Why there is no NE London



Whatever became of London NE? In logic, you ought to be able to find it between London N (Stoke Newington, Tottenham) and London E (Clapton, Walthamstow). But oddly, the Post Office compass has two points fewer than other people's. There's a north but no north-east; a south-east, but no south. Somebody did away with them. This week I discovered the malefactor's identity. It was Anthony Trollope.

The original plan for the London postal districts was the work of Rowland Hill, honoured now for inventing the penny post. In 1856, as secretary to the Post Office, he drew a 12-mile ring around Post Office headquarters and divided it up into segments. The two innermost were named west and east central. Eight more outside were designated by their initials, from N through NE and E round the ring to NW. So far, so apparently sensible.

But in 1869, with Hill now retired, his handiwork was roughly disturbed. The secretary who succeeded him was a man called Tilley, who happened to be Trollope's brother-in-law. Wishing to cut the number of districts, he asked Trollope, a trusted subordinate, to prepare a report. NE and S were among the smallest, with the lowest weight of deliveries. So Trollope said they should go.

All this is set out in an excellent piece of local history contributed by Simon Morris to the London Topographical Society Newsletter of November 1989. Morris suggests that Trollope's deletions may have reflected rather more than an urge to rationalise: "Trollope," he writes, "is said to have disliked Hill ... and is supposed to have taken pleasure in undoing his work." That is excessively gentle. Hill could not stand Trollope, and Trollope could not stand Hill. "With him," the novelist wrote in his Autobiography, "I never had any sympathy, nor he with me." Also this: "I was always an anti-Hillite ... It was a pleasure for me to differ from him on all occasions; - and looking back now, I think that in all such differences, I was right." At one stage Hill had tried to get Trollope sacked for what he justifiably saw as an act of insubordination: a lecture that Trollope gave attacking the doctrine of promotion on merit, rather than on seniority, which was one of Sir Rowland's favourite causes.

Hill, it seems, was widely unpopular, but Trollope was not that popular either. "A man with worse or more offensive manners than Trollope I have rarely met," wrote one of his Post Office colleagues. "He was coarse, boorish, rough, noisy, overbearing, insolent ... he spluttered, and shouted, and glared through his spectacles, and waved his arms about ... By the officials who were subordinate to him ... he was pretty generally hated for the objectionable manner in which he treated them."

Hill, who protested in vain at Trollope's reform, was not alone in his dissatisfaction. Relegated north-east London was still objecting 12 years later when some Hackney residents got up a petition saying the designation E in place of NE had affected property values. Some businesses went on using NE for fear of discouraging customers. And local government kept refusing to alter the designations on street signs; but that was because they didn't see why they should have to pay for it.

A second mystery: why are the numbered districts introduced in 1917 to replace plain W, SW, or N so unsystematic? In a sensible, well ordered city like Leeds the low numbers are all near the centre and the high ones on the periphery. If you start in City Square and head north towards sought after Alwoodley, the sequence of districts is logical: 1, 2, 7, and finally 17. But then look at west London. Start from Oxford Circus (W1) and take the road west through Bayswater: that is W2. Then comes Holland Park, which is W11, followed by Shepherds Bush, W12. But press on into Acton, and at once you are down to W3, followed by Ealing, W5, and what I suppose you'd call Hanwell, which is W7. Where is the logic in that?

The same applies in the north. If John Gilpin were to repeat his runaway ride today, his affrighted steed would carry him sequentially through N1, N16, N17 and then down to N9. The reason, Morris explains, is that having allotted the principal districts numbers 1 and 2, they numbered the rest alphabetically, thus ensuring that further out Acton got a lower number than closer in Shepherds Bush.

One further plum from this pudding. It is not entirely true that Trollope invented the pillar box. He certainly recommended its introduction in Jersey, after which it caught on everywhere else, but his paper advocating its use freely admits that he pinched the idea from the French. Being the French, of course, they would no doubt have claimed it anyway.

Extract from the Lost districts of London, David McKie, Thursday January 11, 2001, The Guardian.