I went to school in Brighton on the South Coast of the UK - a fairly posh school if I'm honest - and we used to refer to "the village" when we meant the surrounding neighbourhood which, ironically, was called Kemptown which is not a town at all, but an area of Brighton which is now a city, but was a town when I lived there. Kemptown was often called Camptown because it is a very LBGT-centric part of a very LBGT-centric town (city), and was recently voted 26th coolest place to live in the world. It is, as @Mogador states, a funny old language from a funny old country. We like it though. On the whole.
Except in the Black Country where it just means going anywhere with shops, and anyone saying “I’m going to town”* gets asked “which one?”** *”Ahm gooin’ up tow’un” **”Wissun?”
And in leafy Surrey - going to town means doing a good job... "you've really gone to town on that bicycle" doesn't (necessarily) mean that you have ridden it anwhere, but have stripped and polished every last nut and bolt...
And then there's the confusion over Uptown and Downtown. When my mom used to talk about going Downtown she meant to the upscale center of the city, but some people use Uptown to mean that. So for them does Downtown mean the downtrodden or grungy/ugly/avoid-at-all-costs parts? Hmmm...
That phrase is used the same way in the American South. Not sure about other parts of the country. I haven't noticed it much here in the Rocky Mountains.
It's alive and well in the midwest, or at least it was decades ago. Come to think of it I'm not sure I've heard it in a decade or two. It may have gone the way of "Cool beans". Possibly it was replaced by 'really gettin' down on it', though that one might also have faded somewhat. Meaning anybody 40 or over would be familiar with those phrases, but the youngsters might not use them at all anymore. Who knows what the youth are saying these days,with all their Tic Tok lingo. It probably changes every month or so.
Compounding the problem of nomenclature here in the US is a civic promoter's propensity to name a populated place a "city" regardless of the number of people who live there... hence places like Ellicott City, Maryland, and City of Industry, California, which got those names when they were still towns. I don't know if there are really any valid ways of determining what's a town and what's a city, mostly because the boundaries of populated areas can be fairly nebulous. The city of Sacramento, for instance, is located within Sacramento County, and people living outside the city proper still have mailing addresses of "Sacramento, California." So what is the city, really?
The there was The City of Paris, which was a San Francisco department store back in the 1960s. That name confused the young me all to hell.
We too have "going to town on it" but used in different context. Going to town on your bicycle around here doesn't involve pedalling or polishing but more likely taking a crowbar to beat the hell out of it. Placenames are funny things. Many of ours are anglecized versions of Gaelic, so meaningless unless translated. There's a village on the road to Cork called Watergrasshill, which sounds like a discussion of options that the clerk noted prematurely. Near to that, there's New Two Pot House, which sounds like a declaration of some sort to those living in Two Pot House or maybe Old Single Pot House.
Almost all English villages have a church, farm(s), one or more pub or had a pub, had a shop (I say had because a lot of village shops have shut in recent years). Stream or river, older houses in the traditional styl/ materials depending on location. Remember that there are not only building features like a pub but also the geographical features in the village - hill side, river hills in distance, lake, wood. What if any industry did this place have or a nearby place have? The oldest part of a traditional English village is near the church and sometimes near the stream or river. Be clear about whether you are having a village or town as the layout and type of buildings is likely to be different. To be simple you could base your place on a real place but change the name or pick features from a few places to make your new place. Use Wikipedia or similar to look in more detail about these places and the origin of the name.
I realized now that I thought the terms downtown/uptown came from NYC, where downtown refers to the financial district in the south of Manhattan, and uptown is the more rich in the north of Manhattan . And that is only because I watched too many movies. And many English villages also have assembly rooms or town halls.
Thanks for clarifying that. I knew about uptown/downtown Manhattan but never could figure out which was which. In Arkansas, people talked about going uptown or just to town. In California, folks said downtown. Here people say downtown or town, often prefaced by some version of, "F***, I gotta go into town today." Downtown refers specifically to the older business area which is located along two east-west streets and maybe four north-south streets.
