Jesus H. Your addresses drive me insane over there. "One and one half Hedgehog House, Privet, 15th Century, Before Printed Documents." In the US, we used to have idiosyncratic addressing as well. But as 911 (our emergency number) comes into communities, everyone gets a new address. Number Consisting of Only Digits, Unique Street Name, Apartment or Suite. That's it, and that's always it, sea to shining sea. Granted it was weird - and not cheap - getting an entirely new address when 911 came to our town. The town even renamed whole streets, so that there would not be, for instance, noncontinguous Knight Roads. But it does mean that, for instance, you see 133 Knight Road, you're going to 148, well, it's definitely on the other side of the street and not too many down. (Road signs? Standard size, near-universal placement, municipal or county service even in apartment complexes, fancier dos will sometimes buy their own, but again, every intersection, reflective signs at a specified height and size.) Maybe it is culturally important to keep being able to refer to individual buildings by their individual names, but couldn't you just layer on an address? Hedgehog House (17 Privet Row), etc.? You don't *have* to use it if you're swanning about your prestigious place to your friends, but you teach it to your kids to call the ambulance with, you know? Man. We have plenty of screwed up things in our own EMS system, but at least they mostly start once you're already on scene. Getting to an unfamiliar address is eff terrible and stressful even *with* the system we've got, why have they not rationalized and geocoded street addressing for you? (And how do things like online mapping work when any address could be nonsequential free text, to add another redneck Yank question?)