I have always enjoyed playing Monopoly.
In Australia our boards had London street names. From this we learned the relative value of London real estate. Mayfair and Park Lane were socially superior to Old Kent Road and Whitechapel Road and, more to the point, were worth more money.
Monopoly board game with London Locations retrieved from Wikimedia Commons, photograph by James Petts from London, England / CC BY-SA
Monopoly was first created and published in the USA, but in 1935 a London edition was issued by John Waddington Limited, a publisher of card and board games. This was the version that was played in the Dominions, and later, in the Commonwealth. At the coast among the gum trees and in parched little towns in the outback, families and friends landed on prestigious London addresses with a cheer and put up with the minor inconvenience of paying to stay, temporarily, in yellow and light-blue low-rent accommodation.
My father remembers when he first visited London as a university student in the 1950s, he took the Tube around the Circle Line just to have done it, and also for the fun of seeing Monopoly addresses appear at one station after another.
There is a list of the London Monopoly locations on Wikipedia and somebody has created a map of the locations on Google Maps.
A map of the places featured on the London Monopoly Board created in Google MyMaps
I remember seeing an American Monopoly board for the first time and being shocked that the place names were New York, not London. To think that they were first is just as surprising.
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The things we take for granted 😉 I think the famous / classic American board has streets from Atlantic City New Jersey
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Seems to be my day for making mistakes.
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I am finding it so hard to focus at the moment – difficult times
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We used to play Monopoly too. I never thought about the properties being named after actual places.
When my daughter moved to Seattle se real decades ago, they stayed in a place that was yellow and named after one of the yellow properties. Marvin place, I think.
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I grew up loving Monopoly, and still have the set I was given for Christmas in about 1967! Little did I know then that I’d end up living in Salem, Massachusetts, half a mile from the Parker Brothers factory where the game was created and manufactured for decades. The old factory was demolished not long after I moved here in the early ’80s, but I remember it well. I had no idea there was a version set in London!
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I never played monopoly growing up. We have a monopoly travel set to inspire our grandchildren with travel plans. It can get quite heated depending on who’s playing games and winning…usually my husband…he’s a board game guru.
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I thought everybody played Monopoly 😉
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