Famous Streets
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50 free Famous Streets trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
A street name can carry a surprising amount of history. Some of the world's best-known addresses are named after vanished rivers, forgotten trades and long-dead rulers, and a few became famous only because a novelist, a songwriter or a film director happened to set a story there. This quiz walks through famous streets on six continents: grand ceremonial avenues, steep and crooked residential lanes, shopping strips, market streets and nightlife quarters, plus the record holders for the steepest, shortest and widest. It also covers the streets of fiction, from soap-opera terraces to a boy wizard's childhood home, and the real roads behind board-game squares and hit singles. It is written for travellers, pub-quiz regulars and anyone who likes knowing why a place is called what it is. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you can play it straight through or print the questions for a street-themed trivia night.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The crossing on London's Abbey Road that won listed status in 2010 is named after which animal?
Zebra
Zebra crossings rarely become monuments, but the Beatles walked across this one for an album cover and it was Grade II listed. Fans still pose on it despite the busy traffic.
Q 02Which San Francisco road squeezes eight sharp turns into one steep block on Russian Hill?
Lombard Street
Lombard Street got its curves in 1922 because the hill's natural 27 percent grade was too steep for most vehicles. The bends earned it the nickname of the world's crookedest street.
Q 03Wall Street is named after a real city wall that stood there from 1653, built by which colonists?
The Dutch
The Dutch built it on Peter Stuyvesant's orders to protect New Amsterdam when the first Anglo-Dutch war broke out. The wall came down in 1699, but the name stuck.
Q 04Bourbon Street in New Orleans was named in 1721 in honour of what?
A French royal family
A French royal family, the House of Bourbon, ruled France when engineer Adrien de Pauger laid out the city's streets. He named others after royal houses and Catholic saints.
Q 05Which Paris street has hosted the Tour de France's final-stage finish nearly every year since 1975?
Champs-Élysées
Champs-Élysées is French for the Elysian Fields, the resting place of dead heroes in Greek mythology. The avenue also stages the annual Bastille Day military parade.
Q 06Which author housed his detective at 221B Baker Street before the street's numbers ran that high?
Arthur Conan Doyle
Arthur Conan Doyle's invention drew so much mail for Sherlock Holmes that the building society later based there employed a full-time secretary to answer it.
Q 07The Great Fire of London began in 1666 at Thomas Farriner's bakery on which small street?
Pudding Lane
Pudding Lane owes its name to offal, not dessert: pudding was the word for the animal waste carted down the lane to barges on the river.
Q 08London's red-surfaced road The Mall, meant to resemble a giant carpet, leads to which landmark?
Buckingham Palace
Buckingham Palace has had its red approach since the 1950s, when the road was coloured with an iron oxide pigment. Earlier, The Mall was a fashionable tree-lined promenade.
Q 09Which novelist popularised Route 66's nickname, the Mother Road, in a 1939 Dust Bowl novel?
John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck used the name in The Grapes of Wrath, which follows Oklahoma farmers driving the highway west in search of work.
Q 10Boardwalk and the other streets on the original Monopoly board lie in which New Jersey resort?
Atlantic City
Atlantic City and its neighbours supplied the names, and one is a famous typo: the game's Marvin Gardens is really Marven Gardens, in nearby Margate. Parker Brothers apologised for the slip in 1995.
Q 11Which Manhattan thoroughfare predates the 1811 street grid and so cuts diagonally across Midtown?
Broadway
Broadway is said to follow the Wickquasgeck trail, a Lenape path that wound the length of the island long before Europeans arrived.
Q 12Soweto's Vilakazi Street housed two Nobel Peace laureates: Desmond Tutu and which future president?
Nelson Mandela
Nelson Mandela lived at number 8115 from 1946 to 1962 and later donated the house to a heritage trust, which runs it as a museum.
Q 13La Rambla, a tree-lined walk that began as a stream bed, ends at a Columbus monument in which city?
Barcelona
Barcelona's most famous walk so charmed the poet Federico García Lorca that he called it the one street he wished would never end.
Q 21The three luxury-boutique blocks of Rodeo Drive that shoppers know best are in which California city?
