What's in a Prague street name

Originally published on Twitter on 12 October 2022.

Horní Stromka was built in 1925. There’s no street sign (more on that later).

For the story of Horní Stromka, please go back 24 hours to https://whatsinapraguestreetname.com/2023/03/08/prague-3-day-171-v-horni-stromce/.

One thing I’ve learned in the last 172 days (don’t worry, there aren’t that many to go) is that whoever erects street signs in Prague has decided to keep them to a minimum.

So, whereas in some countries, you’d have street names on both sides of the road, at the top of the road, at the bottom of the road, etc., a smaller Prague 3 street will typically only have one sign.

On the plus side, this has meant that I’ve walked quite a lot of steps to take all these pictures.

On the minus side, it means that some streets that are only partially in Prague 3 don’t have a single street sign to document this fact (one example is Pernerova: https://whatsinapraguestreetname.com/2022/11/30/prague-3-day-103-pernerova/.

But Horní Stromka and V Horní Stromce take the economical approach to street signs to a whole new level.

Google Maps states that Horní Stromka and V Horní Stromce are located as follows, as does my atlas.

But there is no street sign for ‘Horní Stromka’ (that I saw – feel free to correct me).

*And* the sign for V Horní Stromce… seems to be located on Horní Stromka.

I guess GPS has made all this less of an issue, but I can imagine some *really* aggressive ‘Kde sakra jsi’-type text messages occurring before we all had smartphones.

And I assume this is also still the source of some of the lower ratings on Uber.