Museum exhibit celebrates origins of unique Nanaimo street names

Nanaimo's strange street name history Twiggly Wiggly Road. Jingle Pot Road. CTV News takes a look at where some of Nanaimo's strange street names come from.

Bizarre street names are as quintessentially Nanaimo as bathtub races and the city’s eponymous dessert bars.

“People typically think I’m giving a fake address out,” says Manuela H., who lives on Twiggly Wiggly Road.

That’s just a few blocks from Jingle Pot Road.

Across town, there’s Bob O Link Way and Bergen-Op-Zoom Drive, not to mention Dingle Bingle Hill Road.

There’s no official record for the town with the most unusually named streets per capita, but if there were, Nanaimo would surely take the crown.

“We don’t mind being number one,” says Mayor Leonard Krog, adding that it’s not necessary to know the history behind the strange street names in order to enjoy them.

“It just sounds good,” Krog says. “It’s like a politician’s speech. If it sounds good, it doesn’t matter what the content is.”

Of course, as the mayor, Krog does know the origins of many, if not all of the bizarre road names in the city.

And for those interested in learning more, the current exhibit in the Nanaimo Museum’s community gallery showcases some of the city’s stranger streets.

Prepared by history students at Vancouver Island University, “The Word on the Street: Roads that Built Nanaimo” is on display until June 25.

Jingle Pot Road, according to the exhibit, is named for a tool used by coal miners. A “jingle pot” was a pot with a few stones in it, attached to a rope. Miners pulled on the rope to make the pot make noise when they wanted to signal that it was time to start hoisting carts full of coal out of the mine.

Bergen-Op-Zoom Drive gets its name from a town in the Netherlands that is home to a Canadian war cemetery. Hundreds of Canadian soldiers who died during the Second World War are buried there.

And Twiggly Wiggly Road? That’s named for former mayor Frank Ney’s daughter Monique, who had the nickname “Twiggy.” Ney was a residential land developer before he became mayor, and that role afforded him the opportunity to name many of the city’s streets.

Despite the confusion it sometimes causes, Manuela tells CTV News she wouldn’t change her street’s name to something more normal.

“I think it’s unique,” she says.

With files from CTV News Vancouver Island’s Jordan Cunningham and Andrew Garland