Walter Menzies:
The game of the name

Doesn't matter whether it's a mall (Liverpool One), a town (one Oldham), a city (Manchester - original modern), a county (Cumbria- Britain's nuclear county*) or a nation (Cool Britannia)...everybody has an opinion on names, logos, colours and straplines. Guaranteed to electrify even the doziest. Acres of vox pops in local papers. Pages of deranged letters to the editor in green ink. Mayhem in the blogosphere. Craziness on the phone-ins.

Surely this is all marketing froth and we should be investing in something useful like the Olympics or more Bobbies on the beat? No. Place branding has proved itself through the ages. The Romans did a good job with their empire: even the donkeys, the white vans of antiquity, knew that they were Romans. One of the pioneers of branding, Lord Leverhulme of Pears soap and countless other branded products fame, didn't miss a trick with Port Sunlight.

And places are competing are they not? Yes. Famously, Glasgow decided that it was miles better (than Edinburgh - and everywhere else). Now it's moved on to: Glasgow - Scotland with Style (cheerily head-butting Edinburgh...no style...feral bag ladies roaming the streets, fur coats, nae knickers and moths fluttering out of their wild hair).

But you can't just make up names? You can...Cannibal (or Cantril as strangers sometimes referred to it) Farm in Knowsley was rebranded Stockbridge Village. Manchester's uber-hip Northern Quarter is a complete fabrication...and the name has stuck. Only time will tell, but people are starting to speak of Spinningfields.

A dangerous game surely? Certainly is. Like public art, place branding can be a triumph (I love New York) or go horribly wrong. Early New Labour Cool Britannia - Gerry Halliwell in her union jack frock and Noel swigging champers at Number 10 - turned sour. It's already a historical footnote. Cool Britannia will be remembered only by the 1967 Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band song of that name.

Northwest is a direction, not a place. It's like living in a motorway sign

Remember Manchester's "We're up and going"? Exactly. This 1997 nonsense (Up what - ourselves? Going where - Strangeways? KwikSave? Hell?) enraged the Manc creatives. They formed the McEnroe Group, tagline "you cannot be serious" and successfully drove a stake through its heart.

Better be careful then? Careful is not the same as boring and lacking in ambition. Think of France: Burgundy, or Germany: Bavaria or Italy: Tuscany. Their regions have wonderful names you can feel and smell and lick. And here: who wants to lick the East Midlands or England's Northwest? Northwest is a direction, not a place. It's like living in a motorway sign.

So it's two steps forward and one step back? Yes. The luckless inhabitants of Vale Royal - quite a classy 1974 invention - are about to find themselves living in a road sign - West Cheshire - when their council is abolished. On the other hand, it's goodbye to East Lancashire (where?) and hello to Pennine Lancashire or PL: "your new favourite place".

What does the future hold? The places will tell you themselves: get ready for the talking bollards and the singing bus shelters and chatty parking meters. There will be no escape. You might not know where you are. But they will.

*All right - I made that one up.