As more damning information emerged this year about ties between King Charles’ brother Andrew and the sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein, residents in the English village of Hellesdon felt the discomfort more closely than most.
As the scandal intensified, eventually leading to the king stripping Andrew of his royal titles last month, the occupants of Hellesdon’s Prince Andrews Road began asking the local council: Might they be able to change the name of the street?
Shelagh Gurney, a councilor in the village of about 11,000 in eastern England, however, said a renaming was unlikely, as it would require a unanimous decision among the 107 properties on the street and an adjoining cul-de-sac.
“It would be very difficult to obtain a consensus of all residents,” Ms. Gurney said, “and my emails clearly indicate that this would not be achieved.”
The disclosures about the royal’s alleged sexual abuse of a young woman, which he has denied, led to the royal family removing his royal title and evicting him from his residence near Windsor Castle.
The move left him known as Andrew Mountbatten Windsor. But the Hellesdon residents still live on Prince Andrews Road.
The street is not actually named for the disgraced royal, Ms. Gurney said, but his grandfather: Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, who died in 1944 and is a relatively obscure figure in Britain.
Even if a consensus to change the name were somehow achieved, she said, the costs of a monthslong legal process to enact it would fall to the people living there.
After researching that process, Ms. Gurney told residents that they would face “significant disruption.”
They would need to update records for land ownership, utilities and insurance, driving licenses, passports, tax information, voter registration, trash collection, emergency services, and even the microchips that register their dogs in a government database.
There are roads and landmarks elsewhere that were named for Mr. Mountbatten Windsor, including Prince Andrew Road and the adjoining Prince Andrew Close in the town of Maidenhead, about 30 miles west of London. Residents there face similar hurdles.
In the moneyed Fitzrovia neighborhood of London, the Duke of York pub on Rathbone Street featured the former prince’s likeness on a sign for more than a decade. It was taken down this year by new owners.
Outside of England, officials and residents are also casting a wary eye upon anything adorned with “Prince Andrew.”
In Canada, a member of the Commonwealth, a group mostly of countries that were part of the British Empire, there is also a growing clamor to remove the name.
Once such place is Prince Andrew Island, a speck of land in the Otonabee River near Lakefield, Ontario. The mayor of Selwyn Township, which includes Lakefield, said the township’s council would begin to consider a name change at its next meeting.
The town is home to Lakefield College School, where Prince Andrew was once its most famous student.
Adeel Hassan, a New York-based reporter for The Times, covers breaking news and other topics.
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