Naming and Renaming Streets

Names are always worth investigating. And usually worth preserving.

Cities are not built. They accumulate. A building here, a street there, a tree planted in a park. One generation does its work. Another. And another. People come and go and are forgotten but their work remains, layered on top of what the generation before left, and the generation before that. Like the deltas that rise from the slow accumulation of silt deposited by the flow of a river over years and decades and centuries, cities are formed by the endless flow of people.

This is what makes old street names precious. The people who chose them may be gone but in their choices we can see the world as they saw it. And understand a little better how the delta emerged.

Here’s a small illustration.

In Ottawa, where I live, there is a “Charlotte Street.” It’s quite old by the standards of a city that only started to emerge with the beginning of the construction of the Rideau Canal in 1826. (The canal was part of a defensive network linking Montreal and Kingston in anticipation of an American invasion. Canada would look very different today if it hadn’t had the threat of Manifest Destiny — a term Canadians remember, if not Americans — hanging over its head throughout the 19th century.)

More importantly, in the context of current events, Charlotte Street has an important resident. It is the Embassy of the Russian Federation.

To express Canada’s feelings about Russia’s bloody and criminal invasion of Ukraine — no calling it a “special operation” in this newsletter — Charlie Angus, an NDP Member of Parliament, suggested it be renamed “Zelensky Street.”

Put that on your stationery, Ivan.

The City of Ottawa is now considering the request and many people have voiced support. I understand the appeal. I’d love to poke the bear in the ribs. But what I found interesting — and disconcerting — is that in the initial reaction to Angus’ proposal, no one asked the obvious question.

Who was “Charlotte” and why is her name on the street?

As I’ve written before, “start with the history” is excellent advice for decision-making. And it’s the credo of this newsletter. So let’s start there.

The “Charlotte” in question is not the “Queen Charlotte,” whose name appears in various places where the British Empire once was. (Queen Charlotte was wife of King George III.) It is “Princess Charlotte,” the only child of King George IV.

Now, Canada is riddled with streets named after British royalty. There are King Streets galore. Even more Queen Streets, because Canada’s monarch has more often been a woman. Victoria and Elizabeth. George and Edward. For earlier generations of Canadians, monarchs expressed patriotism, and nothing was so patriotic as naming a street after one.

One might reasonably conclude we can afford to lose one or two streets named after royals for a good cause. And this is a very good cause.

But there’s something more to the story of Princess Charlotte. Here’s a clue: She died in 1817. So whoever chose to put her name on the street wasn’t simply honouring a member of the royal family. They were honouring a member of the royal family, not a monarch, who had died many years earlier. Unlike slapping a monarch’s name on a street, that is unusual. So why did they do it?

I don’t know who made the decision, so I can’t say with certainty why he or she did it. But we probably know why nonetheless.

As the only child of George IV, Princess Charlotte was “Princess Charlotte of Wales,” heir to the throne. She was told to marry William, the heir to the throne of the Netherlands — royal marriages were affairs of state — but refused. Eventually, her father permitted her to marry Leopold, the future King of Belgium.

It was a genuinely moving match. At a time when the royal family was widely felt to be a proxy for family in general, almost the ideal family, the young couple were enormously popular. At the age of 21, Charlotte became pregnant with her first child. The press throughout the British Empire gave the pregnancy lavish attention.

But after enduring 40 hours of labour — without anesthetic — Charlotte’s baby was delivered stillborn. Not long after, Charlotte died.

The nation went into a long period of mourning that was, by all accounts, deeply and personally felt. “It really was as though every household throughout Great Britain had lost a favourite child,” wrote one politician. This was an era when the death of infants was almost routine, and childbirth was likely to be the greatest danger a woman faced. The loss of the princess and her child embodied fears and sorrows felt personally, viscerally, by all.

“Charlotte Street” isn’t yet another street named after a British royal. It is named for a British royal who had been dead for many years but whose loss was still keenly felt by those who named the street because it expressed the suffering of so many.

I generally don’t like renaming streets or buildings or parks because every renaming means digging up a little of the river delta. It means replacing the decisions of past generations with those of our own, which is a little arrogant — as if our concerns are more worthy than theirs — and more than a little disrespectful.

There are reasonable exceptions, of course. No one wants to live on Hitlerstrasse. And Ottawa may have hit on a clever way to keep the old and make a contemporary point — by renaming only the little snippet of Charlotte Street on which the Russian Embassy squats. That does little injury to the river delta that is the city.

In fact, when our generation has passed, and people investigate why that tiny section of Charlotte Street is called “Zelensky Street,” they will discover some of the history of the first half of the 21st century, just as “Charlotte Street” offers a glimpse into the early 19th century.