What intrigues me is that you can address a letter to XYZ House, and the British postal service will deliver it. The U.S. postal service will expect a street name and number.
I suppose something would get delivered to “The White House”, but the USPS really recommends that you use “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue”.
I feel like there is an important difference between “the Smith House” and “Smith House”.
It’s not just a British usage.
You may be right but that may be just a difference between British and American English, which use articles like ‘the’ somewhat differently.
I used to drive courier trucks in the UK particularly London.
Coming from Australia it took me a while to get used to UK addressing. American and Australian addressing is more systematic IME. Aspects of UK addressing could be described as “quaint” or “interestingly historical” or “fck’n confusing” or probably many other things, depending on your POV. I guess the basic point is that many UK places were named long before there was a system and in a time where lives were largely local. You just knew where “X House” was. You didn’t need a system to tell you it was at 49 Smith St.
UK postcodes are now carefully systematic. But the tradition of knowing places by a name (rather than a number on a street) has stuck, far more than in Australia and (I believe) the US.
It’s fine once you get used to it. And street maps (even before Google Maps) in the UK are extremely informative and useful, so I seldom had a problem once I relaxed into it.
You can look up the names of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work and get plenty of XXXX House constructions there, too. I don’t think “XXXX House” is all that rare in the US at all. Here in Chicago, everybody will have heard of Hull House, for instance, if they paid any attention to Chicago history. Plus the Frank Lloyd Wright near University of Chicago is Robie House. Plus the campus itself has, by my count, seven buildings of the form “XXXX House.” (Actually, looks like Robie House is considered on the campus, so eight.) Does Civic Opera House count, cuz we got that, too. Looking at a list of Chicago Landmarks, I see something like 50-60 buildings called “XXXX House.”
And, in Canberra’s case at least, Parliament House contains two houses of Parliament.
In New England, it is required that every village, town and hamlet must have a House of Pizza, as in Salem House of Pizza, or Springfield House of Pizza.
Except that all those places have something glaring in common.
I live in an ordinary street of Victorian Terraced houses, built at a time when house numbering was standard, but carved on the gate is the name ‘Windsor House’ - and every other house in the street has its own name as well. A quirk of the builder, no doubt. What Windsor has to do with my house, god only knows.
As for why ‘House’ - I can’t see how it’s any different from calling something __cottage or __villa or even ___Palace.
To back up some earlier comments, the High Commissions in London of Commonwealth countries (=Embassies) are conventionally called “Australia House” and the like.
(,But Embassies aren’t, AFAIK - the French House is a pub in Soho).
I’d say in most circumstances people would also add the street name- but the postcodes in the UK often cover a very small area, often one street- or even only one building.
I’ve not tried it, but I think addressing a letter simply to:
Filbert’s Mum,
[Postcode]
would actually be delivered to them- it technically would contain all the info required, though I expect the postie would be unamused.
You wouldn’t get away with simply a house name by itself though, unless it maybe it was at the Buckingham Palace level of fame, the postcode or street + town would be required.
In some cases, houses might not actually have a street number, as we don’t tend to re-number houses; to take my parent’s home address, for example, their street starts with houses with names and no numbers, then switches to number [name which is not street name], then finally the oldest houses, which are number [street name]. 1 [street name] is over half way down the street. That’s unusual, but not the only time I’ve seen it.
Our system grew- it wasn’t exactly designed, except the postcodes, which makes the rest work.
My house (in Wales, UK) address is
[name of house]
[name of town]
[name of bigger nearby town]
no street, no house number. I’m constantly amazed that our postie manages to get our post to us consistently.
Well actually there was a hilarious story in The Guardian a week or two back about the Royal Mail’s ability to deliver things with remarkably little information. I won’t spoil the funniest (headline) story which you really should read for yourselves, but other examples of Royal Mail detective work given are:
Last year, Catrina Davies, who lives in a shed in Cornwall, was handed a letter in an envelope omitting a town, street name or postcode.
The sender had simply addressed it to Katrina Davis [sic], noting that she lived in a shed “near a village 21 miles from Land’s End, as featured on BBC2 Simon Reeve Cornwall programme”.
In 2010, a postie rose to the challenge when they were asked to find a couple with an address given as “somewhere near the golf course in Thetford, Norfolk”.
But perhaps the most impressive feat was the delivering of a Christmas card to Paul Biggs in Longlevens, Gloucestershire, in 2015 – sent from Germany in an envelope simply marked “England”. At the time, Royal Mail said that although its “address detectives” were renowned for their investigative skills, this effort was “pretty impressive” even by their standards.
One important factor was that major noble families traditionally called their London residence ‘X House’, with X usually being their title. So, Arundel House, Essex House, Northumberland House etc. Wikipedia has an incomplete list. The same was done in some other cities, such as Edinburgh and Dublin. Hence, Bute House and Leinster House. A few of these survive in London (Spencer House, Lancaster House), but the only major one that remains a non-royal private residence is Bridgewater House. In other cases, such as Somerset House and Burlington House, later buildings have retained the name. And, of course, Buckingham House was rebuilt as Buckingham Palace. The reason all this was important was that ‘X House’ had classy connotations and so in time was copied further down the social scale.
One other, more recent London usage hasn’t been mentioned. The Commonwealth High Commissions in London (the equivalent of embassies) are Australia House, Canada House etc. In everyday speech one can usually refer to them as such without further explanation.
Well, not in the last three posts, anyway 