Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Dialling with Letters - Harringay's Old Telephone Exchanges
I was recently looking at on old advertising handbill for a boxing event at Harringay Arena and noticed that the phone number given was STA 8221.
I'm just old enough to remember alpa-numeric dialling. Until it was abandoned in the late Sixties, alpha-numeric dialling meant that every phone number was a mix of three letters and four numbers. The letters were the first three of the name given to the local exchange. Often the names used were just area names, but sometimes they had to invent names. Where I lived for a while, for example, the exchange names were Uplands and Bywood. There was no obvious connection to anything local, but I'm sure there was poem method to the GPO's madness.
I wondered what the STA in the Arena's phone number could have stood for - not STAdium surely, I thought. So I checked and came up with a list of the local exchanges in and near Harringay until the late Sixties.
Below, is the handbill, by the way.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Jeremyb on
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I'm in Wood Green, when we first got our phone installed way back, the engineer said that the BOWes Park exchange was full, so we would have a new exchange MULberry. He said that this was named after a tree in the grounds of the Telephone Switching Centre in Bounds Green Road, but I've never found out if this story was true or not...!
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Permalink Reply by SarahC on
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It's good enough for me! When I tried googling this before, I found a website about mulberry trees (!) that listed some in Bounds Green Road - maybe it's still there.
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Permalink Reply by Martin (Woodside) on
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MULberry may well have been a new exchange within the Bowes Park exchange building. They only had 10,000 numbers to use and after that they had to create a new code. There is no actual exchange in Bounds Green, Greenridings House was a main trunk switch.
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Permalink Reply by Bob Lindsay-Smith on
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I worked at STC in New Southgate (who made telephone exchanges for what was originally a branch of the Post Office, later BT). It was generally accepted there that the phone code name ENTerprise was a nod to the company - whose phone number was 01-368-1234 and was a major user of the exchange. Maybe some other former employee of STC or BT can throw more light on this.
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Permalink Reply by Geraldine on
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Thanks for shedding light on ENTerprise, Bob. I had a friend who worked at Standard Telephones back in the 60s and I remember it well. Makes perfect sense.
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Permalink Reply by Dick Harris on
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This subject is a trip down memory lane for me because I was working in a London telephone area office when these changes were made in the mid 1960s. Until then all numbers in the London area were expressed as three letters followed by four digits. Our area included such memorable names as GLAdstone, ARNold, ELGar, LORds, PINner, PRImrose etc. Each of these codes could accommodate a maximum of 10,000 numbers (in practice rather less than this). As the demand for new lines surged we began to run out of possible letter combinations that could be used for new exchanges. The choice of new combinations had to be not merely pronounceable but also unambiguous. An example of this problem would be an exchange we had just off Maida Vale that was called Abercorn in the days before it was automated. This name could not have continued in use after automation because there was an exchange in Westminster called Abbey. It was thought that too many customers would have mistakenly dialled ABB for Abercorn so a new name had to be found, which I think was CUNningham. We also had problems because some codes were in use for dialling exchanges just outside the London area. For example, five digit numbers in Watford beginning with 2 were called by the prefix WA2. Codes like this were needed for more London exchanges and, in any event, they were often problematic. Not knowing that Watford was outside the London area, some people would dial WAT2XXXX and end up connected to a telephone on WATerloo exchange.
As UK telephone dials did not have letters on the digits 1 or 0, the number of three letter possibilities was more limited than might be supposed. Moreover, in the mid 1960s the first steps towards international dialling were being planned and there was a problem of international coordination. Many cities in the USA used letters as part of telephone numbers but the letters on their dials were not in the same arrangement as in the UK, for example, their letter O was on the zero whereas in the UK it was on the digit 6. Other countries had equivalent problems and the only practical solution was for all countries to abandon the use of letters altogether.
Doing so in the UK increased the number of usable codes available in London by such a wide margin that the London numbering range did not need to be extended again for more than 20 years, ie when the 071 and 081 prefixes were introduced in 1990.
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Fascinating! I remember my London cousins had the number Speedwell 8898. They were in Golders Green. Always wondered why Speedwell. Being young at the time I never dialled phone numbers myself, so I never realised you actually dialled the first letters in the exchange name.
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