Surrey recognizes value of historic road and district names
Heritage rarely gets much consideration from Surrey council or city staff, so it was a pleasant surprise to find out how much effort has been recently put into actively pursuing names for roads, districts and geographic features. Much of this work came to fruition with significant changes to Surrey’s original road numbering bylaw no. 1500, which was adopted in 1957. That bylaw eliminated most of the names of Surrey streets, replacing them with numbers. The changes to the original bylaw were adopted by council last summer. The changes recognize that the original bylaw called for named streets - those that are not east-west or north-south in direction. While this has been done in many parts of Surrey since that time, the streets that have been named have usually reflected the desires of developers, not necessarily the city at large. Thus developments like Birdland (in Guildford) and Cowtown (in Cloverdale) came about, using names of birds and cattle respectively. The changes c...