Town planners searching for a dash of inspiration and aspiration in a street name, something exotic yet comforting, foreign but friendly, often turn to Nelson Mandela Avenue. Their forebears sprinkled Britain’s towns with an equally proud, African and indomitable subject: the acacia tree.

The roots of Acacia Avenue go deep into the British psyche as they do into the suburbs. Few are unmoved by the name. To some it is a wonder, a street in the clouds, a new Jerusalem, where manners are good, cars are clean, umbrellas are rolled and hedgerows are clipped. There reigns a holy trinity of Respect, Decorum and Propriety. Such acolytes would insist that the morally loose Charlotte at No 22 in Iron Maiden’s Acacia Avenue is very much the exception, if not a gross calumny. To others, an address in Hades would be preferable to Acacia Avenue, a triumph of suppressed emotions, intolerable insularity and suffocating petit bourgeois codes.

To the latter’s distress, an AA survey of Britain’s Acacia Avenues finds a picture of contentment: eight out of ten residents are “very happy”; they divorce less, live closer to work and are better educated than the rest of us. They have gardens and a sense of community, though they don’t do sushi.

We have, for better or worse, moved on from Acacia Avenue. The Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors reports today’s vogue names to be those with a religious theme. In a search for the quaint, new streets become Church Street or Vicarage Lane even if the nearest religious establishment is miles away. The names may have changed but our yearning for what we lack has not.