After the London exchange names were abandoned, lots of new numerical exchange codes were introduced, which of course had no alphabetical equivalent. For a while after that, there was a certain amount of snobbery over having a code that corresponded to one of the old named exchanges, and there was an urban myth that it even affected house prices. I was in Notting Hill for years with a "fashionable" 229 (BAYswater) number.

Haruo, we Brits do still have letters on some of our phones (the one on my desk at work has them), but they never get used and mnemonic phone numbers in adverts are very rare. They've come back big time on mobiles for sending text messages, of course.

Anahata