• FOR anyone over a certain age, Eric Gordon’s pseudonym – John Gulliver – had a special significance, (Eric Gordon: Tributes to Camden’s great chronicler as founder and editor of CNJ dies at 89, April 8).

But it was more Kentish Townian than Jonathan Swiftian. In the 1920s the introduction of automatic dialling meant that the names of local telephone exchanges had to be translated into numbers.

The first three digits of an exchange name became dialling prefixes. South Kensington was KEN, which translated into numbers as 536.

By the time the GPO’s allocators of names reached Kentish Town, KEN had been taken, so a non-significant and almost poetic name was taken.

GULliver was chosen, 485. These numbers live on in many landlines in NW5.

In the late 1960s this system of named exchanges was phased out, to be replaced by all-figure phone numbers. But for some – and I suspect Eric Gordon was one – these exchange names kept their resonance.

ROBIN KINROSS, NW5