive the great detective's mail followed. It was only settled in 2002, after Abbey National moved out, when Royal Mail agreed to deliver it all to the museum.

The street has a second claim too: Gerry Rafferty's Baker Street and its saxophone riff, a worldwide hit in 1978. And Baker Street station, opened in 1863, is one of the oldest surviving stations on the London Underground.

5. Carnaby Street, W1F — City of Westminster

Named after Karnaby House, built nearby in 1683, the street spent most of its life as an unremarkable Soho back road. Then in the early sixties a run of boutiques opened along it, Mods adopted it, and by the time Time magazine ran its "London: The Swinging City" cover in April 1966 the name had become international shorthand for British youth culture.

It is a short street — you can walk it in three minutes — which makes the scale of its reputation slightly absurd. Pedestrianised in 1973, it has been a fashion address, then a tourist trap, then a fashion address again, and the name has outlasted every version of it.

6. The Royal Mile, EH1 — Edinburgh

Here's the catch: there is no street called the Royal Mile. The route running downhill from Edinburgh Castle to the Palace of Holyroodhouse is a chain of separate streets — Castlehill, the Lawnmarket, the High Street, the Canongate and Abbey Strand — each with its own nameplate. "Royal Mile" is a nickname that stuck so hard it displaced the real names in everyday speech.

The mile in question is a Scots mile, an old measure a little longer than the statute one, at roughly 1.8km. And the spine it follows is geology rather than town planning: a crag-and-tail ridge left by a glacier grinding around the volcanic plug the castle sits on. Every close and wynd dropping steeply away on either side exists because of that ridge.

7. Savile Row, W1S — City of Westminster

Built between 1731 and 1735 as part of Lord Burlington's estate, the street was named after the 3rd Earl's wife, Lady Dorothy Savile — one of the few famous British streets named for a woman. It began as a smart residential address full of officers and statesmen, which is precisely why the tailors arrived: they followed the customers up the road from Mayfair.

Henry Poole & Co, known as the founder of the Row, cut an entrance onto Savile Row from Old Burlington Street in 1846, and is credited with inventing the dinner jacket — which Americans, having seen it worn at Tuxedo Park in New York, renamed the tuxedo. The word bespoke belongs to the same world: cloth set aside for one named customer had been "spoken for".

Then, on 30 January 1969, the Beatles climbed onto the roof of number 3 — the Apple Corps headquarters — and played a 42-minute set before the Metropolitan Police came up the stairs to ask them to turn it down. It was their last public performance. There's a neat loop in it, too: the suits Lennon, McCartney and Starr wear on the Abbey Road cover were cut a few doors along by Tommy Nutter. Harrison wore denim.

8. The Shambles, YO1 — York

The name is not a comment on the state of the place. It comes from the Anglo-Saxon fleshammels — the wooden shelves on which butchers laid out meat. This was York's butchers' row, and the Domesday survey of 1086 already records butchers' stalls in this part of the city. Over the centuries it also went by Haymongergate and Nedlergate, before the Great Flesh Shambles shortened itself into the Shambles.

The overhanging upper floors that make it so photogenic were practical: jettying out over the street gave you more floor space upstairs and kept direct sun off the meat below. Look at the shopfronts and you can still find meat hooks and the wide window sills that served as display counters. The word "shambles" only came to mean a mess later, by way of "shambles" meaning a slaughterhouse, and then a scene of carnage.

Modern fame arrived via Harry Potter tourism and a resemblance to Diagon Alley that the film-makers never actually claimed. The street was already 900 years old and coping perfectly well.

9. Portobello Road, W11 — Kensington and Chelsea

In 1739 Admiral Edward Vernon captured the Spanish settlement of Puerto Bello in what is now Panama, with six ships, and the country went slightly mad for him. Pubs, songs and streets were named in his honour. A farm in the fields north of Notting Hill took the name Portobello, and when London swallowed the fields the lane to the farm kept it.

The market grew from Victorian traders, took in the rag trade, and turned decisively to antiques after the Second World War — it now claims to be the largest antiques market in the world. The name did the rest of its own work: Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Notting Hill, and a Peruvian bear whose adopted family live just around the corner.

10. Fleet Street, EC4 — City of London

Fleet Street is named after a river you cannot see. The Fleet ran down to the Thames along this line, was progressively covered over from the 18th century, and now flows as a sewer beneath the road.

Around 1500, Wynkyn de Worde — William Caxton's former apprentice — set up a printing press near St Bride's Church, and printing simply never left. Newspapers followed the printers, and for the best part of three centuries the national press was produced within a few hundred yards of this street.

Then it ended, quite quickly: the move to Wapping in 1986, the rest scattering to Docklands, and Reuters finally leaving in 2005. Not a single national newspaper is produced on Fleet Street today. Everyone still calls the press "Fleet Street", which tells you something about how durable a street name can be once it means more than a location.

Nearly made the list

• Oxford Street, W1 — Europe's busiest shopping street, following the line of a Roman road.
• Grey Street, NE1 — Newcastle's great Georgian sweep, repeatedly voted the finest street in Britain in listener polls.
• Brick Lane, E1 — named for the brick kilns, later defined by wave after wave of arrivals, most recently Bengali.
• Princes Street, EH2 — shops on one side, a castle on the other, which is a hard trick to beat.
• Sauchiehall Street, G2 — from the Scots for "willow meadow", and much prettier than the shopping suggests.
• Threadneedle Street, EC2 — the Bank of England's address, and the reason it's the "Old Lady of Threadneedle Street".
• Ebenezer Place, Wick — the shortest street in the world at 2.05m, with one address on it: the door of a bistro.

