I have a question about Harry Potter/England

[conuly]

In book 5, it says that Sirius' house (number 12) is in between numbers 11 and 13. Is this normal for England? In the US, streets are all even on one side, and all odd on the other, so number 12 would be in between 10 and 14, not 11 and 13.

Comments

Re: Sometimes I use my useless trivia knowledge for good!

[eofs.livejournal.com]

I've lived in England for all 19 years of my life (except the past month, but let's ignore that) and I can tell you that the convention in England *is* to number odd on one side, even on the other (and the numbers are smaller at the town end.) However, I don't find it hard to believe that there are many roads in the country where the numbering is sequential, even though I can't think of any off the top of my head. It is probably more common in villages, or on older roads (I don't know how far back naming conventions go, but roads and buildings can go back to at least the 11th century and I don't know if they would renumber them.)

In England we don't operate on a block system - there is only a single city in the UK that does in fact, Milton Keynes (have you read Good Omens?)

On the estate that my best friend lives on, the numbers skip from 14 to 41 :0) *Talks to him about this query* He reckons it's mostly older Victorian Terraces that do the 1, 2, 3 thing (I have a vague feeling a road I once studied in school might have been 1, 2, 3) He points out that even roads with no houses on one side can be numbered just odds or evens :0)

Re: Sometimes I use my useless trivia knowledge for good!

[conuly]

In England we don't operate on a block system - there is only a single city in the UK that does in fact, Milton Keynes (have you read Good Omens?)

Do you mean that you don't operate on a grid system? Because when I say "block" I just mean "a row of houses across the street from another row of houses". So one block would be, say, the stretch of St. Paul's avenue from Taxter (that's a cross-street) and Beech (that's the next cross-street). My street is two blocks on one side and one long block on the other (because there's a street that stops at our street, so one side of the street has that street in the middle, and the other doesn't)