13 October 2010

Location Lingo project seeks to create an ‘alternative gazetteer’ of Great Britain

Look at a map and you’ll find the official names for places throughout the country. But that’s not necessarily what those places are called in everyday life.

Take, for example, ‘The Nam’ (for Tottenham), ‘Spaghetti Junction’ (the motorway crossover near Birmingham) or the ‘Wobbly Bridge’ (the Millennium Bridge). 

That’s why this year, as part of English Language Day (Wednesday 13 October), Ordnance Survey has partnered with the English Project to collect the peoples’ pet names.

“We are throwing a very wide net in this national trawl for what we call Location Lingo,” says Bill Lucas of the English Project.

“Everyone knows the big national nicknames like Pompey for Portsmouth or Auld Reekie for Edinburgh, but we are also interested in the names that are not so well known and might be used only by a neighbourhood, a village community, a workplace, or even by an extended family or group of friends.”      

However, there is a serious purpose to this project. As emergency service control rooms become centralised, there is a risk they will lose local knowledge and could be confused by callers who use “location lingo” when phoning in with reports of incidents.

That is why Ordnance Survey is investigating the building of an “alternative gazetteer” that references many of these nicknames and pet names, which could include, for example, a popular name for a road junction or bridge.      

“With the huge variety of place nicknames that exist, we could never hope to capture them all ourselves,” says Glen Hart, Ordnance Survey’s Head of Research. “Technically, this research goes by the name of vernacular geography, which is looking into which names should be recorded and how best to discover them.

“Projects like Location Lingo can provide us with useful research data to help answer these questions. Organisations like the emergency services rely on our information when responding to 999 calls, so by having the most complete set of ‘unofficial’ names we could help the emergency services quickly locate the right place, and maybe even save lives.

“Such knowledge can also help improve Internet searches as well as to recognise the importance that such names have to local communities.”  

Anyone wishing to submit their own Location Lingo is invited to visit the project’s website – www.locationlingo.net – where they can add their contribution directly onto an interactive Ordnance Survey map built using the OS OpenSpace API.

Alternatively, people can follow the English Project on Twitter at @TheEnglishProj and tag their tweet with #localing.

 

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