Where the streets have no name: Coach Road Estate, Washington

Serlby Close, Usworth. The houses on the left are part of Coach Road Estate
Source: © Alex McGregor at Geograph CC-BY-SA-2.0

Microsoft, like a number of other large tech firms, now has teams working to improve OpenStreetMap. A couple of weeks ago they turned their attention to the UK, and asked about some roads apparently missing street names.

I checked a few of these examples using available Open Data sources, primarily those of the Ordnance Survey. For the most part, our existing mapping seems correct: there is no official street name. Many were places like caravan parks and industrial estates, but one really stood out. This was an area on the north side of Washington, County Durham called Coach Road Estate. As I investigated it soon became apparent that the estate is interesting for other reasons too.