Argleton was a

phantom settlement Phantom settlements, or paper towns, are settlements that appear on maps but do not actually exist. They are either accidents or copyright traps. Notable examples include Argleton, Lancashire, UK and Beatosu and Goblu, US. Agloe, New York, was ...

that appeared on

Google Maps Google Maps is a web mapping platform and consumer application offered by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panoramic views of streets ( Street View), real-time traffic conditions, and rou ...

and

Google Earth Google Earth is a computer program that renders a 3D computer graphics, 3D representation of Earth based primarily on satellite imagery. The program maps the Earth by superimposition, superimposing satellite images, aerial photography, and geog ...

but was later removed by Google. The supposed location of Argleton was between the

A59 road The A59 is a major road in England which is around long and runs from Wallasey, Merseyside to York, North Yorkshire. The alignment formed part of the Trunk Roads Act 1936, being then designated as the A59. It is a key route connecting Merseysi ...

and Town Green railway station within the

civil parish In England, a civil parish is a type of administrative parish used for local government. It is a territorial designation which is the lowest tier of local government below districts and counties, or their combined form, the unitary authority ...

of Aughton in

West Lancashire West Lancashire is a local government district with borough status in Lancashire, England. The council is based in Ormskirk, and the largest town in the borough is Skelmersdale. At the 2011 Census, the population of the borough was 110,685 ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

, in an area of empty fields.Lefort, Rebecca (31 October 2009).
Mystery of Argleton, the 'Google' town that only exists online
". ''Telegraph.co.uk''. Retrieved on 6 November 2009.Hickman, Leo (3 November 2009).
Welcome to Argleton, the town that doesn't exist
". ''Guardian.co.uk''. Retrieved on 6 November 2009. Data from

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

is used by other online information services, which consequently treated Argleton as a real settlement within the L39 postcode area. As a result, Argleton also appeared in numerous listings for things such as estate and letting agents, employment agencies and weather, but although the people, businesses and services listed are all in fact real, they are elsewhere in the same postcode district.Ramachandran, Arjun (4 November 2009).
Argleton: the phantom town that Google created
". ''The Sydney Morning Herald''. Retrieved on 7 November 2009.

Media interest

The anomaly was first written about by Mike Nolan, head of web services at nearby

Edge Hill University Edge Hill University is a campus-based public university in Ormskirk, Lancashire, England, which opened in 1885 as Edge Hill College, the first non-denominational teacher training college for women in England, before admitting its first male st ...

, who posted about it on his blog in September 2008. In early 2009 it was investigated further by Nolan's colleague, Roy Bayfield, who walked to the area shown on Google Maps to see if there was anything special about it. Bayfield commented about it on his own blog and described the place as being "deceptively normal" as well as exploring the concept of a non-existent place using the tropes of magic realism and

psychogeography Psychogeography is the exploration of urban environments that emphasizes interpersonal connections to places and arbitrary routes. It was developed by members of the Letterist International and Situationist International, which were revolutiona ...

; the story was later picked up by the local media. By November 2009, news of the non-existent town had received global media attention, and "Argleton" became a

hashtag A hashtag is a metadata tag that is prefaced by the hash (also known as pound or octothorpe) sign, ''#''. On social media, hashtags are used on microblogging and photo-sharing services such as Twitter or Instagram as a form of user-generated ...

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

.Jaleel, Gemma (5 November 2009).
Advertiser leads way over mystery Google Map town Argleton
". ''Ormskirk & Skelmersdale Advertiser''. Retrieved on 7 November 2009. As of 23 December 2009, a Google search for "Argleton" was generating around 249,000 hits, and the

domain names A domain name is a string that identifies a realm of administrative autonomy, authority or control within the Internet. Domain names are often used to identify services provided through the Internet, such as websites, email services and more. As ...

argleton.com (with the message, "What the hell are they talking about? We, the good citizens of Argleton do exist. Here we are now!") and argleton-village.co.uk (a spoof website describing the history of Argleton, famous "Argletonians" and current events in the fictional village) were claimed. Other websites were selling merchandise with slogans such as "I visited Argleton and all I got was this T-shirt" and "New York, London, Paris, Argleton". On 18 September 2010, the BBC Radio 4 programme ''

Punt PI ''Punt PI'' is a fact-based comedy radio series on BBC Radio 4 in which Steve Punt investigates mysteries in Britain. Format Each episode is 30 minutes long and there are three or four episodes in each series. Starting with series two, every ep ...

'' hosted by

Steve Punt Stephen Mark Punt (born 15 September 1962)Mr Stephen Mark Punt
company-director-c ...

investigated the case of Argleton.

Explanations

One possible explanation for the presence of Argleton is that it was added deliberately as a

copyright trap Fictitious or fake entries are deliberately incorrect entries in reference works such as dictionaries, encyclopedias (including Wikipedia), maps, and directories. There are more specific terms for particular kinds of fictitious entry, such as Mo ...

, or " paper town" as they are sometimes known, to catch any violations of copyright, though such bogus entries are typically much less obvious. It has been noted that "Argle" seems to echo the word "Google", while the name is also an

anagram An anagram is a word or phrase formed by rearranging the letters of a different word or phrase, typically using all the original letters exactly once. For example, the word ''anagram'' itself can be rearranged into ''nag a ram'', also the word ...

of "Not Large" and "Not Real G", with the letter G perhaps representing Google.Mystery of phantom Google village
". ''BBC Liverpool'' (3 November 2009). Retrieved on 7 November 2009. Alternatively, it has been suggested that "Argleton" is merely a misspelling of "Aughton", although both names appear on the map. "Argle" is also a somewhat common

metasyntactic variable A metasyntactic variable is a specific word or set of words identified as a placeholder in computer science and specifically computer programming. These words are commonly found in source code and are intended to be modified or substituted before ...

, the kind of

placeholder name Placeholder names are words that can refer to things or people whose names do not exist, are tip of the tongue, temporarily forgotten, are not relevant to the salient point at hand, are to avoid stigmatization, are unknowable/unpredictable in ...

s used by computer programmers. " Argle-bargle" is slang for "an argument" or "to argue." Professor Danny Dorling, president of the

Society of Cartographers The Society of Cartographers (SoC) was an association of cartographers based in the United Kingdom. The Society was founded in 1964 at the University of Glasgow and was originally named the Society of University Cartographers. In 1989 the Societ ...

, considered it more likely that Argleton was nothing more than an "innocent mistake". A spokesman for Google stated that "While the vast majority of this information is correct there are occasional errors", and encouraged users to report any issues directly to their data provider. Data for Google Maps are provided by Netherlands-based

Tele Atlas Tele Atlas is a Netherlands-based company founded in 1984 which delivers digital maps and other dynamic content for navigation and location-based services, including personal and in-car navigation systems, and provides data used in a wide range ...

; the latter was unable to explain how such anomalies could get into their database, but said that Argleton would be removed from the map. By May 2010, the location had been removed from Google Maps.

References

External links

Argleton: the world
''The Guardian'' 30 November 2009 unmapped
Punt PI
(Radio 4 programme on Argleton) {{Authority control Fictional populated places in England Google Maps Fictitious entries Aughton, West Lancashire

Media interest

Explanations

See also

References

External links