I live in Carmarthen which some believe is the oldest town in Wales (Cardiff = wet-behind-the-ears upstart) so, although I live in quite a new building (1785 ish) there's a lot of 'built heritage' about. Street names are ... interesting, often because there was a drive to rename all the streets in Welsh some decades ago. The compromise was to have bilingual street signs, with the names being straight translations UNLESS there was historic evidence to show that there were different English and Welsh names previously in use.

So ...

I live one block over from one of the main streets which is Heol Awst in Welsh and Lammas Street in English; rather than do a lot of cut-and-paste I direct my learned friends to look up Lammas in Wikipedia. (I can't believe I just said that! Wikipedia!)

My own street has two completely different names: St Catherine Street and Heol y Gwyddau. The English refers to a medieval chapel and mill which used to be just behind my property. The Welsh is curious. People - including town councillors - get confused between gw^ydd (goose) and gwy^dd (loom). Unfortunately they used the former when they should have used the latter. This should be the Street of the Looms because the terrace houses on my side of the street used to all be weavers' cottages; my own house, a mill, grew from one cottager's ambitions and was a weaving mill rather than a grain mill. The Town Fathers can be somewhat excused for the mistake because there IS a small lane at the end of this street called Goose Lane, being the lane in which they used to 'shoe' geese.

In the block between me and Goose Lane there is an old cemetary where, rumour has it, they dumped all the bodies during The Plague.

Although I can be quite vitriolic about local town planners I will give them some credit for encouraging SOME developers to keep local heritage in mind when naming things. A small section of the town centre was developed a few years ago resulting in a new pedestrianized street running down towards the old site of a monastery; the developers called it Greyfriars Court / Cwrt y Brodyr Llwydion. Of course, those same town planners allowed Tesco to build a supermarket on the actual site of the monastery so ...

Nigel, isn't there a section of streets in Cardiff - sort of above the Univ. campus - named after The Colonies? I seem to recall a Newfoundland street???

And speaking of the Colonies, in my home town of Port Colborne they decided to give names to the back lanes in the old part of town - the shared lanes that run along the back of properties facing two different streets. As Port C is divided by the Welland Canal, they've named them all with names reflecting the port/canal heritage. One of them is Top Hat Lane, referring to the practice of giving a top hat to the first captain to take his ship through the canal in the spring. Nice.

sian