The Neasden connection ... Place-names

Like songs about cities, British place-names tend to lack pizzaz. Somehow, there’s little grandeur, or emotional impact. Consider, for instance, GRIMSBY. Scunthorpe / Neasden / Blackpool / Frinton-on-Sea. TWICKENHAM, for heaven’s sake. What could sound more earth-bound? Not for Brits the heart-swelling euphony of a ‘San Francisco’ And it’s doubtful that Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber would’ve scored a world-wide mega-hit with ‘Don’t Cry For Me, Hemel Hempstead’.

No: Brits like to live in places that sound – here it is again – cosy. Even if they have industrial blight and teeming populations. ‘Newcastle-Upon-Tyne’. Sounds pretty, doesn’t it? ‘Swansea’.

If Brits reside in small villages (their true spiritual homes) they prefer place-names redolent of Olde Worlde Charme. These are cosier-than-cosy ... by definition, ‘twee’ ... evoking warming visions of thatch-on-roof, copper-on-walls, roses-on-trellis, scones-in-fireplace, and wood-worm-in-beams. Consider Nether Wallop, Little Didcot, things in-the-Marsh, things on-the-Wold, and things under-Lyme. And if that’s not cosy enough, Brits assign names to their cottage homes and rural hideaways. Yes, if great estates and palaces can have titles (Sandringham, Blenheim), why not your retirement bungalow? This is a harmless device for allowing Brits from all walks of life to live out the ‘country house’ fantasy. Patient postmen find their way to thousands of Lake Views, Shangri-La’s and Journey’s Ends.

Of course, the cosiness of the British landscape – decorously arranged on human scale – contributes to the snugness of it all. Nowhere in these Sceptred Isles are Brits outfaced by their own topography; nature has the decency to behave. There are no towering mountain-ranges, no deserts, no glaciers, no natural wonders (unless you count Hadrian’s Wall, and he was Italian). And if a mischievous Providence had placed Mt Everest somewhere in Britain, chances are that the natives would have called it ‘Perriwinkle Tor’.

Date: 2015-04-20; view: 948