Campaign to ditch town's 'erroneous' hyphens

A town which has had its name spelt wrong for more than a century is finally getting a correction thanks to Google agreeing to remove "erroneous" hyphens.

Dubbed the "great dash debate", people in Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire, say inaccurate dashes started to appear after Great Western Railway (GWR) added the punctuation to the Wiltshire town's railway sign in 1899.

Now the town council and local businesses have launched a campaign to claim back their name and are calling on Tripadvisor, Wikipedia and GWR to also support them.

Tom Vaughton, founder and CEO of Varn Search Marketing, began the campaign after spotting there were 5,800 "erroneous hyphens" appearing online.

Councillor Sam Blackwell, mayor of the town, said: "[The] great dash debate has been rolling on for decades, but as a town council we are clear that our town's name is perfect without punctuation."

When contacted by the BBC with details of the hyphen campaign, Google promised to take action within 48 hours.

Before 1899, Bradford on Avon was written without hyphens.

But when GWR added the dashes to the station title - because it didn't want the town to be confused with other similarly named areas - the dashes started to creep into popular use.

A GWR spokesperson said its hyphens will be kept in place at the station as "any change" would need to go through a "raft of industry-wide systems".

They said while the rail company "applauded" the campaign, "this is one line in the sand we won't be crossing any time soon".

The BBC, and other news outlets, also have included hyphens in Bradford on Avon in the past. Even the official OS map of the area includes the controversial dashes.

Whether Bradford on Avon should be hyphenated has been actively discussed by Wikipedia editors over a number of years.

The entry was moved to the unhyphenated verison in 2005, before being swapped back to Bradford-on-Avon after a community discussion in 2018.

A Wikipedia spokesperson told BBC Wiltshire: "That history is actually a useful illustration of how Wikipedia works: disagreements about facts, terminology or naming are discussed openly by people, with the reasoning and evidence visible for anyone to scrutinise.

"Where new or stronger evidence emerges, Wikipedia also has established processes through which editors can revisit previous decisions."

A Google spokesperson said they had a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources.

"We have reviewed the request and will remove the hyphens in Bradford on Avon," they added.

Vaughton said his team is currently working on updating the online mentions that use the dashes.

"The horizontal hate crimes have persisted for far too long. Now, Varn is taking a stand," he said.

"We're grateful for the support of Bradford on Avon Town Council and GWR to sort the physical signs.

"AI loves an em-dash, and it also loves adding erroneous hyphens to our town's name. We can't let the robots win this one, so we're doing what we can to change the data that they use."

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