I have happened upon Wikipedia’s extensive information on the counties of England, and I am thoroughly flummoxed.
Apparently, England (and perhaps the other parts of the United Kingdom) can be divided up in different ways depending on the purpose, but – maybe I’m just not very smart today – I can’t grasp the basic purpose of the different system. Apparently, all these systems are different –
Traditional or historical counties
Ceremonial counties
Administrative counties
Formal postal counties
Metropolitan and non-metropolitan counties
Are all these different systems still in use? If you are asked what county you are from, which system do you base your answer on?
Can someone explain all these county systems to me in a simple way?
Blimey, where to start? That’s a lot of questions wrapped up in one
The Wikipedia entry on traditional counties is perhaps the best-written, or at least most comprehensive, starting point. These arose over centuries, each having its own history and its own timeframe - some, such as Essex, ultimately derive from Saxon kingdoms. Some historical counties retain their identity to this day, and often have only minor difference in the borders. Others, such as Middlesex, have disappeared for various reasons.
Administrative counties, metropolitan/non-metropolitan counties, unitary authorities: all are to do with the way local government has been structured and re-structured since the 1800s. You don’t really need to know which are which. The names for new counties weren’t plucked from nowhere, they referred to existing regional identities such as Humberside. And the disappearance of counties such as Rutland didn’t remove their local identity, either. What these really mean is who you pay taxes to, who empties the bins and maintains the roads.
Postal counties - these were an attempt by the Royal Mail to accomodate all these changing administrative names & identities, but are now a historical irrelevance.
People won’t ask you “which county are you from”, because not everybody is from a still-existing county, including anyone living in London or Manchester. However, many people in the modern-day incarnation of historical counties still retain strong identities (Yorkshire, Lancashire, Cornwall as three examples). In these cases, people will often respond to the question with the county as an answer - I will certainly answer ‘Suffolk’
But what if you asked them anyway (either “where are you from” or “where do you live”) and they had to give an answer with a county name? What system would be the default system? Would some people just not be able to answer because of the many times it has been changed?
Wigan used to be in Lancashire, yet is now in Greater Manchester. Older folk tend to claim they’re from Lancashire, and football matches between Wigan and Bolton are called a “Lancashire derby”, despite the fact that neither town is actually in Lancashire anymore.
You wouldn’t get a meaningful answer. The response you’d get from most people in London or Manchester would be “none, what do you mean”? (Although some people in east London would say Essex, even though the present-day Essex doesn’t reach that far.)
None of them. There’s no “default” system, it depends whether you’re talking about local administration, or the history of an area, or whatever.
Essentially, all of England was divided into counties centuries ago. From the mid-19th century, London began to centralize powers. In the 19th and especially 20th century, London rearranged boundaries because the growth of large cities overlapping county boundaries made local government difficult. In the early 1970s, the UK government decided to impose a ‘rational’ county size throughout the country, so small counties were dissolved into bigger ones, some were merged, and some bigger ones were split. New counties were established around some large urban areas.
But people often kept the names of old counties in their mailing addresses for reasons of nostalgia and regional identity. And cricket teams, which were founded back in the old days on a county basis, obviously kept their old names and support base in their original home areas.
More recently, county level government has been abolished completely in some areas, so there is only one level of local administration in those areas, hence ‘unitary authorities’.
By US standards, local govt in the UK is weak, with few revenue raising or legislative powers. In England, most policy decisions and funding flow from the UK govt in London. Local govts implement central policies in areas like education, police, social services, health etc. So re-jigging boundaries doesn’t change the way a particular area is run.
And don’t forget the Gerrymandering. Successive governments merge counties, subsume small counties into others and change borders, under the banner of “rationalisation”, but sometimes, shock horror, it alters the voting demographics in the House.
Since I’ve been away, too, the postal system seems to rely more on the nearest postal city than the county. The village where I grew up used to be have a mailing address that said it was in Oxfordshire. Now the official address is “Village Name, Oxford” then the postcode.
Anecdotally, I was registering for something on the phone the other day, and the girl on the other end asked for my address. I told her Bla bla bla, Oxford, postcode, and then she asked “what county is that in”? :smack:
Most of my family live in Greater London, for example, but post is always marked Middlesex. As long as people know where you’re talking about, then all the different systems will likely stay.
The question was asked earlier about Wales and Scotland. I have too much respect for the relative unbrokenness of my skin to attempt to explain what happened in Scotland.
