What's in a Prague street name

K sídlišti was built in 1935.

Until 1952, the street was called V rovinách II. I’ll say no more until we get to V rovinách (‘I’ no longer required).

A ‘sídliště’ is a settlement, but it’s also the term for a housing estate – a residential area with multi-storey residential buildings – panel houses, or, colloquially, ‘paneláky’.

They were typically built around the country between the 1940s and the 1990s.

Pankrác Plain was already the site of extensive housing construction in the 1920s and 1930s, when Prague’s population swelled (in 1910, there were 667,000 people in the city; by 1930, there were 950,000).

In the 1960s, Pankrác gained not one but three housing estates, ingeniously named Pankrác I, Prankrác II and Pankrác III.