London Road is to the north east of Salisbury.
It is the ‘London Road’, obviously enough, because it is the road from Salisbury to London.
I enjoy comedian Frank Skinner’s description of London – “a large conurbation in the South-East of England.”
Etymology of London
The meaning of the word ‘London’ seems to be unclear. Wikipedia says that:
The etymology of London is unknown. There have been many theories advanced over the centuries for the origin of the name: most can be dismissed as fanciful on linguistic or historical grounds, while a few have some measure of academic plausibility. None has any direct evidence.1
Possibilities for the derivation of ‘London’ include:
- the city of King Lud2
- from the WelshLlyn Din meaning ‘city on the lake’, the assumption being that the Surrey side to be flooded3
- from the British Glynn Dyn, meaning city in the valley 4
- that it is a reference to the English being descended from the Israelite Tribe of Dan – the Land of Dan5
London’s other names
I thought it would be interesting to list other names for London.
The Smoke
‘The Smoke’ is probably the most used nickname for London.
It dates back to before the Clean Air Act of 1956 when, because of the domestic and industrial burning of coal, London was full of smoke. The combination of the smoke with the natural fog of a low-lying area gave us the rather wonderful word ‘smog’.
Wikipedia, and some other online sources, have the nickname as the ‘the big Smoke’
The Great Wen
I thought this was from Dickens, but it’s not. It was coined by William Cobbett (who also came up with a new name for Old Sarum – the “Accursed Hill“). He writes in ‘Rural Rides’:
Have I not, for twenty long years, been regretting the existence of these unnatural embossments; these white-swellings, these odious wens, produced by corruption and engendering crime and misery and slavery? We shall see the whole of these wens abandoned by the inhabit-ants, and, at last, the cannons on the fortifications may be of some use in battering down the buildings. But what is to be the fate of the great wen of all? The monster, called, by the silly coxcombs of the press, ” the metropolis of the empire?6
On a slight tangent, the opening sentence of one of Dickens’ novels is just:
London.
LDN
I worked at the mobile telephone company one2one in the mid 1990s, and I was probably one of the first couple of dozen people to send a SMS text message, but I never really got the hang of it.
In particular, the abbreviations are a bit of a mystery to me. One of the ones I do know is ‘LDN’, which is short for London. I know this only because Lily Allen wrote a song called LDN.
A minor update: Dizzee Rascal was wearing a red baseball cap with ‘LDN’ on it during Britain’s Got Talent last night (June 2010)
L-city
The Urban Dictionary has ‘L-city’ as a nickname for London, although I’ve never heard or seen it anywhere else.
L-City is the main nickname for London. Simple as that.7
The Land of Sugar Cake
A possible derivation for the word ‘cockney’ is that it comes from the Norman ‘pais de cocaigne’. ‘Pais de cocaigne’ means ‘land of sugar cake’ – a place where the living was comfortable and easy 8. This was believed to be the Normans’ nickname for London.
The Capital
I found an interesting comment on a website somewhere to the effect that London is not technically the capital of England. The argument is that a capital city is defined as the centre of government for the area. Because England does not have it’s own government, or separate administration, then it can not have a capital.
This is an interesting point, but I would be surprised if there aren’t any administrative functions anywhere in the city that don’t apply to England alone.
Londonistan
I really don’t like this word. I’m not sure whether or not the word is innately racist, but it conjures up an image of London being dominated by Asian people, which is possibly inflammatory and certainly untrue.
Troynovant
The name Troynovant means ‘New Troy’. This refers to the idea that London was founded by a Trojan called Brutus. It was either invented or brought to prominence by Edmund Spenser in ‘The Faerie Queen’, in which he writes:
For noble Britons sprong from Trojans bold,
And Troy-novant was built of old Troyes ashes cold.9
The Argos London bus
The pictures both above and below are of a toy London bus that belonged to one of my kids. I could probably find some pictures I’ve taken of London itself (I lived in ‘the Smoke’ for close to 20 years), but given that I’m a rubbish photographer, I thought that pictures of the toy bus would be more interesting.
I think the bus came from Argos, and cost about £12.99. I don’t know who manufactured it.
Footnotes
- Etymology of London – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [↩]
- http://chr.org.uk/legends.htm [↩]
- A Selection of curious articles from the Gentleman’s magazine, Volume 1 By John Walker [↩]
- A Selection of curious articles from the Gentleman’s magazine, Volume 1 By John Walker [↩]
- English Words of Supposed Hebrew Origin in George Crabb’s English Synonymes, David L. Gold, American Speech, Vol. 54, No. 1 (Spring, 1979), pp. 61-64 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/454531 [↩]
- Full text of “Rural rides” [↩]
- Urban Dictionary: city nickname [↩]
- Edgar Allan Poe Wordlist – Vocabulary words and phrases used by Edgar Allan Poe [↩]
- Brewer, E. Cobham. Dictionary of Phrase & Fable. Troy-Novant (London). [↩]
As far as I remember The Winchester Gate pub in Rampart Road was called the London Road Inn, I cant rember when it changed names, late 70′s? First time I went there, 1975 you could get x4 pints of Ushers PA for less than a pound.