Eastbourne’s great debate: is it ‘Langley’ or ‘Langney’?

ome of your readers may have seen the Facebook ‘Langney/Langley’ debate, which apparently erupted when a coffee shop in the shopping centre spelled it ‘Langley’!

In fact, local people were pronouncing it ‘Langley’ in the 1920s, but also long before that.

The earliest record is in the Domesday Book (1086 AD), where it’s called Langelie - roughly our ‘Langley’.

Some documents from the next 700 years spelled it like our ‘Langney’, but others like our ‘Langley’.

Finally, it settled down into our modern ‘Langney’ about two centuries ago. (The original Anglo-Saxon name probably meant ‘long piece of land by water’ = ‘peninsular’, which it once was, surrounded by the sea.)

A place names expert (who I think doesn’t want to get drawn into the debate!) suggested to me that because the letters ‘L’ and ‘N’ use a similar tongue movement and shape to make the sounds, they may have become a bit interchangeable here.

That might explain the alternative ‘Langley/Langney’ spellings through the ages.

To conclude, I think you can happily pronounce it either ‘Langney’ or ‘Langley’.