London (UK) has Canada Dock and Canada Water. However - I don’t know if either have/had a higher status than just a “region” of London.
You mean “[mouse]”, don’t you?
This doesn’t answer the OP’s question, because it’s not a city or town. But I think it’s pleasingly symmetrical that there is a park in Dublin called Californian Hills Park, and a (much larger) park in California called Dublin Hills Regional Park.
You seem to have a very solid opinion on this matter (any settlements in Europe, remember?), based on a limited UK perspective. You live on a relatively tiny island with a very high population density and a very long, intensive habitation history. There’s more to Europe than that.
I live in Finland. I grew up in a suburb that was built in the 1960’s over a former forest. Its name and the neighboring names were made “on the spot”, in the 1960’s, since there were no settlements there before, at best just single homesteads scattered far and wide. Just as an example, one of the neighborhoods had seen long-extinct mining activities in the 1600’s, so it was named after a Finnish made-up and slightly cutified word for “place with mines”.
There are literally hundreds of such places here. Sweden and Norway are similar. At any rate, we make up some 14 % of the land area of Europe, so not a speck on the map. And nothing to do with the Soviet bloc, FYI.
You’d be wrong. Dozens of places got city rights here during the late-1800’s and the 1900’s.
It’s true (and I said it myself in my post you replied to) that in Britain, city status does not confer actual rights other than allowing the place to style itself a city. Nonetheless, it’s coveted; towns do apply for city status, and sometimes applications for it get rejected. Here’s a BCC article on the motivation that drives local politicians to apply for city status, and sometimes to invest considerable amounts of money in these campaigns. It’s basically vanity, but vanity can make people do things they would otherwise not do.
Although not named after US settlements there seems to be a habit round where I live (the very middle of middle England) to name streets on new developments near RAF/USAF or former-USAF bases after former presidents. Here’s one next to former RAF Chicksands:
Dropped pin
https://goo.gl/maps/tpt8ce29Rk94F4WHA
Hoover Place, Eisenhower Place, Taft Place, JFK Drive (which seems slightly inappropriate) among others.
OB
I wonder if there are any Mexican city names used in Spain?
There are only 8 islands in the world bigger than Great Britain - I’m not sure everyone would see that as “relatively tiny”.
The point about new towns or cities that is relevant to this thread is that if there were many examples in any country in Europe named after North American settlements, some of us would have noticed. I note that you don’t cite any new settlements in Nordic countries named after places in North America.
The “city rights” thing isn’t very relevant to this thread - new settlements have all sorts of legal statuses but they still get names one way or the other.
As it happens I can offer a “Toronto Primary School” in the Scottish new town of Livingston, but it looks like it’s just named after the street, in an area where there are a few other Canadian street names.
I’ll give you the relatively tiny part, but that is missing the point. Population density UK: 275 / km2. Population density Finland: 18 / km2.
My reply was to SciFiSam, who unloaded a bunch of unsubstantiated assumptions about Europe as a whole, based on her extremely-densely-populated home country. Slightly off topic, but I haven’t seen any Mods taking issue with that.
It’s clear that SciFiSam was referring to names like Leningrad, Stalingrad and Karl-Marx-Stadt (though they didn’t involve getting rid of existing residents).
If you think that what San Vito and SciFiSam wrote was so badly inaccurate, then give some examples to prove it.
What are talking about? I already did that, with my answer to SciFiSam. I’m about to report you for Junior Modding.
You have alluded to one example of a settlement in Europe not named after a pre-existing local placename. You haven’t named any, though someone else has mentioned Telford, Shropshire.
To be clear, by “settlement” in the above post, I mean the “new towns” that San Vito mentioned, something larger than the small villages and minor suburbs we have provided the bulk of examples in this thread.
Claiming that there are vanishingly few new towns in Europe that were founded (relatively) recently from scratch is, I think, an exaggeration. There have been foundations of new settlements in many European countries at various stages of European history. Now it’s true that in most such cases, some pre-existing local place name was borrowed to give its name to the new city; examples are Milton Keynes, England (1967); Wolfsburg, Germany (1938); or Latina, Italy (1932).
But it has also happened that a newly established town received a newly made up name. This was particularly common in the Socialist countries, perhaps in an attempt to indicate a break with the feudal and bourgeois eras of the past: Viz. Eisenhüttenstadt, East Germany (1950); Tolyatti, Russia (1964). An example in Western Europe would be Lelystad, Netherlands (1967), and an example from pre-Socialist (but still rather recent) Russia would be Donetsk, now Ukraine (1869).
There are also numeros other European cities which were built from scratch in historically relatively recent times; examples would be Valletta, Malta, Karlsruhe, Germany, or St Petersburg, Russia. But somehow the discussion has now converged towards “post-US” cities, so these cities, being pre-1776, would all be disqualified.
I’m done with you. But here we go, in the name of general interest:
a scratch-the-surface local sample (places I’ve lived in or spent considerable time in):
Kaivoksela – a district of Vantaa in Southern Finland. Named in 1960 for the defunct mines in the area.
Linnainen – a district of Vantaa. Named after a mansion that was re-named in 1865.
Riihimäki – a city in Southern Finland. The name Riihimäki was made up in the 1860’s for a railroad workers’ work station. The new name also became the emerging railroad settlement’s name. The settlement got city rights in 1960.
Forssa – a city in Southern Finland. The name Forssa was adopted in 1847 from a weaving company’s name. The settlement got city rights in 1964.
Not an American name, but Rhodesia in Nottinghamshire (UK) is a mining town that gained its name in the 19th century. Unfortunately it was named after the local mineowner, not Rhodesia the place.
Oh no! While I grant that San Vito shouldn’t have limited this to the post USA foundation period, I suspect she probably realises that all North American placenames are actually relevant. But that does not take away from the point she was actually making, in the very first response to the OP, that the OP was overestimating, in various ways, the likelihood of there being a place in Europe with a substantial population that was named after a place in North America.
Subsequent replies show that the best we are likely to find is in the low 4 digit region. Possibly not even that.
So what?
And do you have evidence that the name Riihimäki, which according to Wikipedia means “drying barn hill”, the type of literal placename which is very common throughout Britain and Ireland, did not exist in the area before the opening of the railway in 1862?
Moderating
Toxylon and The_Stafford_Cripps, let’s dial back on the snark and little personal jabs. We don’t need remarks like “I’m done with you,” Oh no," and “So what?” Just respond to the posts without making it personal.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator