At least in the U.S., it seems pretty common to use the name of a place to refer to a certain industry. The entire financial sector of the economy is just called “Wall Street.” The movie industry is referred to as “Hollywood.” If you work for a big advertising firm in NY, you work on “Madison Avenue.” If you worked for a music publishing/songwriting house in the early 1900s, you worked on “Tin Pan Alley.”
The origins of these terms are pretty easy to figure out, but I’m curious about other, possibly more obscure, examples. Also, is this practice common in other countries and languages? If so, do you have any examples?
Akron is not as commonly known as Tire Town as it used to be, but there’s still a Tire Town Golf Club (established for minorities), a Tiretown Corvette Club, a baseball league called the Tire Town Classic, a Tire Town Sounds record label, and Tire Town chapters of various organizations. Here’s a 2005 article about the Black Keys referring to their home of Akron as Tire Town.
Harley Street - medicine/doctors
I don’t think things like “Cheddar” count exactly - I’ve never heard “Cheddar” used to refer to the cheese industry in the way that “Wall Street” means “finance” and “Savile Row” means “bespoke tailoring”.
Another obvious example not mentioned is “Broadway” to mean “theatre”. The British equivalent is not a single street but the wider area of “the West End”.
But again, that’s not used as a shorthand for the wine industry. There’s all manner of places that give their names to products, but I understood the OP to be asking about places that have become metonyms for an industry.
A couple more examples, though whether they are “industries” is debatable:
Downing Street (or, more generally, Westminster) - the UK government.
To expand on this - Downing Street generally refers to the Prime Minister (or his staff) in the same way as the American White House. Westminster is politicians generally (not necessarily in the government) a bit like the American Capitol Hill. The Scottish equivalent is Holyrood. Whitehall is the Civil Service bureaucracy.
One that hasn’t been mentioned yet: The City (of London) for London’s financial district and the UK finance industry in general.
Tin Pan Alley, Silicon Valley, and Bollywood are phrases that aren’t real geographic names of any particular area but were coined to refer specifically to some industry associated with some vaguely defined area.
[Professor Irwin Corey]Detroit is the automobile mecca of the world. That’s where they mecca the cars![/Profressor Irwin Corey]
This may be more local but here in Nashville we have Music Row, a part of town where all the record companies are/used to be. There’s also Printer’s Row in Chicago.
As someone not from Nashville, I’ve frequently heard “Nashville” used to refer to the country music industry, the same way “Hollywood” refers to the U.S. film industry.
I’ve never heard the word Nashville to refer to country music, when used alone. I’ve heard of “The Nashville Sound” and such, but I’ve never heard anyone say, “Nashville was crushed by the announcement Reba McEntire would leave country music.”
To me it would sound like a city not an industry in general