We live in a narrow one way lane in a Hampshire town. All the houses only have names making it a nightmare for delivery drivers etc. This is aggravated by most sat navs and mapping systems including google street view putting our postcode in a dead end side turning off the main lane.
Who can I approach to suggest adding sequential numbering be officially adopted to help this situation.
Local council? County council (who manage the roads) or maybe Post Office?
TIA Bob
Good luck. We tried to have the lane we lived on previously, officially named and signposted. We moved out, five years after our request was "referred to the parish council", without any response.
It would be your district council. They would conduct a poll of all the residents concerned. We jhhad one about 20 years ago - requested by an incomer. I'm pleased to say the idea of numbers was rejected.
I think Usually the district/borough/unitary council but just who ends up as the street naming and numbering authority is beyond my ken. The legislation is rooted in the mid-19th century.
They should have guidance on their website. Here's an example - in Hackney's dumbed down style.
Would lying about your postcode help in this situation?
Ambulances were failing to find a school entrance because the official address of the school was on a road with no entrance to the premises. I got the ambulance service to update their records with a different postcode that brought them straight into the school drive. Could using a different postcode for your delivery address work for you?
Nick
Our village has 3 disjoint postcodes determined I think by the position of field boundaries in the middle ages or something. Causes people with satnav to screech to a halt outside the church thinking they have missed the farm shop (which also has the same postcode but is a mile away).
Sequential numbering isn't the only option though.
In Japan numbering on a road are in order of their construction date so you get essentially random building numbering on long old roads. That is why they invented Fax machines to send maps to would be visitors! (I'm *not* kidding)
Probably district council planning office and they may have a website.
To get it out of their in tray. PC could put up a noticeboard though.
What you can do locally if the neighbourhood is agreeable (or the parish council might be persuaded to do) is put up a noticeboard with the house names shown on an index and where to find them map. Several villages in my area have done this to make life less fraught for delivery drivers.
I gave serious consideration to putting up some street signs. But it fell into the "ICBA" pit, especially after we sorted it out directly with the Fire Brigade.
I've never understood why postcode has become the preferred method of satnav destination rather than long/lat. Some satnavs allow long/lat, but it's often hidden away on second level menus.
I live in a terrace house number 6, one neighbour has a house number 4 and the other 10. the rest of the houses in the road sequential are numbered (evens or one side of the road and odds on the other).
No-one seems to know why 8 is missing. My house and my neighbours house (4 and 6) were built (in 1905) approx 10 years before number 10 but at the time of building it was effectively a green field site. All the houses in the street have approximately the same frontage width and are all generally the same size (excluding later extensions).
It does cause some confusing because in close proximity the same name is used for road, avenue, place and mews and often someone will knock on my door looking for number 8 xxxx avenue whereas I live in xxxx road.
You don't get "top tier ... accountants" for £100/hr. More like 10 times that.
It is a top tier firm. Their absolute minimum charge out rate is £100/hr for a teaboy which is all it takes to check these miniscule budgets. Money for old rope.
Seems to me from personal experience and reading other comments in this thread that the problem lies in the postcode database - or should that be databases? Our postcode, like yours, is wrong, and directs delivery drivers to a dead-end side turning about 400 metres up the road. We have had couriers try to deliver stuff there and get turned away. yet other couriers find us without problem. Why? Is there a list of incorrect postcodes somewhere?
Many years ago I was doing some work for a pharmaceutical company, who were suddenly informed by the post office that the postcode they were using was incorrect, and actually referred to a small residential street about a mile away (seems the last two letters of the code had got transposed when the PO first sent the letters out notifying companies of the postcodes). The PO said that as they would shortly be amending and adding some new postcodes, the company would now be given the correct postcode. The company pointed out to the PO that the postcode they had been using since they were introduced umpteen years previously was the one they were told to use by the PO at the time. The PO said they had to use the new code, so the company said they would have to change every piece of product labelling, carton, insert, and all associated material on which their address appeared, and that would have to be through an official variation approved by the Medicines Control Agency. The cost of the variations alone would be in the tens of thousands of pounds range, and printing new labels, etc to replace the incorrect ones would cost hundreds of thousands of pounds. This cost would be passed to the PO, as it was their error which led to the incorrect code being used. Unsurprisingly, the residential street's postcode got changed instead...
We had this problem. I discussed it with neighbours and amazingly they didn't want numbers because it was 'common'. Nevertheless I got onto the council and they came out and allocated numbers, and wrote to everyone telling them what their number was. My name was mud then on our street. Thirty five years later some people still refuse to display the number, so I get pizza delivery boys knocking on my door at ridiculous hours asking for directions. I don't usually know where the named houses are so I can rarely help. It's quite interesting though. They only get a quid for each delivery and they have to pay for their own transport.
Bill
Postcodes cover a number of houses; that number varies from place to place and may be quite large in rural areas. Without being given further information, such as a house number and street name, satnavs direct you to the centre of the postcode area, which may be some distance from your location.
Start with the Highways department of your local council ?
We wanted to give our house a name which would appear on the PAF database. The PAF database is compiled from local authority submissions, and the process is the same as naming a road - the same forms etc.
It's as opaque as you can get (even the council didn't know at first) plus there's a fee of hundreds of pounds.
In the end we saved the money, and just started using the name for every online order, and correspondence address. I have now noticed that it's "fed back" into the system and almost all databases have picked it up ....
No opportunity just not to accept the Pizza as you mistakenly thought somebody in your household had ordered it? Might make people have a think about their objections to having a number.
G.Harman
I think it seems that the post office has the power to add numbers if they so desire. It was done in a local close not that long ago as all the houses were named after types of tree. Ashcroft villas etc. Brian
There seems to be some prestige value in not having a number, and it may be the OP's neighbours are blocking his attempts to acquire a numbering scheme. I think we're pretty well immune to numbering at the moment because our road does not have a name, even an oral one. It would be handy for couriers though, if combined with street signs.
Houses in our current road have either names or numbers (but not both!), and the numbers run in a counter-intuitive direction (as you go away from the T-junction start of the lane, they go *down*). Using our postcode in a satnav directs you to the middle of a field!
Looks like it might be time for this again;
We had a similar single main street through the village terminating at the river. There was nothing to state the name of the street, some called it Church Lane, others Main Street, others said it was one for part and the other for the rest. Our Parish Meeting (lower than a Parish Council) approached the Borough Council and a fixed name was agreed and a street sign erected.
On the above street the top end and the bottom end had, and still have, the same postcode. Our block of cottages were designated as one, incorrect, code, which not only made a mess with satnavs but also every time a credit search was needed. That's was sorted by the Post Office (I think) though it may have been in conjunction with the Borough Council.
Coincidentally I used to get mailings intended for Boots for some strange reason. I used to forward them on but gave up.
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