The names of the streets in Bargeres are due to the urban planner André de Jong, who died in 1995. He came up with the names when building neighborhoods and industrial estates. For example, he was a fan of explorers and he gave various street names on the industrial estate names of explorers, such as David Livingstone and James Cook.
De Jong was not sure what to do when it came to naming the street names in Bargeres, so Henk Jeurink of the Southeast Drenthe Historical Association asked that question. “I had bought a booklet for my wife with all the places in Drenthe in it. André wanted to borrow that booklet”, Jeurink remembers.
De Jong then took all the names for the greens of Bargeres from that booklet. But why do they end in -brink and not in -street or -road?
“He then said: ‘All villages are green villages and if we take all villages, we will just put green behind them.’ That’s how they got their names,” says Jeurink. De Jong did not see it as a problem that not all Drenthe villages actually have a village green.
How is it possible that there are green names called Alerder, Ekseler and Spehorner? “That is a corruption that is in that booklet. Alerder is an old bastard Drenthe name of Aalden. The same applies to Ekseler, that is Exloo, suddenly the ‘x’ has disappeared and there is a ‘ks’. Just like with sex, that is sometimes with an ‘x’ and sometimes with a ‘ks’,” says Jeurink. “The Spehornerbrink seems to come from Spier, but I’ve never heard anyone call Spier Spehorn.”
The name Alerderbrink comes from Aalden and it is called a brink, because almost all places in Drenthe have a brink. Aalden does not have a Brink street name. Yet there is a green in the village, around Oud Aalden.
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