‘We Have Renamed Places For Four Hundred Years And Nobody Has Ever Complained’ Writes Palace Cartographer

NEW EDINBURGH, N.Y.  His Majesty took possession of the naming rights to New York City at 9am on Wednesday and redesignated it New Edinburgh. My office has since received 4,011 congratulatory emails but we don’t have the staff to read them. Since nobody in the affected territory appears to understand what has happened, I have been invited to explain it.

In 1664 the naming rights to the territory were leased, in perpetuity, to the King’s brother, the Duke of York. Independence transferred the land. Independence did not transfer the name. Deeds and names are held on separate instruments, and only one of those instruments was ever surrendered. The name has therefore sat with the Duke of York for 361 years, accruing nothing, requiring nothing, and going entirely unremarked upon by the people living inside it.

Why now? Because as of this year there is no Duke of York. I will not be drawn further than the register permits. The office records the situation as a lapse of nomenclatural privilege, the privilege reverts to the Crown, and the Crown may reassign it at pleasure. We then proceeded down the order of precedence in the ordinary way. Cornwall was encumbered. Cambridge was encumbered. We arrived at Edinburgh: available, unencumbered, and in possession of a functioning tram network to which the city may one day aspire.

The full schedule of changes appears at Schedule 2 of the Instrument of Redesignation, published Monday at 11.04am. Manhattan becomes Leith. Brooklyn becomes Morningside. Queens becomes Portobello. The Bronx is under review, though Sighthill remains the clear frontrunner. Staten Island keeps its name, my team having been unable to identify a Scottish equivalent that anyone would visit voluntarily.

We are not indifferent to local feeling. A YouGov panel of 2,014 residents, fielded over two hours on Tuesday afternoon, found that 61.3 per cent had no objection provided the subway kept running, that 14 per cent asked whether the change was tax-deductible, and that 9 per cent believed it had happened some years ago. That is a mandate. It is a larger mandate than most of the forty-one Kingstons received.

Now, I am not saying the residents were consulted. Consultation is a separate instrument and there is no provision for it. I am saying the residents were surveyed afterwards and found to be broadly content, which is the same information arriving in a more convenient order.

The Duke of Edinburgh was notified by letter and asked whether he would be expected to visit. He will not. The name requires nothing from anybody, which is precisely why your complaints are so difficult to answer. The gentleman formerly attached to the previous name was written to at an address in Berkshire, second class, and has telephoned four times to ask whether the airport counts as a building. It does not. The airport is a facility. I expect to explain this again.

Further work is in hand. Boston becomes New Highgrove in March. Detroit becomes Little Poundbury and will be rebuilt in local limestone over ninety years. Philadelphia is provisionally Dumfries. A request to rename Los Angeles was received, considered and declined, and I would ask that it not be resubmitted.

My predecessor, Wilfred Nunavet, redesignated 406 settlements between 1971 and 1994 and retired to a bungalow in Sturminster Newton with a certificate signed by the Queen. He asked in his will that the Canadian province of Alluvit be redesignated in his honour. It was a Tuesday. We’d made the change by Thursday.

You did not thank us for Georgia, for the Carolinas, for Virginia, or for the forty-one Kingstons. You have lived four hundred years inside our filing and you have called it your home town.

You are welcome.

— Douglas Craik, Chief Cartographer, Overseas Nomenclature Office, Buckingham Palace