In the UK, most houses can be identified by a postcode, a street name and a number. There are exceptions for very large houses, blocks combining multiple dwellings and houses in locations so small they don’t really have street names but that applies in most cases. I would also expect one side of the street to have even numbers and the other side to have odd numbers. That is such common knowledge that there are even jokes built off it: if 666 is the number of the Beast, 667 is the house opposite and 668 is the next door neighbour of the Beast.

I have come across a few exceptions but, as far as I recall, they had all been complex roads with side branches containing multiple houses. I remember one such road in the village I grew up in. You couldn’t predict what number would be on the opposite side of the street but you could trace an even side and odd side. I got to know that one pretty well both from people I knew who lived there and from doing a paper round that included it.

Earlier this week, I was walking down Station Street in Loughborough on my way to work and it suddenly struck me that all the numbers on the side I was walking on went up one by one. Looking across the other side, the numbers were much higher and ascending in the opposite direction. However, when I turned onto a street that bisects it, which looks to have housing stock of a similar vintage, it was back to the pattern I expected. Checking an online map, I see some of the nearby parallel streets also follow the “up one side and back down the other” pattern.

I’ll have to mark that down as another bit of “knowledge” that isn’t quite as certain as I thought it was. I wonder how common it is in the UK to have streets that go 1, 2, 3, 4… rather than 1, 3, 5, 7…?