The Dunedin City Council is righting the wrongs of street names past and agreed to drop the erroneous "e'' from Ayreshire Dr in Mosgiel.
The council's infrastructure services committee unanimously agreed to rename the street - one of 10 in the Highland Park subdivision in Mosgiel - to Ayrshire Dr to be consistent with the spelling of the historic county in southwest Scotland.
The renaming of the street, the only matter raised during the committee's meeting yesterday, was passed without debate or dissent.
The committee also agreed to amend the council's road name guidelines so the spelling of future street names would be checked before being considered by the committee.
Renaming the street would come with costs to the council, as the correction would have to be communicated to government departments, such as Land Information New Zealand.
However, those costs were not discussed at the meeting.
The subdivision's developer had agreed to replace the street signs in the subdivision.
The misspelling attracted the ire of Prof Liam McIlvanney, the Stuart Chair in Scottish Studies at the University of Otago, who said the street name would "stand not as a tribute to our Scottish forbears but as a permanent reminder of the ignorance and carelessness of their descendants''.
The error was noticed by the subdivision's developer and he began the process to correct it.
