I’ve always liked the addresses of places in england, take this one for example:
Woodfields Cottage
Weston Under Penyard
Ross-On-Wye
Can you add something like this to your (USA) mailing address?
I like the sound of “Woodfileds Cottage”
or perhaps:
“World’s end cottage”?
I’m sure you can. As long as your proper street address is there, in its proper place, I doubt the post office will care.
This would be a great thread. After the election is over, replace the “I’m voting for . . .” in your location field with your home name.
[small voice] Except I like seeing where people are from . . . [sv]
Commercial buildings often get named, e.g.,
XYZ Building
1001 First Avenue
Podunk YZ 98765-4321
I suspect that the post office ignores the first line, unless there is a problem with the rest of the address. If it can be done for commercial buildings, why not for residential?
Most urban/suburban English (UK really) addresses are of the form:
1 Streetname
Town
Postcode
but its pretty common for more isolated houses, or those in smaller villages, to be addressed by the name of the house.
Incidentally, the minimum address information required is, from my above example:
1
Postcode
Not quite true, the road name also needs to be included, because in some cases a single postcode refers to more than one road. A former address of mine, in a small village, was:
3 The Street
…
AB12 3XY
The same postcode also covered 3 Top Street and 3 Post Office Lane.
The official advice is:
[quote=Royal Mail]
How should an address be laid out on an envelope?
A correct address is made up of the following elements, in this order:
[ul][li]number and street name, e.g. 3 High St[/li][li]locality name (optional), e.g. Hedge End[/li][li]town (please print in capitals), e.g. SOUTHAMPTON[/li][li]postcode (please print in capitals, in full, and on a separate line), e.g. SO31 4NG[/li][li]county (optional. You do not need to include a County name if the Town and Postcode are used).[/ul][/li][/quote]
Not far from here, the town of Carmel-by-the-Sea has no street numbers by design, so much to the dismay of delivery drivers new to the area, addresses are typically in the form of “Second blue house on the left after the deli” or “Southeast corner of Junipero and Fourth Avenues” which happens to be the address for the police department.
That’s got to [del]mess up[/del] suggest improvements for all sorts of databases and online address forms. I still run into way too many that assume one is in the United States, for example, and choke on Canadian postal codes.
I remember visiting Carmel. Very cute and human-scaled. Though I didn’t notice the lack of street numbers.
Oh yes, and those which ship internationally yet have no option for those locations without postal codes. Or the spectacular failure of a German publisher which refused to accept more than five characters.
Dubai has no postal codes and no home mail delivery. One of my addresses was along the lines of “from (popular landmark), towards (other landmark), second left after Pizza Hut, then third villa on right”
IIRC TheLoadedDog works for the Australian postal service and says that relying on postal codes is actually a somewhat old-fashioned approach, modern sorting systems taking the entire address into account. That is, the more items of address information you provide, the more likely the package is to arrive on time. Minimal addresses such as street name, number, postcode will work but are not optimal.
Anyway since reading his/her posts on the subject I have made an effort to be fulsome in the addresses I use for snail mail. Like “The Hollies, 4 Hollybush Close, Leafy Park, Upper Twattingford, FROTTINGHAM, Trumptonshire, FR3 5QS”.
Yeah, that’s correct. I wouldn’t say postal codes will be obsolete tomorrow, but they are becoming increasingly less important. If some low-paid grunt at a government agency mistakenly addressed “The Hollies, 4 Hollybush Close, Leafy Park, Upper Twattingford, FROTTINGHAM, Trumptonshire, UNITED STATES FR3 5QS”, the machines would still possibly route it to the UK, after tallying the number of clues. Of course, this makes it a bitch if you live in Birmingham, Alabama or Canada Bay in Sydney, etc.
Some of the funniest UK ones are when some lower middle class type with pretentions has gone for the “complete lack of numbers” look in their address, when it’s clear that it’s not really a “The Mews, Shittington House, Fuckstick-on-the-water” type of residence, but clearly a suburban house in Liverpool. This happens quite a bit.
I claim the shortest address:
My real name
SWLF
AUSTRALIA
…would get to me at work (and you could make it even shorter by one word if posting from Australia).
Bloody scousers.
I don’t think we’ve even got any of them posting here, so we could go onto light-fingeredness and the awful accent, too.
On the more relevant point, there’s certainly people here who claim that because an envelope with the word ‘Cheshire’ on it will arrive correctly on his doormat, it means he doesn’t live in Greater Manchester.
IIRC, the Post Office takes the address from the last two lines. You can have multiple lines before that, and they’ll ignore it, but if you put the house name in the next to last line, they can say “no such address” (depending on their mood – they might just deliver it, anyway).
So it can be:
Sir Humphrey Hungadunga
Green Cottage
In the Gnarly Grove
234 Some Street
Some City, SS 31415-9265
And since the last two line are in proper format, it will get to you.
I suppose John Lennon’s Aunt Mimi, late of “Mendips”, was a typical example. Undoubtedly, people who aspired to aggrandize themselves by naming their houses, were as happy as larks once the local post office got familiar enough with it to play along, and then their friends and relatives could address mail to them that way.
But then you do work for the post office, right?
Yeah, sure it’s cheating, but it’s a fun little piece of personal trivia I like.
My mad old aunt decided that she needed to send a wedding congratulations card to my soon to be inlaws in Japan.
They lived in a completely different town from us, but my mother sighed, and carefully wrote down the address for her.
Mad old auntie carefully copied out PARTS of PIL’s address, but then added in one line from my just-vacated address, another line from my not-quite moved to address, and a random postcode.
As luck would have it, she’d picked the correct town name, so it arrived in their little town of 60,000 people, and got stuck at the main post office.
HOWEVER!!! On our wedding day it arrived at PIL’s house with a penciled note “Try **** san from ***** Taxis. His son’s got a foreign wife.”
Ah the joys of being a gaijin in a small country town!
60,000 is a little town??? I was going to say again that a letter with anything close to my name and with the correct zipcode (which would get it to my town) would probably not even be late, but my county has about 12,000 people so it isn’t as impressive as your story. Post offices do seem to know a lot about the people they serve.
Well, it’s not tiny, but I seem to stick out here. Three other incidences:
When I didn’t live here, but was just visiting with my kids, we went to a park on the other side of town, where I let my kids draw with sidewalk chalk and then washed it all off with buckets of water from the kiddie play area. That evening my FIL got a call from that neighbourhood association head saying “Tell your DIL that drawing in the park is not acceptable.” There’d been hardly anyone in the park and I’d not been aware of being watched…
We had just moved here and I got a taxi from the station. As I got in I realised I didn’t know the address properly yet, but the taxi driver told me, “Oh, it’s OK! I do!” and took me right there. My FIL was a driver for that company but he’d been retired more than 15 years by then.
Same week, got into another taxi, this time a totally different company from the next town over, and as I got in the driver said, “Alone today? Where are your boys?” Eeep! I asked him how he knew I had two boys and he said he often saw me walking with them around town. Figures, I suppose.
Hokkaido Brit, I hope all the attention makes you feel warm and fuzzy and not paranoid! When my daughter-in-law, who is 6’ and blonde, was in Korea, she says she caused quite a sensation on the streets, including a couple of minor bike wrecks.