Ye Olde Marketing

Why fake British names are all the rage in America

A few weeks ago I was in Boston visiting my son, who goes to college there. I’m a very early riser (especially since starting my new WSJ newsletter) and he isn’t so I used the opportunity to meet an old college friend who lives in the suburbs for breakfast. She told me to meet her at “Newton Centre.”

I was expecting our breakfast to be at a shopping mall since anglicized names are a weird hallmark of American commercial establishments. I was wrong: It was a walkable commercial hub with upscale shops, cafés, and a cool bookstore. Here it is in 1897, before they got good espresso:

I suppose I could have guessed since both Boston and Newton were settled a long time ago when that actually would have been the spelling (Newton itself derives from “newe towne”). That makes it the exception rather than the rule in America. Reversing the “e” and “r,” adding an extra “u” after the “o,” or going for even more archaic spellings, is thought to add a touch of class to an establishment.

I explained this once to a British colleague whose column I was editing (I was fixing some non-American spelling) and he was incredulous. And no wonder: His countrymen have a, um, somewhat less-classy reputation on the continent than they do here in the former colonies.

I also recently traveled to Orlando with my wife and one of my sons. I had to work while they visited the theme parks but, owing to the aforementioned newsletter schedule, I had time for mid-morning runs past the hotels, timeshares, and apartment complexes that dominated the area where we were staying.

Pretty much everything in Orlando is new and our neighborhood in particular was dotted with construction sites. Like most of America, chain stores and restaurants are ubiquitous. It’s boring, but there was one interesting thing I noticed as I ran: It was like there was an arms race to come up with the most incongruously Olde English-sounding names. Some of the spellings might not even have any origin in the UK, or at least none that I recall from six years of living there.

For example, “Grande.” There was Grande Vista, Grande Lakes, Reunion Grande, Grande Downtown, and at least a dozen others I looked up in the Orlando area just now. There’s even just “The Grande.”

Likewise, I stopped counting places with the word “Pointe” in them when I got to 12. There’s a “Grandewood Pointe,” but no “Grande Pointe” in Orlando, sadly. (There is one elsewhere in Florida—a venue on the Redneck Riviera part of the state that bills itself as being “near the Gulf of Mexico.” Better update that website ASAP folks).

Despite Orlando being in the middle of the state, far from the ocean, I ran past a couple of places with “Harbour” in their name and found at least 10 in the area on Google Maps. There were only a few uses of “Centre,” but too many to count of “Shoppe,” which I don’t recall ever actually seeing in England. I googled a “British Shoppe” that sells haggis, Yorkshire pudding, Cadbury chocolate, and the like in—where else—Florida.

The use of fake British names to add a touch of upper-crustiness reminded me of a book I read in high school, Paul Fussell’s wonderful and hilarious Class: A Guide Through the American Status System. He was a literary critic and English professor but briefly worked as a taste consultant for a friend planning new suburban developments looking for street names with cachet. He came up with ones like Montpelier, Osborne, and Priory, to which street, lane or circle would be added. Going through the alphabet, Fussell got to “W.”

“I couldn’t resist ‘Windsor’ for W, and today there’s some poor puzzled fellow wondering why success is so slow in arriving since for years he’s been residing at 221 Windsor Close instead of living on West Broad Street.” 🤣

He notes that “new, jumped-up places like Houston are quick to surround themselves with tract suburbs bearing the most egregious British names.” To which you could add Orlando.

Some of the developments or resorts I ran past used words that sounded sort of cool and exotic without meaning anything—“Solaya” for example—but you take a risk with things like that, so why not stick with the classics?

I shouldn't laugh too hard because I only discovered at age 15 that a food full of delicious “nooks and crannies” I loved to have for breakfast with a dab of peanut butter was in no way foreign. As Fussell writes, “if you merchandise tasteless little blobs of dough you can sell billions of them by calling them ‘English’ muffins.”