In Wales, though, a combination of rationalization on the basis of population and an appeal to historicity won out. The “traditional” counties of Wales were based on names attached by English Marcher lords to the ancient cantrefs of the Welsh. Brycheiniog, for example, became Brecon, Ceredigion became Cardigan, Morgannwg became Glamorgan, and so on.
With the revision, the territories associated with the historical kingships (or principalities, if you prefer) into which Wales was divided, became again united under the traditional names, or one of them. The northeast resumed the name of Gwynedd, Monmouthshire reverted to its historical name of Gwent, and the east central area resumed its term of Powys (which in its new incarnation included cantrefs south of the original Powys and sometimes historically in loose affiliation with it). Denbigh and Flintshire, traditionally a battleground between Gwynedd and the Earls of Chester, adopted the name Clwyd based on the large river they share. The three areas of the southwest, only briefly united historically under the name Deheubarth, adopted the name of the unit with the longest historical dynasty, Dyfed. And Glamorganshire, with close to half the population of the all Wales, was split into three smaller counties, each centered on an urbanized area.
Yes, since the universal application of postcodes, the Royal Mail’s preferred style has become street address / post town / post code, with no county being required. People will tend to put ‘Middlesex’, or especially ‘Surrey’ or ‘Cheshire’ on their address, when this is no longer correct in any sense, sometimes because they feel this looks more impressive than ‘Croydon’ or ‘Manchester’.
I once had a huge argument with some pillock who lived somewhere on Merseyside because I had addressed a letter to him using the Post Office’s preferred method (as cited by GorillaMan above). He insisted that he lived in Lancashire. That’s as may be, matey, I said, but if you want the Post Office to deliver your letters, you live in Merseyside (or wherever the hell it was).
There is a lot of snobbery in some places. The big reform of 1974 did away with many traditional counties such as Rutland but now these are returning in the form of county boroughs (e.g. Newport in South Wales) or the dreaded “unitary authorities”.
Well, the City of London is not in the historic county of Middlesex – though most of its boundaries are with that historic county, i.e., all the parts not on the Thames, where the City meets with the historic county of Surrey. It would make a little more sense to send something to “Westminster, Middlesex, England”.
London isn’t (and hasn’t ever been, IIRC) in Middlesex, so yes. A better example might be “Harrow, Middlesex, England, United Kingdom” - but in both cases it’d probably get delivered, because as GorillaMan says, postcodes locate you, and are the primary method of doing so. Street and numbers help the individual postmen/women know which door in their route they stick the post in (and to what route the post is assigned).
It’s much harder to change the boundary of a state of the US, once it’s part of the union. The only significant boundary change that I know of is the separation of West Virginia from Virginia. This is because the US is a federal state, where the rights of the individual states are protected, so that Delaware or Vermont would have to agree to a boundary change.
In the UK, it just requires an ordinary act of Parliament to change county boundaries, and there have been several major reorganisations across the whole country in the last 30 or 40 years. The boundaries which are harder to change are those of Sctland, Wales and the City of London, but even those could be changed by a government willing to fight a hard battle with some traditionalists: they have no real constitutional protection.
I suspect this has something to do with what Hemlock mentioned: Local governments in the UK are relatively weak, so the actual dividing lines don’t matter too much. In the US, however, state and local governments do quite a lot, and so moving around the boundaries is probably more consequential than it would be in the UK, and hence less likely to happen.
Plus, in the cases of states, I believe the Constitution has something to say about this:
Maybe we should consider counties to be the equivalent of counties in the US, instead of states? Or maybe even townships–which I can never remember if I am in Rich or Bloom Township. The Townships in IL don’t do alot, but they do determine which school district you go to and other things (water and sewer? Not sure).
I don’t think that every state even has towships.
I could see switching township or rearranging them with no big fuss, but even counties here are pretty set in stone.
But thank you all for making somewhat clearer the obscure references in many a British murder mystery.
Not entirely though. See here for example, noting the asterisk’ed footnote near the bottom.
Many eastern U.S. states changed their counties a lot during their formative years — making life more complicated for people researching their family trees. Census records will place your great-great-great-grandpa in the “wrong” county, making it a little more difficult to find him.
(We’re assuming of course he really is your great-great-great-grandpa. Could be that Great-great-great-grandma had a fling with the town blacksmith.)
