How to get rid of some parts in a string variable?
One possibility is to use gsub function to find the first ' - ' and remove everything before and also remove the dash with the space before and after that.

&gt; tmp
[1] "965 - Vehicle parking area"
&gt; gsub("^.*? - ","", tmp)
[1] "Vehicle parking area"


If there are two spaces: 

&gt; tmp &lt;- "965  -  Vehicle parking area"
&gt; sub("^.*?  -  ","", tmp)
[1] "Vehicle parking area"