Welcome to Meadowbrookfield: the names we give estates in Ireland

Opinion: modern housing estate names tend to be innocuous, derivative and have a vague connection to the area they are built upon

By Chris Fitzgerald, Mary Immaculate College

We are starting to see the construction of new housing estates and developments around the country as the Government rolls out its Housing for All plan to provide 33,000 new homes a year until 2030. As well as being necessary developments to tackle the housing crisis, these estates provide curious examples of toponymy, the naming of places.

As with the naming of people, the naming of houses and estates follows trends. GeoDirectory is a database run jointly by An Post and Ordnance Survey Ireland and it lists Saint Jude (or some variation of this) as the most common house name in Ireland. While not a popular name in recent years, this preference reflects a time when bungalows were the house of choice for practical and financial purposes and the patron saint of hope or hopeless cases was seen as a good name to have in one's address.

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From RTÉ Radio 1's Ray D'Arcy Show, Chris Fitzgerald talks about how Irish estate names are lacking imagination and that we can do better.

Nowadays, the more affordable, efficient and convenient option is the suburban semi-detached property with a number in a named estate. The responsibility for naming these estates rests with a number of stakeholders. While the developer is firstly responsible for numbering houses and the naming of estates, councils have the authority to advise and approve these. Many councils have naming committees composed of elected representatives who are tasked with ensuring that street names and new estates reflect local and Irish place names. The use of Irish exclusively in names is encouraged.

Modern estate names seem to be constructed with the aim of being innocuous, derivative and having some tenuous suggestion of a connection to the area they are built upon. Originality does not seem to be a major concern; for example. there are five different estates called The Meadows in and around Limerick city.

Often names are concocted from the blending of words. While not a frequently used word in any other context, 'brook' is a favourite component of housing estate names, with any number of first components; Meadowbrook, Castlebrook, Hazelbrook. This can usually be interchanged with 'haven’, especially if there isn’t a ‘view’ to be exploited for the purposes of nomenclature.

Similarly, there is an abundance of estates ending in 'field' with flora of any type attached to the beginning (Briarfield, Oakfield, Hayfield). This brings to mind an image of the developer standing in the middle of a field in preparation for planning and choosing the first plant they see to become a component of the future residents’ address. These monikers often have the unintended effect of invoking the image of what the natural landscape may have been like prior to its destruction to facilitate the construction of an estate.

While such decisions may seem irrelevant to a developer, the linguistic landscape of a territory is important to the inhabitants of that location and contributes to the construction of the identities of those who live in them. There has been a lot written in recent years about the loss of connection with Irish place names, including books such as John Creedon's That Place We Call Home: A Journey Through the Place Names of Ireland and Manchán Magan's Thirty-two Words for Field. Both of these books make the case for place names signifying a tangible connection with our language, culture and heritage.

From RTÉ Radio 1's Today with Claire Byrne, Manchán Magan talks about his book Thirty-Two Words for Field

How we address the naming of places in Ireland has been controversial since 1830 with the official Ordnance Survey anglicisation of Irish place names depicted in Brian Friel's 1980 masterpiece Translations. A more recent iteration of this controversy arose last year when locals in Dingle expressed their outrage when a new 20 house development was named ‘Pairceanna na Glas’, a name which locals called ‘meaningless’. A campaign to have it renamed got underway with the involvement of local politicians and officials. It showed that a lack of public consultation from the outset can cause distress when locals really care about the language used to name a territory that they feel a degree of ownership over.

Beyond literal meanings, words have positive or negative connotations which make us feel a certain way. While our address is no more a determiner of our qualities than our accent, certain words hold a degree of linguistic capital and are seen to be signifiers of status, just as we associate French sounding words with good wine and German with quality car manufacturing. This is easily manipulated in marketing: even if we don’t know what Vorsprung durch Technik really means, we have been conditioned to believe it signifies substance, efficiency and class.

From RTÉ Radio 1's Drivetime, journalist Anne Lucey on why locals in a new housing estate in Dingle are critical of calling it 'Pairceanna na Glas'

This also holds with the names we attach to estates. Developers put a lot of work into marketing estates so that they will sell in phases before they are fully constructed. The name of the estate gives a first impression and is designed to attract potential buyers. While the inclusion of Boulevard, Manor or Villa in an estate name does not make it a better place to live, it does act like a slogan and can create an impression of a place before we know what it is really like.

Choosing estate names that attempt to present a positive sense of a place to attract buyers is a flawed approach. After the sale is made, the name remains. Without diversity in our toponomy, we are likely to create a bland linguistic landscape full of harmless but predictable names that tell us nothing of the locality.

Dr Chris Fitzgerald is a postdoctoral Linguistics researcher at Mary Immaculate College. He is involved in a project investigating language use in online work meetings.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ

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