“A Proper Direction to Their Places of Abode”: Street Addressing and Wayfinding in England, ca. 1650–1850

Abstract

Finding one’s way around a town, the house of a friend, or a specific shop, are everyday practices and challenges that involve the application of much implicit knowledge—knowledge of spatial patterns, routes, and directions, for instance, which is often acquired performatively and unconsciously. In eighteenth-century England, rapid urbanization, increased mobility, and intensified commercial exchange aggravated such challenges. This gave rise to various media designed to assist orientation and make local knowledge more readily available to wider audiences, for example, in maps, directories, and guidebooks. One type of information particularly affected by this development was the street address of individual residents and businesses. While up until the beginning of the eighteenth century such directions, as used in advertisements and on letters, tended to be highly specific, detailed, and changeable, over the course of a few decades, they became more standardized and concise. This was closely connected to an increasing tendency to treat addresses as stable and clear-cut pieces of information that could be passed on, published, and retrieved easily. Originally fluid, tacit knowledge was thus transformed into standardized, explicit information, fixed on calling cards and in directories. However, these forms of publication not only served to facilitate social and economic interactions, but they also touched upon sensitive issues of privacy: being easy to find was not necessarily desirable and, in fact, deemed rather risky by some, who consequently tried to keep information about their place of residence or work private. This paper sketches the development of styles and practices of street addressing in England between 1650 and 1850, drawing upon rich source material such as letters, directories, advertisements, and Post Office papers as well as contemporary novels. It serves as a case study of the complex relations between tacit and explicit, private and public knowledge.