Owl’s Hoot: How People Name Their Houses

Joyce Miles has for some time been collecting house names, chiefly in England, and has here attempted to systematise her findings. She has not provided a classification as can readily be done with surnames, for example, though reading between the lines it looks as if a scheme could be devised. Favourites appear to be the names of places that have emotional resonance for the house owner, like holiday and honeymoon resorts. (In the village where I spent my childhood there was a house named after the Flemish battlefield where the owner had been wounded during the First World War; I...