Victorian City Name Generator

A Victorian city name should smell faintly of coal smoke. The era's real towns fell into a few recognizable families. Older shire towns kept their Saxon and Norman bones, with endings like -chester, -bury, -minster, -mouth, -ford and -thorpe, and often a second word such as Regis, Magna or Market to set them apart from neighbours. The new industrial places were blunter, named for what they made or dug: Coalbrookdale, Ironbridge, Stocksbridge and the mill towns of the Pennines, with street-level names like Gasworks, Foundry Row and Tanyard. Spa and seaside resorts went the other way, borrowing Parade, Esplanade, Spa and -on-Sea to sound healthy and respectable.

The Empire added a fourth family. Colonial towns were named for the Queen, Prince Albert, governors, generals and famous battles, which is why the map of the 1890s is dotted with Victorias, Alberts, Balmorals, Ladysmiths and Almas. Dickens, meanwhile, gave fiction its own tradition of grotesque satirical names, Coketown, Mudfog and Dingley Dell, that readers still recognise as Victorian at a glance.

This list covers all of those registers so you can name a soot-blackened metropolis, its genteel spa suburb and the imperial port it trades with, all in one consistent period voice. Choose by the city's industry and social class, then give its districts names from the same family.