There aren't many Morris Oxfords left plying the world's highways, and even fewer de Haviland Comets criss-crossing the skies, but there is still one British export that can swell your heart with pride: British place names. According to an analysis of The Times atlas there are no fewer than 55 Richmonds spread around the world, along with 46 Londons and 41 Oxfords. There is even a smattering of Croydons, from Pennsylvania to New Zealand, which suggests either that colonials had a sense of humour or that they hadn't been to the original one.

We shouldn't be too proud, though. Place names are another British product that has declined in quality. Who could draw inspiration from the bland names given to our new towns and other big developments of the past 30 years? Would William Byrd, the founder of Richmond, Virginia, have been moved to pay tribute to his home town had he come from Bradley Stoke, a new suburb of Bristol whose bland and amorphous name (derived from two local streams) echoes its physical reality.

But even Bradley Stoke has some sort of identity compared with Springfield, Oakley Grange, Downhead Park and all the other could-be-anywhere new towns and suburbs that now litter the Ordnance Survey. The developers and council officials responsible seem to have one simple rule: pick out two attractive landscape features that your new town is going to destroy, then merge them into an appellation so bland that it will upset no one. I haven't been to Gorse Covert, a new estate outside Warrington, but I wouldn't mind betting what I won't find there: any gorse or any covert.

The Victorians knew how to add drama and romance to otherwise mundane places. Once heard, who can forget Port Sunlight, William Lever's village for soap workers on the Wirral, built in 1887? Or Saltaire, Titus Salt's model industrial village in West Yorkshire? Or Etruria, the corner of ancient Italy that Josiah Wedgwood implanted in Stoke-on-Trent?

If we had the same sense of romance we would call our estates Prescottia and Barrattopolis. Or, like the evocative Back of the Yards, a suburb of Chicago, how about place names that achieve distinction through brazen honesty? A property developer once asked me to suggest a name for his estate of three and four-bedroom homes in the Midlands. I told him not to muck about: call it Middle England, which would both identify with his target market and generate reams of free publicity. Sadly, I don't think he took my advice. But if he is still thinking, how about Crunch Town - a name that will put 2008 on the map for ever?

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