It is easy to see why the topics of the OP would be confusing to someone who doesn’t live here.
When I consider that, as a New Jersey resident, the questions of the OP are easy to answer, all I have to do is look across the pond in order to be humbled:
I’m pretty sure that most of the things explained in the video (of which I have always been clueless), are obvious or at least well known to most Brits.
New York, and before you ask, for no real good reason (although Manhattan (and each of the boroughs) is its own county – and the county is referred to as New York. Queens and the Bronx are called by their own names at the county level. Brooklyn is in (is) Kings County and Staten Island is Richmond County.
It would be “New York, NY” I don’t know if there’s official backing for it, but the tradition is that mail going to The Bronx or Brooklyn has “Bronx, NY” or “Brooklyn, NY” in the address. If you are addressing a letter to Queens, you use the village/neighborhood.
i.e. “Flushing, NY”; “Fresh Meadows, NY,” or “Long Island City, NY” And you omit “Queens.”
For Staten Island, you normally say “Staten Island, NY”
Which is where I live, and it is not East Bumblefuck, USA, it is actually quite a nice medium sized city. We have about 100K people. Most people live outside the city and commute in. I actually live in one of the surbubs, called Colonie - won an award for the Safest Municipality with a population under 75,000 in the country.
Should you happen to arrive via Newark airport and plan to take the New Jersey Transit to ‘Penn Station’ to reach Manhattan, make sure to exit the train at New York Penn Station, not Newark Penn Station.
New York City is the Center of the Universe, yo, at least to those who live in and around it. Upstate NY has some medium size cities mostly struggling economically, and a whole lot of fields, trees, and farmland interspersed with housing developments and malls. A former NYC mayor once pooh-poohed Upstate NY as being a wasteland where you have to ‘drive 20 miles in your pickup truck to buy a Sears mens suit, or a gingham dress’. Some of us take our mom’s 50’s era gingham dresses down to Tha Big City and sell them to vintage stores for big bucks. So we have that.
On the first point, I see Heathrow is indeed located in LB Hillingdon. Interesting. I didn’t know that, thanks. On the second point, I agree. I’d find such a thread interesting, along with perhaps three other posters
I was surprised to learn recently that New York State borders Canada. That seems counter-intuitive, until you see how big an area the State actually has.
They are separate cities according to the meaning of “city” under the law of the State of New York. They might not be separate cities under some other definition. Is there a particular definition you had in mind?
This would be (and is) a good argument for metropolitan consolidation, but when one pays taxes to, elects municipal officers for, and is obliged to obey the laws of, a certain town or village, the fact that its developments abut on those of a neighboring community is secondary to the legal aspects. There’s no ‘real’ difference between Nevada and California, for that matter – you can walk across the state line with impunity. Same principle applies to urban developments.
It is one of the most densely populated places on earth though. The difference even between Brooklyn and Manhattan is staggering. I think that’s why just about everyone in the Tri-State area, including New Yorkers, uses the term “The City” to refer to Manhattan only. I live on Long Island now, but if I want to go to Union Hall and drink some beers while playing bocce, I’d say I was going to Brooklyn (or Park Slope). If one of my friend’s bands is playing at Sullivan Hall, I’d say I was going into “The City”
I used to do that all the time coming home from college. (Baltimore’s) Penn Station to (NYC) Penn Station, though oddly I’ve never taken a train to or from a Pennsylvania Station in Pennsylvania.
To be exact, if you considered Manhattan as if it were a city by itself, it would be the fifteenth most densely populated city in the world, after seven cities in India, four cities in the Phillipines, and one city each in Indonesia, France, and Greece:
You never thought it odd that the American and the Canadian sides of Niagara Falls abut, on either side of the waterway between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, and can be accessed from the American side in upstate New York, near Buffalo?
There is also a Newark, California, which is pronounced like the NJ not Delaware city, and a quick search revealed Newarks Ohio and Texas. I have no idea how they are pronounced.
Actually, if you want to be exact, the population density of Manhattan, 70,951 per square mile, would place it 11th in a list of most populous cities, if the island were a city unto itself. This of course speaks nothing of the daytime population of commuters, tourists, and day trippers which is by and large incalculable, but estimated to swell the population by 87%, giving it a population density of about 125,000 per square mile.
So we have that.
