Questions regarding London, England

Perhaps someone could answer these questions:

  1. Which English county/counties is London in? Is there a “County London”.

  2. Which counties are the “Home Counties”?

  3. Is London more a conurbation - It contains the cities of Westminter and Southwark. Are these cities in their own right?

  4. Would the M25 be considered the boundary of London - is there a specific place where it stops?

  1. There is no County of London, it’s just called Greater London

  2. The home counties are: Berkshire (the one I’m currently posting from incidently), Oxfordshire, Hampshire, Surrey and possibly Buckinghamshire, and Bedfordshire (I’m not sure if there is an exact defintion but any definiton always includes Berkshire)

  3. The term ‘city’ for Westminster and Southwark just refers to their charter.

  4. The M25 doesn’t end, it’s an orbital motorway. M25 could be considered a boundary, but it’s not really a precise one as it goes through the countryside of several other counties.

oops I forget Essex and Kent, which are two other home counties.

and Sussex

The English are forever adjusting, merging, dividing, abolishing or renaming their counties. I think there was a County of London at one time - at any rate, there was certainly a London County Council, which was replaced by the Greater London Council, which was abolished, before the mayoralty was established . . . you get the picture. There was also a County of Middlesex which was in what is now considered part of Greater London. I have no idea if it still has any existence.

There was and still is a City of London, which has a very small area and was never coterminous with the County of London, if there ever was one. The City of London and the City of Westminster function as two of the boroughs that go to make up Greater London. All the other boroughs - Hackney, Wimbledon, Southwark - are called boroughs, not cities.

Surely Southwark is still a city though as it has a cathedral in it.

This is no more than a rule of thumb. Westminster has always been a city even though there was no cathedral (until the Roman Catholics erected one). There is still no Cathedral of the established church. Oxford was a city long before there was a Cathedral. Chelmsford has a Cathedral but is not a city. And so forth.

It’s the London Borough of Southwark, not the City of Southwark.

AFAIK, the definition of a ‘city’ in England is that it possesses a cathedral or university.

It still exists as a postal area but administarively I believe it’s now split between the London Borough of Harrow (and possibly other LBs) and Hertfordshire. Of course it’s not as simple as that because Herts has two tier local government so in some parts of Middlesex you’d have Hertfordshire County Council and, for example, Three Rivers District Council as your local councils.

On London… London is the area covered by the 32 London Boroughs and the City Corporation. Some of the area inside the M25 isn’t London (e.g. some of Three Rivers IIRC).

Londoners also now have two tier local government since the establishment of the Greater London Authority.

I always thought the Home Counties were all the ones that are adjacent to London (which would also include Hertfordshire). Not sure though.

I’m pretty sure this is wrong these days. It’s got sth to do with a charter from the Queen. IIRC they created some new cities for the millenium.

cite.

…and toadyism. :wink:

Mmm… good point, they were for the Jubilee not the Millenium.

They are called the Home Counties because this is where a lot of the people who work in central London have their homes and from where commute daily.

There certainly did used to be a London County…at least in the world of English cricket. The cricket teams of the English championship are organized by county, and there are currently 18 first-class counties. The county of Surrey has its ground in London south of the Thames, and Middlesex is north. But neither of those called “London County”…that refers to a team put together by the greatest English cricketer of all, WG Grace, at the turn of the (19/20th) century. It was really a team of barnstormers captained by Grace and based in London. I’m not sure if Grace was angling to get this team accepted into the Championship or not, but they played a number of exhibitions against Championship counties, without much success. (Here’s a scorecard of them getting blown away by MCC.)

Other than that, “county of London” never existed. London and its suburbs were always parts of Surrey and Middlesex until 1973(?), when the county of Middlesex disappeared, along with parts of Hertfordshire, Surrey, and Essex, into the Greater London Council.

Read the whole article. It explains that a previous batch (Brighton and Hove, Inverness and Wolverhampton) had been created for the Millennium.

Not necessarily. I have long assumed that the term derived from the ‘Home Circuit’ of the English assizes and it would appear that the eminent historian of English local government, Alan Everitt, suspects the same.

http://mamaynooth.freeservers.com/everitt.htm

Not quite correct as the City of London, along with a number of other major English cities, was always considered to be a county in its own right. In such cases, the city had its own sheriff (or, as in London, two of them), commission of the peace, assizes and militia.

The point about the link between cathedrals and cities is that it only applies to ancient cathedrals on the basis of long usage. Southwark and Chelmsford did not become episcopal sees until the early twentieth century, by which time both had long been formally incorporated as boroughs. The obvious counterexample to a supposed link with a university is Cambridge, which was only granted city status in the late 1940s.

The M25 now serves as an unofficial boundary for Greater London, in the same way as the Beltway in Washington, D.C. One occasionally hears people speaking about it as such.