User:Morwen/essay

this is draft but represents my thinking vaguely.

There is a complex and rather unfortunate dispute over British geography. At the core is one fundamental issue


 * what, if anything, does "county" refer to in the British isles

and several others, including


 * what framework for geography should we use
 * what tense do we use for "traditional counties"
 * which version of "traditional counties" should be accept as authorative, if any

also there are naming disputes


 * what area does a name correspond to, if any

this may have different answers depending upon whether the name is a current administrative unit


 * East Riding of Yorkshire -> the modern UA, possibly including Hull
 * West Riding of Yorkshire -> the old West Riding, including South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire

British isles geography is really no different to any other countries - territories have always been changed back and forth, sometimes after long static periods. The only real difference is that only British traditional counties and a historical revisionist movement, and so far as I'm aware, French provinces, don't.

General dispute

 * what does "county" mean?
 * before 1844 this was reasonably unambigous. there were counties, as established by common law, and sometimes statute.  there were also counties corporate which were given the priveleges of counties, but were considered by law to be still geographically part of the original county
 * in 1844, the Parliament of the United Kingdom passed an Act called the Counties (Detatched Parts) 1844 Act which assigned a number of exclaves to their host territories, such as Lindisfarne.
 * it has been later claimed that this wasn't "real" but people at the time thought it was
 * in 1888, county councils were established, based pretty closely on the areas previously in use for Quarter Sessions courts, with the addition of the county of London. the councils covered areas that were newly established by statute and called "administrative counties".  outside of administrative counties were areas similar to the county boroughs, this happened in England and Wales and Scotland. it is claimed that the 1888 Act specifically didn't repeal the traditional counties.
 * at the time, despite any disclaimers, these county boundaries were regarded as new county boundaries. the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica openly refers to say, Cromartyshire in Scotland as being a "former county", and Middlesex as having been reduced in size. although the usage is at times a little inconsistent, there is clearly no house rule against
 * maps made at this time use the 1888 borders (and subsequent minor revisions). however, they don't use the actual adminstrative counties directly - East Sussex and West Sussex were still considered one county Sussex, although with two county councils - and most importantly, any changes to the external boundaries of East Sussex and West Sussex would have been shown as part of Sussex.  For example, Reading and consequently Berkshire was expaneded to cover Caversham in Oxfordshire.
 * at this point these geographic/ceremonial counties supplanted the 'ancient and historic ones' in actual use
 * I therefore contend that these counties became the counties in British folk tradition and therefore they became the "traditional counties", although this is probably not a good term to use.
 * in 1974 the first major revision happened. the Local Government Act 1972 was popularly opposed, but the opposition to it reveals several key features that indicate that the opposition was not aligned with what we today call the traditional counties movement.
 * Two areas that were particularly annoyed at the prospect of losing their status as independent counties were Bristol and the Isle of Wight - neither of which were traditional counties
 * Opposition was voiced in terms of "being ruled from X" - e.g. people in Rutland afraid of being ruled from Leicester, a big city quite distant from it. whereas middle-class people in say Southport were worried about becoming part of a big metropolis based in Liverpool.
 * this fear of political change induced a supposed loyalty to the traditional counties. as people looked into the history of the matter, they decided to reject the 1888 changes as well.  this is a clear case of historical revisionism (in the literal sense).

However, this opposition to the changes was far from universal. Many people just didn't care very much. And since traditional counties people were easily ignored, who cares? The new status quo was the status quo, and was adopted by map-makers and statisticians and the royal mail (in part), and suchforth.

In the 1990s there was a local government reform. this led to the setting up of unitary authorities. this led to the abolition of three of the counties created in 1974 - County of Avon, County of Cleveland, County of Humberside. Of these the only really unpopular one was Humberside, which was geographically silly. The other two are defensible and sensible groupings of areas - Bristol and its suburbs and commuter areas, and the built-up area on the River Tees.

