Steven wrote: ↑Fri Jun 18, 2021 08:01
Telstarbox wrote: ↑Thu Jun 17, 2021 22:47
I know that some council districts have been merged recently such as those in Buckinghamshire and Suffolk, but is land ever moved between districts nowadays?
Absolutely all the time! This is exactly the reason that historic counties (
which haven't changed since the Detached Parts Act of 1848) are preferred as a static geography over administrative areas.
I wanted to come back to this because I wasn't sure that this was quite true. And bearing in mind that maps showing county boundaries before 1974 drew Warwickshire as including the whole of Birmingham in its present form (almost anyway, there have been some minor changes since then), I needed to check this. Birmingham - which has always been in Warwickshire no matter how large or small - has grown considerably since 1848. The area I live in - Kings Heath - was absorbed in 1911 as part of the
Kings Norton and Northfield Urban District. This was historically part of Worcestershire, and there are bits and pieces of evidence around the area that provide evidence for this, such as the recently-closed North Worcestershire Golf Club in Northfield, and a building on a side street near me which clearly had something to do with the County Council, as there is the emblem of the Worcestershire pear above the door. Not all of the Urban District was absorbed, but the article states that "The Urban District was finally abolished in 1911 as part of the provisions of the Greater Birmingham Act, when much of its area was incorporated into the County Borough of Birmingham, and thereby became associated with Warwickshire." And this is reflected in the mapping of much of the 20th century.
Now I know that Steven will say "But that's just Wikipedia, so what?". So I looked further.
This page shows how the city boundaries expanded from 1838 up to 1931, after which they remained unchanged until 1974. The areas absorbed were variously part of Worcestershire, Staffordshire and Warwickshire - but the key piece of information for me is footnote 22, which reads "22. By Art. V of the order altering the city boundaries, the boundaries of the counties of Staffs., Warws. and Worcs. were correspondingly altered so that the whole city should be in the county of Warwick for civil purposes." This says to me that there was a schedule attaching to the Greater Birmingham Act of 1911 covering how county boundaries were henceforth to be drawn. Later additions to the city were already within Warwickshire, meaning that no further change to county boundaries were necessary.
Something similar happened in Sheffield, when some southern suburbs that lay within Derbyshire were transferred into the County Borough of Sheffield, and became part of the West Riding for these "civil purposes", whatever they were. And again, the mapping, including road atlases, show Dore and Totley and Abbeydale and so on within the West Riding of Yorkshire. It may have happened to other cities as well, if you know please do tell.
Then we come to Dudley - in 1966 Dudley's borough boundaries were expanded to take in most of Sedgley, Coseley and Brierley Hill, all of which were in Staffordshire, while Dudley itself had been a detached part of Worcestershire, one not "tidied up" by the Counties (Detached Parts) Act of 1848. Several sources that I have found state that as a result Dudley itself was transferred into Staffordshire. This one I'm not so sure of, even though it might make sense - maps continued to show Dudley in its island of Worcs within Staffs, and the people of Dudley itself would, I think, have been annoyed to be told that they were in any sense Staffordians, whereas the folk of Kings Norton and Northfield seem to have accepted their transition, and allegiance to, for example, Warwickshire cricket club is pretty universal. Of course, the fact that Worcestershire continued to play county matches in Dudley up until the demise of the Dudley cricket ground due to mining subsidence would have helped affirm their allegiance. Against that, however, we have
this. This shows the history of Dudley as a registration area, and there is a note saying "All the areas in Dudley registration district became part of the county of Staffordshire on 1.4.1966." And
this page seems to back it up. So perhaps it is true that Dudley moved to Staffs, but it never seeped into peoples' consciousness. And it only lasted eight years anyway before the 1974 reorganisation.
Why is this important? Well, it affects the baseline that we use for traditional counties. Some of the post-1848 changes were pretty significant, and as I say were the basis for the mapping that followed their implementation. So perhaps it would make sense to use the final "frozen in time" boundaries as of 1974 for our wiki? I think it makes sense, what do you all think?