Mapping change: celebrating the women in street names

Her Women in Street Names project originally launched at the London School of Economics in 2019 and, as the name suggests, is a list of streets in the UK named after women, with accompanying notes about who they were.

The idea seemed to be a natural progression, de Silva explains, of Caroline Criado Perez’s work. She had compiled her list of UK statues of women a few years previously (and discovered that just 2.7% of them are of historical non-royal women) and, in 2016, eventually succeeded in having a statue of suffragist and feminist campaigner Millicent Fawcett erected in Parliament Square.

In the same year, English Heritage launched its ‘plaques for women’ campaign, encouraging the public to nominate remarkable female figures from the past to be celebrated with blue plaques – the marker used to commemorate a link between a location and a person of note in the UK.

De Silva has collected about 700 street names and does not have definitive numbers on the imbalance between male and females commemorated, “but it’s clear there are many more named after men,” she says.

She has created several categories, from aristocracy to education, writing, politics and community. “I think the untold stories or forgotten ones are very interesting,” says de Silva.

As well as the figures that have remained in the public consciousness, such as stage actress Lillie Langtry and suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, others on de Silva’s list include Clara Rackham an early magistrate, Poor Law guardian and Cambridge councillor, after whom Rackham Way in Cambridge is named.

De Silva intends the Street Names project not only to be a commemoration of women but also something that impacts on women’s self-perception. She has also developed a ‘First Women’ project, collating “women in law, government, the professions, music and other notable posts, achievements and matters of interest”.

It includes Edith Smith, the first female police constable with full powers of arrest who had a street named after her in Grantham, Lincolnshire. And, of course, there is an entry for Irene Barclay, who in 1922, was the first woman to qualify as a chartered surveyor. She later ran her own practice in Camden, north London, and campaigned for better conditions for tenants – fittingly, she had a block of flats named after her near Euston Station. Despite a century of women’s progress, however, surveying is still a profession that is 80% skewed in favour of male members.

“Something as simple as street names, something we’re exposed to every day whether we’re paying attention to it or not, that constant representation of men’s names everywhere, reinforces this idea that only men rule the world,” says Sybil Taunton, RICS’s head of diversity, equity and inclusion. “And so it's important to see a mix of representation.”

“One of the main things we discussed was the lack of women role models and women not being recognised in awards, writing or archival systems,” says Berman. “That has a knock-on effect as that knowledge isn’t being brought forward into the design and navigation of the real world.”

To address this, in 2022, Part W produced an initial map of 20 projects showcasing women’s contribution to London’s urban realm, which was included in the Barbican exhibition ‘How We Live Now: Reimagining Spaces with Matrix Feminist Co-operative’.

A crucial next step was a crowdsourced map of Women’s Work: London, including the sites of built projects in Greater London where a woman or women have played a pivotal role in its design development, conservation, commissioning or construction. Projects ranged from Waterloo Bridge, built by female construction workers, to Dawson’s Heights social housing, designed by architect Kate Macintosh.

“Our aim is to enable people to start making their own maps and develop a toolkit for doing so,” says Berman. “Maps are traditionally a record of city-based historical male travel patterns: arterial routes as opposed to a looser graphic style of map, not a traditional A-Z style. We want to give people around the world agency to carry out Women’s Work mapping.”

There are other ways of marking women’s contribution to a place, of course. One of the most prominent projects is the East End Women’s Museum.  Aoibhín McGinley, associate director with Manalo & White Architects, worked on its design and says: “We focused on addressing gender issues by forming an all-female design team, showcasing women's capabilities across the built environment. We also partnered with an organisation of tradeswomen to construct the museum, marking a first for the UK.

“A key objective of the museum is to tell women's stories and redress the balance of history. It confronts the inconvenient truth that, while women have consistently made up about 50% of the population, they occupy only around 0.5% of recorded history.” She applauds de Silva's project “as a positive and effective antidote to women's voices frequently being silenced or overlooked and helping women’s stories to reappear in a simple and easily accessible way”.

Commissioned by Transport for London and the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC), it has drafted a Community Researcher Handbook and How To Guide for the Women’s Safety Audit scheme.

“[Women often ask themselves]: ‘Do I feel that this place represents me? And how do people who've designed this space understand my lived experience?’” says Holly Lewis, a founding partner of We Made That. “And that's where the community researchers come in. We recruited 47 women and girls and then we trained them to act as researchers and have the conversations with wider participants. The conversation around safety and health then feels like one that you can have with your sister or with your flatmate in a space that you feel is safe, instead of it being with an official with a clipboard.”

Katy Marks is the founder of architectural firm Citizens Design Bureau and believes that part of her remit is building women’s priorities into her practice’s work. During the design of a new public park and housing development in Barking, east London, Marks and her team made gardening and food a central part of the engagement process. This meant that they were better able to implement meaningful design features such as communal food gardening, sensory play, communal swings and a new gate to better connect a local school.

“We realised very quickly how much design has been skewed away from women’s needs in terms of the way in which briefing and engagement is carried out, evolution of design development and prioritising budgets,” she says.

Meanwhile, de Silva will try to resurrect some of the achievements of women from the past.  “I want to keep adding to the list,” she says, and her website includes an open invitation for anyone to add street names inspired by women that they come across in the UK.