Watching an episode of the TV show Not Going Out, a detail caught my eye.
It seems one of the children in the sitcom attends Melbridge Park Academy. That's odd, because Melbridge doesn't actually exist. We have built several layouts with the name, but pinched it from the 1942 film, Random Harvest.
At the time, we were struggling to invent a town name, and Melbridge was convincing, and certainly better than anything we could come up with. Try it for yourself - it's harder than you think.
So, how come the TV people used Melbridge? I'm assuming they also nicked it from the film, or perhaps there is a railway modeller on the production team?
The answer to imaginary English place names is this:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-search/title/the-concise-oxford-dictionary-of-english-place-names/
Whilst the dictionary is factual,listing the derivation of the names of real villages,towns and so on, it can also be used to make up names that don't exist by taking elements from real places and putting them in combinations that never existed. For example many English place names combine a personal name with a geographic feature. Simply take that name and add it to a different feature. Another thing to do is to take a name and canonise it. This is less easy as there are many very obscure saints, but does that matter? The study of English places names is fun.
I would like to think there is an impressed railway modeller on the staff who added the name in tribute to the vairosu layouts!
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