Even today these groups of four local authorities co-operate heavily, and people in particular refer to Avon as if it exists, sometimes calling it by other nicknames "CUBA (County that Used to Be Avon) is one". Teesside happily has a sensible name apart from Cleveland and has maintained that identity.

In two instances, Rutland and Herefordshire, old counties were restored as part of this change (oh, and East Riding of Yorkshire too I suppose). In these cases, people regarded the changes as a rectification of an historically unjust situation, rather than administrative trivia that doesn't matter.

So, in short


 * if the counties became traditional counties by use in popular tradition, they can stop being traditional counties for the same reason
 * they did
 * use by an activist minority who wish to see them restored does not constitute "tradition"
 * use on postal addresses in limited circumstances that was even recommended by the post office (the post office recommended Coventry, Warwickshire; Liverpool, Merseyside; Carlisle, Cumbria; Manchester, Lancashire; and Uxbridge, Middlesex, all at the same time) does not constitute "tradition" either
 * whether or not the "ancient and geographic counties" still exist in law is irrelevant. lots of things in UK law haven't been formally repealed or abolished but are not presumed to still exist.
 * what does it mean for the "ancient and geographic counties" to exist anyway?
 * if we allow the conceptual sense then clearly they exist. as do the 1888 administrative counties, the borders can still be traced, and suchforth.  therefore this is not a useful sense.  clearly the traditional counties people are claiming that they exist in some sense that the 1888 counties no longer do
 * for something to substantively exist, then has to be a detectable difference between it existing and it not existing.
 * formally abolishing the traditional counties would make no such difference. for all intents and purpose they are, like South Wight no longer in existence.
 * it is unlikely that an Act abolishing them would even be acknowledged by the traditional counties supporters as legitimate, valid, enforceable, true, etc. they would argue that parliamentary sovereignty does not apply to geographic nomenclature
 * this gives a very weak definition of "exists", and then rests on the continued tradition of using them.

other issues


 * "Middlesex is a county"
 * "Middlesex is a traditional county"
 * "Middlesex exists"
 * "Traditional counties exist"

the truth value of these are not necessary the same. For example, I can accept that Middlesex exists, but reject that it is a county. I can also accept it has a County Cricket Club but regard that as a historic anomaly that I have no problems with. As far as I'm aware, nobody has ever argued there should be a Greater London Cricket Club, or that Yorkshire County Cricket Club should be split into four, so the lack of such entities shouldn't be taken as indications as to people's opinion in the matter.

Of course, we have no literature to support this because in general traditional counties people have been ignored by the mainstream. The problems are similar to debunking conspiracy theories like the Apollo conspiracy theory. In real life people raising such concerns are politely listened to by the media and government and then just ignored. In wikipedia this leads to nonsense being inserted unchallenged in articles.

I don't consider myself a "supporter" of the LGA 1972 counties. I'd shed no tears if they were torn down and replaced with a system based more closely on the traditional counties.

Scotland
In Scotland there was no 1844 act. the pre-1888 "ancient and geographic counties" are therefore indisputably absurd as a geographic system, particularly Cromartyshire. also, the word "county" was not re-used because the regions of Scotland bore no resemblance to the former administrative counties of Scotland.

I believe there is no ambiguity in the use of the word "county" in normal discourse in Scotland - it refers to the 1888 to 1975 administrative counties, that have been adopted by popular tradition.

It is of note that, unlike in England and Wales although the Postal Counties were not changed, nontheless plenty of people started using things like Strathclyde and Tayside as part of their address! Spontaneously.

Could review letters pages of newspapers to provide usage statistics about this.

Wales
In Wales we have the problem of lack of continuity, which doesn't really exist so much in Scotland and England. Specifically, e.g. Monmouthshire exists as an LGA 1972 "county" now, but has no continuity at all with the old Monmouthshire and covers only half its area.

This sort of exists in Scotland, see the particularly badly named Renfrewshire, and in England - at least Rutland existed as a district from 1974 to 1997... whereas Herefordshire didn't.