How Streets Got Their Numbers

Numbering the houses on a street is such an ordinary act that it is easy to forget somebody had to think of it. Before the eighteenth century most European addresses were descriptions: the third door past the well, the house with the blue shutters. The system worked because the people who needed to find you already knew the neighbourhood, and it failed as soon as a stranger with a document had to find you instead.

The first numbering schemes were therefore not conveniences for residents but instruments of administration, introduced to conscript soldiers, quarter troops and collect taxes, and they were resented accordingly. What made them stick was a second use nobody had planned for. Once a house had a number, a letter could reach it without a messenger who knew the district, and a postal service could employ people who did not. Within a century the numbers had changed sides: a device imposed on a city to make its people legible to the state had become the thing that let those people be reached by anyone at all.