house numbers

[Doozle]

Which was the first city to have numbered houses?

[dundurn]

I think it was Paris, with the houses being numbered from the Seine outwards.

[Octavius]

In Britain, house names were traditionally the only way of identifying a house. It wasn't until the Stamp Act of 1765 that house numbering was introduced in some areas; to this day, there are regions where houses are only named. The earliest house names tended to be descriptive, e.g. Copped Hall, The Greene Gate.

The act of Parliament in 1765 decreed that every house in a town or city would have a number followed by the name of the street or road, this giving rise to the familiar address format still in use but its use was not universal in the decades immediately after its introduction.

No evidence to support it, but I imagine London might have been one of the first. The London book trades 1775-1800 lists several London addresses with street location/ description and house numbers where the house has one.

[dundurn]

Some additional data - The Inns of Court at Lincoln's Inn may have been the first houses in England to be numbered and the practice may have spread elsewhere in London before being generally adopted across the country. General house numbering in Paris dates from the time of Napoleon I (so later) but house numbering had been tried there as early as 1463 on the Pont Notre-Dame as a means of identifying property belonging to the city.

[smudge]

Don't know about where you live, but all the houses around here that should be No. 13 are No. 11A. They read 11, 11A, 15!

That's superstition for you!

[Doozle]

To dundurn, Octavius and Smudge, Many thanks for your full and interesting answers!

[jno]

this report is from 1898 and says Paris, but I don't know if historians since have come up with anything more precise

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf? _r=1&res=9803EEDB1139E433A25755C1A9619C94699ED 7CF&oref=slogin