And a note for the pub quiz: the most common street name in Britain isn't famous at all. Depending on whose dataset you use, High Street comes first with somewhere between about 2,000 and 5,400 examples, followed by Station Road — a direct legacy of the Victorian railway boom — and then Church Street. Roughly a third of British street names are one-offs, which is worth remembering if yours is.

What actually makes a street name famous

Looking at the list, there are really only four routes in:

• A song or a photograph. Abbey Road and Penny Lane were unremarkable roads that got captured. Three minutes of music beats three centuries of history.
• Power. Downing Street and Threadneedle Street are famous because the address is the institution. Nobody needs to say "the Prime Minister's office".
• A trade. Fleet Street, Savile Row and the Shambles were named for, or came to mean, the work done on them — and the name outlives the work by decades.
• A story. Baker Street is world-famous for a tenant who never existed, and people still write to him. That may be the most durable form of fame of the lot.

What none of them have is a good name in the ordinary sense. "Abbey Road" is about as plain as English gets. That's rather the point: the name is a container, and what people put into it is the meaning.

The design behind the sign

The nameplate itself deserves its own paragraph, because it's a genuine piece of British design history rather than just municipal signage.

In 1967, the newly enlarged City of Westminster commissioned the Design Research Unit, under Sir Misha Black, to sort out its street signs. What came back is the layout everyone now pictures when they think of a London street: white enamel, the street name in heavy condensed black capitals, the postal district in red to the right, a thin black rule beneath, and the borough in red along the bottom. The lettering is a bespoke alphabet built on Adrian Frutiger's Univers — the ultra-condensed weight — which is why it reads cleanly from across a road while packing "SHAFTESBURY AVENUE" into a plate you can lift with one hand.

It worked so well that it escaped Westminster entirely. The design has been copied worldwide on tea towels, mugs and fridge magnets, and Westminster now licenses it to keep control of the real thing. It is one of very few examples of local-government paperwork becoming an icon.

It is also, as it happens, a very good design for a wall: high contrast, no ornament, one flash of red, and a hierarchy that reads at any size.

Putting your own street on the wall

This is exactly what our London Calling street sign print does. You get the three lines the real plates use, and you choose all of them:

• The street name, in condensed black capitals, with a slider to control how large it sits on the plate — useful, because "Rye" and "Shaftesbury Avenue" need very different treatment.
• The postcode in red, which you can nudge up or down to sit exactly where it does on the real thing.
• The borough line along the bottom, in red — your council, your town, your county, or something that isn't a place at all. "Est. 2019" works. So does a surname: "The Hendersons".

It comes in portrait or landscape (the real signs are landscape; portrait suits a narrow wall or a stairwell), as an instant digital download or as a printed and optionally framed piece. If you're unsure how big to go, our room-by-room wall art size guide has the numbers in centimetres.

The addresses that make the best prints, from what we see ordered:

• The first flat. Especially the grim one. It's funnier and more affecting on a wall than the nice house that came later.
• The street you grew up on, as a present for a parent or a sibling. This one lands hardest at 60ths and retirements.
• Where you met, which is often a pub, a road outside a club, or a university hall.
• A new house, given on completion day — a housewarming present with the address already on it.
• A road that isn't yours at all: a favourite holiday street, a football ground's road, the street of a shop you loved.

If you'd rather mark a place than a street name, a coordinates print does the same job with latitude and longitude, and Location Location handles a street name with a house number.

Frequently asked questions

What is the most famous street in the UK?

Downing Street is probably the most widely recognised name internationally, since it stands for the British government rather than a place. For a street famous purely on its own account, Abbey Road takes it — the crossing outside the studios is a listed structure and a permanent tourist queue.

What is the most common street name in the UK?

High Street, by a comfortable margin, followed by Station Road and Church Street. Exact counts differ between datasets — estimates for High Street range from about 2,000 to 5,400 depending on whether close variants are included — but the running order is consistent.

Why are London street signs black, white and red?

Because of a 1967 commission by the City of Westminster to the Design Research Unit, led by Sir Misha Black. The design put the street name in condensed black capitals, the postal district and the borough name in red, separated by a thin black rule, using bespoke lettering based on Univers. It has been copied so widely that Westminster licenses the design.

Why is Savile Row famous?

For bespoke tailoring. Tailors have worked the street since the early 19th century, and Henry Poole & Co — the "founder of the Row" — is credited with inventing the dinner jacket there. It's also where the Beatles gave their final public performance, on the roof of number 3, in January 1969.

What is the shortest street in the UK?

Ebenezer Place in Wick, Caithness, at 2.05m — recognised by Guinness World Records as the shortest street in the world. It has a single address: the door of a bistro belonging to Mackays Hotel.

Can I get a print of my own street name?

Yes — that's the whole idea. Put your street name, postcode and borough (or town, or anything else) onto the London Calling street sign print and you'll see it appear as you type, before you buy anything.

What size should a street sign print be?

These work best wide rather than tall, because the design is horizontal. 30 × 40cm suits a hallway or a small wall; above a sideboard or a bed, go larger. Our wall art size guide walks through it room by room.

Make your own

Ten streets on this list are famous because of what happened on them. Yours is famous to about four people, which is a better ratio than any of them manage.

Design it in your browser, change your mind as often as you like, and only buy when it looks right: start with the London Calling street sign print, or browse Places & Events if you'd rather mark the moment than the address.