When I was young—mid 1960s—it was still common to see “Long Island” or “L.I.” interposed between someplace like “Syosset” and “N.Y.” My dad was a postal clerk, and I saw change-of-address paperwork he brought home, meaning this wasn’t just something you’d see done by your dotty old aunt. The practice went into decline with the introduction of ZIP Codes and two-letter postal abbreviations.
I’m not sure if the practice was also followed on Martha’s Vineyard or other places.
From a family story about mispronunciation by relatives in the old country, I have the impression that 19th century letter-writers sometimes included the county between the name of a small town and the state, much like the British examples given upthread.
Somewhat related is the use of districts rather than the encompassing municipality. New York City addresses often have “Brooklyn NY” as the city—but some places in Los Angeles (Van Nuys, North Hollywood, Venice, Canoga Park) are used that way as well. The only other example that comes immediately to mind is Boston, where I think addressing a letter to Dorchester, Charlestown, or Roxbury was once common. By contrast, even though Chicago, Philadelphia, and other large cities swallowed formerly independent settlements just the same as LA or Boston, the use of those old placenames as postal destinations was pretty much unknown after annexation.
With respect to addressing mail, before postcodes, the county or district (SALOP, HANTS etc always in capitals) told the sorters where to send the item.
If I posted a letter, it was collected by the local staff and sent in bulk to Birmingham where the main sorting office was. The staff there sorted everything according to the county or district in the address and it would be sent off to their main sorting office.
From there it would be sent to a local sorting office, denoted by the town (Portsmouth, Redditch etc) and be sorted into postmen’s walks. All this would happen overnight, so a properly addressed letter posted in the afternoon would normally arrive the following morning.
Places like The City of London got such a lot of mail that they would make up to four deliveries and collections a day. Where I lived then, in rural Cornwall, we got a once a day delivery/collection. If a letter was for a delivery further on in the postman’s round he would cancel the stamp with a blue pencil and deliver it. Otherwise he took it to his sorting office in the town 15 miles away.
We once had a friend staying who sent a letter to his solicitor in London and received a reply the following morning. His letter would have gone to London by train in the afternoon and they used to roughly sort the mail en route. His solicitor got his letter by the last post, scribbled a reply and popped it in a letterbox in time to get it on the night train for delivery the next day.
Although some people still address envelopes with the County name as well, the Post Office no longer requires it in its standard form - as the postcode tells it to them anyway.
Technically, you don’t have to put the city and state on US mail for the same reason. The Zip code tells them exactly which post office it’s going to. But it’s good to do so anyway, especially if it’s hand addressed. In the event that the OCR software misreads the code, they’ll have something to direct it to the correct post office.
Cities often include neighborhoods that were once independent but got swallowed up by their hungry neighbor. I live in Roslindale, MA which is part of Boston, but if anyone asks I will specify Rozzie. You could address a letter to me as going to either Boston or Roslindale, the zip code will make it clear where it goes, which is good because there are lots of same-name / different street occurrences around here, and I’m surely not the only one who has gone to the wrong one a few times, but it looks like we’re stuck with it.
A few years ago we were sitting outside our local pub in Farnborough, Hampshire. A trucker stopped and asked for directions to a certain road address. None of us had heard of it so we looked at the paper a bit closer and found out he we looking for Farnborough, Kent about 60 miles away. Mine happens to be the biggest Farnborough in the UK of the 8 here. Good thing he wasn’t looking for the one in Queensland, Australia.
A while back I was given a survey job for a cellphone mast site at Rainham, I noticed that the postcode did not match the Rainham, Essex location that I would have expected and the mast ID code had a Medway prefix and not the Havering one you would expect for Rainham, Essex, but would match Rainham, Kent. The telephone exchange MFID began with ND [North Downs] and not LN [London North]. I pointed out most of this, and knocked the job back into the pot.
I understood nearly all of it, since I worked near Rainham, Essex for a while (many years ago). But what does ‘knocked the job back into the pot’ mean?
@ Mk_VII Were you getting these jobs from some central agency somewhere?
I read Mk_VII’s post to say “The company I work for got a job to survey new cell phone towers for MegaPhoneUK or whatever. The top one on the list had massively contradictory information supplied, which made surveying the site problematic. So I kicked the job back to TPTB and took the next one in the queue.”
Mk_VII could no doubt explain it best, but my assumption is that there was a large group of people doing the same work, picking up specific jobs from a common list (or pool or pile or pot), and free to return one and take another according to circumstances - in this case a confusion over a recorded location caused by muddling up two places with the same name on different sides of the Thames Estuary.
There’s also the example of small villages with two names, one of which is common to more than one nearby village. If you’ve seen Midsomer Murders you’ll have seen it. So it might be Great (or Little) X (or X Magna/Parva), likewise Upper/Lower X. Or one might be Church X (because it has the parish church). Sometimes it reflects mediaeval ownership (Monks’ X/X Monacorum, or the name of the Norman family that took the village, e.g., Worth Matravers). There’s a group of “Bumpstead” villages including Steeple Bumpstead and Helions Bumpstead, and others that sound like Victorian character actors or music-hall acts - Wendens Ambo, Nempnett Thrubwell, Peterson Wentlooge - though no doubt there’s some logical historical reason for the name.
Either way, the postcode reduces it all to mundane practical efficiency.
Piddletrenthide, Piddlehinton, Puddletown, Tolpuddle, Affpuddle, Briantspuddle and Turnerspuddle, and Tonerspuddle Heath is beside it. With two exceptions, each of those names contains “puddle” rather than “piddle”. A local tradition has it that the villages were once named with “Piddle” but renamed to avoid embarrassment before a visit by Queen Victoria. However, there is no evidence of this and Puddletown was certainly still called Piddletown into the 1950s.
Sorry OP: only one name each, but they are all compounded!
NB Tolpuddle will be forever famous for its Martyrs.
There is a village near me called Wyre Piddle. Back in the 80s, some councillors wanted to change the name to Wyre Puddle on the grounds that the residents ‘must’ be embarrassed by the name.
There was a well-orchestrated outcry and the name has remained unchanged. A classic case of some officious person with a little power getting offended on behalf of someone else. It was the same when someone proposed to stop Christmas decorations in the streets because they might offend the Muslims/Jews/Hindus/Zorroastrians et al.