Beverly Hills
Beverly Hills holds the famous stretch, just three blocks of a two-mile street whose southern end actually crosses into Los Angeles.
Q 22Which Christopher Street bar in New York saw the 1969 riots that sparked the gay liberation movement?
Stonewall Inn
Stonewall Inn began life far from nightlife: its two buildings were put up in the 1840s as horse stables, and the name belonged to a restaurant until 1966.
Q 23Which fictional Weatherfield terrace names the soap Guinness called the world's longest-running in 2010?
Coronation Street
Q 14Which Washington street, nicknamed America's Main Street, links the White House and the Capitol?
Pennsylvania Avenue
Pennsylvania Avenue runs diagonally across the city's grid, and the stretch between the two buildings is the stage for official parades, processions and protest marches.
Q 15Beale Street, named the Home of the Blues by an act of Congress, runs through which Tennessee city?
Memphis
Memphis won the title for its street in 1977, when urban renewal had left it a virtual ghost town. Today its blues clubs are a major tourist draw.
Q 16E Street in Belmar, New Jersey, gave its name to the backing band of which rock star?
Bruce Springsteen
Bruce Springsteen's group took the name because it rehearsed there, in the garage of keyboard player David Sancious's mother at 1107 E Street.
Q 17Harry Potter grows up at number four on which road in the fictional Surrey town of Little Whinging?
Privet Drive
Privet Drive is where Harry is raised from infancy by his aunt Petunia and uncle Vernon Dursley, while Arabella Figg, living nearby, secretly keeps watch on him for Dumbledore.
Q 18Which Manhattan street divides East from West addresses on the borough's numbered cross streets?
Fifth Avenue
Fifth Avenue is where house numbers on the cross streets begin, climbing in both directions as you move away from it. Its stretch beside Central Park is nicknamed Museum Mile.
Q 19Which Edinburgh route runs downhill from the castle to Holyrood Palace through the Old Town?
Royal Mile
Royal Mile is a nickname for a chain of streets, among them Castlehill, the Lawnmarket and the Canongate, that together stretch almost exactly one mile.
Q 20Which London road, once home to most British national newspapers, is named after a now-buried river?
Fleet Street
Fleet Street stayed shorthand for the British press even after the papers moved out in the 1980s. Reuters, the last major news outlet there, left in 2005.
Coronation Street has been on ITV since December 1960, and Guinness gave it the record on the programme's 50th anniversary.
Q 24Which London street of bespoke tailors saw the Beatles give their final live performance, on a rooftop?
Savile Row
Savile Row was home to the band's Apple Corps headquarters at number 3. At number 1, the Royal Geographical Society once planned expeditions to Africa and the South Pole.
Q 25Which institution has been nicknamed the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street since a satirical cartoon of 1797?
Bank of England
Bank of England staff have worked on the street since 1734. The nickname comes from a James Gillray cartoon and has stuck for more than two centuries.
Q 26Which nickname stuck to the block of West 28th Street that housed New York's sheet-music publishers?
Tin Pan Alley
Tin Pan Alley is said to owe its name to a journalist who likened the din of cheap upright pianos, all playing different tunes, to the banging of tin pans.
Q 27Signs for which Liverpool street were stolen regularly after the Beatles named a 1967 single after it?
Penny Lane
Penny Lane's roundabout, then a major bus terminus, was a regular stop for John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison in their school and student days.
Q 28Khaosan Road, a backpacker hub whose name means milled rice, is in which Asian capital?
Bangkok
Bangkok's backpacker strip takes its name from the rice once traded in the area. Budget guesthouses began to open there only in the early 1980s.
Q 29Avenida 9 de Julio, often called the world's widest avenue, honours the independence day of which country?
Argentina
Argentina declared independence on 9 July 1816, and the avenue named for the date is about 110 metres wide. The Obelisk of Buenos Aires stands where it meets Corrientes Avenue.
Q 30Baldwin Street, which Guinness calls the steepest street in the world, is in which country?
New Zealand
New Zealand briefly lost the record in 2019 to a lane in Harlech, Wales, then won it back on appeal in 2020 when Guinness ruled that slope must be measured along the centre line.