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Going by historical spelling, yeah!

Interestingly, "Brixton" is derived from "Brixistan", although you'd probably be locked up if you tried to call it that today!

Sounds like a former soviet satellite

haha i never realised thats how it was spelt

my favourite one is "penge", which in saxon english meant "a clearing in the wood where the pigs are fed", and still remains true today.

tubeguru wrote:Right, so it's Mary Burn then?

If you want to believe the rough guide to London, it's Marra-Le-Bun.

Regardless of all we can say about phonetics, a place name does give a good indication of character. "Penge" sounds incredibly depressing, as does "Hull"

One of the scummy areas of Dunstable (next to Luton) is called "Downside"! Classic!

sums up Dunstable all round really doesnt it

There's nothing wrong with Dunstable.. thats why we only lived there for 18 months *l*

There are areas of Brighton known as "Old Steine", "Cheapside" and "Ditchling". No comment required, methinks.

Slightly Irrelevnt, but is there a formula for where a "West" or "North" goes on a station name?
(West Finchley, Hounslow West for example)

there's also a road in the city of london called cheapside though, which was the "high street" back in the day.

i always wondered about north south east or west as suffixes/prefixes aswell. my theory is that if there's a district of the town called east ___ or west ___ etc. (such as east finchley, east croydon, south norwood), the other end will have the word as a prefix (e.g. west croydon, west norwood). otherwise it's a suffix. but there are probably about a million exceptions to that.

Such as Finchley

Sorry to bring up an old thread.
I was wondering about the Chesham/Amersham pronunciation. When I went up there and asked someone if he knew where the bus for Amer-sham leaves he just looked at me and said: Oh, you mean Amers-ham. This was an older male, so could it be that Amers-ham is an old pronunciation?
And what about Loughton? Is it pronounced as the Scottish loch or Lafton or Laten.

Loughton is pronounced like "plough-tn" (plow-tn if you're American).

CHESH-m.
AMer-shm.

That's how I pronounce them. I don't know about archaic pronunciations...

Otherwise Amersham sounds like a rather famous online book retailer.