Charlotte Shepherd and her family had found the perfect new house in Upton-upon-Severn, a town in Worcestershire on the banks of the river. The house was well-situated, with a garden, plenty of space and kerb appeal. She’d seen it listed for six months, but, until now, had hesitated about booking a viewing. There was a major drawback: ‘We didn’t want to live on Minge Lane.’
‘People would take the mickey,’ Shepherd tells me, ‘and my husband is a potty mouth at the best of times. My 12-year-old daughter was worried she was going to get picked on at school. We just couldn’t do it.’
Minge Lane, though, is an ordinary residential street. It has a mixture of bungalows and social housing. There is a fire station at one end and views of the Malvern Hills. According to residents, its name comes from its former days as the town’s red-light district: in Upton’s bustling trading days, it was where randy sailors would satisfy their wanton desires. ‘It’s not like that anymore – it’s full of families now,’ says resident Bridget McGregor. ‘It’s a nice area to live, considering the name.’
McGregor, 22, has lived on Minge Lane all her life. In that time, the street sign has been cemented into the pavement to prevent it from being stolen. This became necessary after the actors playing the Inbetweeners published a photo with the sign as part of their Comic Relief fundraiser, Rude Road Trip, filmed in 2011. Three years later, Minge Lane topped a list of the UK’s rudest street names, beating rivals Slag Lane, Fanny Hands Lane, Lickers Lane and nearby Bell End. ‘The sign used to go missing at least once every couple of weeks. They’d have to replace it, and it would be gone again within a couple of days,’ says McGregor. ‘We do still get quite a lot of people taking pictures with the sign.’
For residents, it seems that living on Minge Lane can be both a blessing and a curse.
On other lewdly named streets, some locals have clearly felt that it’s been more of a curse. In 2009, residents of Butt Hole Road in South Yorkshire clubbed together to change their street name to the more palatable Archers Way. ‘We’ve had people flashing their bottoms for photographs by the drive,’ resident Peter Sutton told the Daily Mail at the time.
‘I just can’t see why they didn’t call it Butt Hall Road, or something like that.’
In Bell End, near Birmingham, residents were more divided. In 2018, a petition claimed that the street had become ‘a laughing stock’ and that children could be ‘bullied and teased at school’, putting forward ‘Bells Road’ as an alternative name. Interestingly, the move was trumped by a counter-petition, which denounced it as a ‘pointless change’ and gained almost 5,000 signatures to the original’s 200. Bell End, therefore, stands proud.
