The Great C Road hunt!

[ravenbluemoon]

I had information through today from Barnsley (S. Yorks) and on having a quick glance through, the roads crossing into Kirklees (W. Yorks) have the same number. So there's definitely some co-operation between the West and the South. Whether or not this is the post 1974 metropolitan counties or the old West Riding, the jury is still out. I'd be interested to see what East Yorkshire comes up with when they update their interactive map as the area around Goole used to be in the West Riding.

I also had a very quick reply from North Lincolnshire today - they've simply directed me to their online map which shows Class IIIs, but no numbering. There's a few listed on the wiki from somewhere, and also the C-roads page on Roads.org.uk gives evidence for a few numbers in Scunthorpe - one sign confirms that Scotter Road shares the number with its counterpart in Lincolnshire.

[Euan]

From what I have seen elsewhere, some C road number systems look as if they were established under the old county councils whereas others originated from authorities that were created in the 1970s or perhaps later - typically in areas where the administrative boundaries have significantly changed to the point where massive duplication of numbers would exist under the old systems making them unworkable. To give an example, the four-digit numbering system across Cumbria probably would have replaced numbers from separate systems in Cumberland and Westmorland as well as from part of an old Lancashire system. On the other hand, if you were to remove the suffixes from the C road numbers across Dumfries and Galloway you would be left with numbers roughly fitting neatly with the old counties of Dumfriesshire, Kirkcudbrightshire and Wigtownshire. In that instance the new regional council didn't seem to bother changing any numbers and instead just added letters to the existing numbers to distinguish them from each other. Ultimately each area appears to have made its own decisions on how to carry forward local numbering when administrative units change, regardless of what others have done.

In the case of the South and West Yorkshire authorities, I reckon there would probably be a strong chance of the numbering being based on the former West Riding of Yorkshire - it would seem a bit odd for two completely separate metropolitan counties to decide to share a new numbering system between them if they had one already. Hopefully ravenbluemoon will hear back from more authorities which would give an even clearer picture. Given that a significant area of the former West Riding of Yorkshire now sits within North Yorkshire, if we had sufficient information from all of the relevant councils it might be worth looking out for any major number gaps in the system used by the councils in South/West Yorkshire which would imply that it is indeed a West Riding-based system used across the area.

[Chris Bertram]

North Yorkshire also includes part of the old East Riding, mostly the area between the River Derwent and the modern county boundary,

[ravenbluemoon]

North Yorkshire also includes part of the old East Riding, mostly the area between the River Derwent and the modern county boundary,

Ah yes, I forgot that area moved counties. North Yorkshire's numbering is starting to make a little more sense in areas, particularly the higher numbers (these are generalisations, some existing numbers may have extended into the "annexed" areas:

- Selby area (ex-WR): Mostly C290 - C348 with a few outliers
- South of the Derwent (ex-ER): C349 - C370
- Harrogate (ex-WR) Mainly C2xx but there's a batch of C37x routes
- Craven (ex-WR): C380-C404, there's a few low numbers that were probably ex-NR

Ignore the C42x routes, they're new ones created by bypasses etc.

You can kind of work out where the old borders are by looking at the interactive map and hovering over the road traces: North Yorkshire Class III Roads.

As Euan suggests, it seems that the old Ridings created their numbers pre-1974, then when counties got rearranged/created, some roads got renumbered to avoid clashes. Once I get the full picture I might create a Wiki page on Class III numbering in Yorkshire as it's quite interesting (for me anyway).

[Steven]

To give an example, the four-digit numbering system across Cumbria probably would have replaced numbers from separate systems in Cumberland and Westmorland as well as from part of an old Lancashire system.

Though ironically, as Cumbria no longer exists, it looks like both Cumberland, and Westmorland and Furness have ended up recycling the old Cumbria CC numbers, for now at least.

[ravenbluemoon]

I wonder what will happen to the numbering for the two halves of Northamptonshire, not that we have any info on the old county yet?

I've had a couple more Yorkshire replies:
- Hull: Seem to have "done a Leicester" and used a four digit numbering system for each named segment of route. Though it isn't as bad as the Leicester situation as Hull don't change road names as often. Traces added to the Hull Council Page.
- Bradford: They sent me a spreadsheet and a nice colour PDF showing A,B and C routes - date of printing today, did they do that just for me? I'm touched . Anyway, most traces are added to the Bradford Council Page except for a very curious C111 - it doesn't seem to be a consistent route, jumping all over the place. Now I've created our wiki page and compared it to their map, it seems like it is the number for a whole bunch of unrelated routes! Typo, or something weirder? I'll probably add them all onto one page at some point.

Just waiting on Leeds and Rotherham now. Deadline is the 23rd or 26th depending on how you count the days, so these may well be looked at when I get back from a Midsommer break. The "West Riding Question" is still inconclusive, but if Leeds don't have 100+ Class IIIs there's going to be a lot of unused numbers that may have existed pre-1974...

[ravenbluemoon]

Leeds have sent a response, they have numbered Class IIIs. Curiously, they "have considered (my request) under the Environmental Information Regulations 2004, as opposed to under the Freedom of Information Act 2000. This is because the information you have requested is information involving ‘activities’ and ‘administrative measures’ which are likely to affect elements of the environment under Reg
2(1)(c). I am advised that both the domestic and European courts give wide meaning to the Regulations and have indicated that they will adopt a broad construction of the definition of environmental information."

I have been given 4 PDFs, of 100 pages each, 31 roads on each page... might take a little while to sift through it

Edit: I notice that they've designated the Inner Ring Road as "A5864(M)", I found a new motorway

[Chris5156]

I have been given 4 PDFs, of 100 pages each, 31 roads on each page... might take a little while to sift through it

Hell's bells! There are only about 36 non-trunk classified roads in Leeds, so this suggests there are 12,364 C-roads! Is it actually just a list of every single road within the council boundary?

[ravenbluemoon]

I have been given 4 PDFs, of 100 pages each, 31 roads on each page... might take a little while to sift through it

Hell's bells! There are only about 36 non-trunk classified roads in Leeds, so this suggests there are 12,364 C-roads! Is it actually just a list of every single road within the council boundary?

Ha, no, it's every single road in their area! Just been through and done a cut/paste job of the C-roads, and lumped the text file into a spreadsheet, it's more like 45, on 150 different entries... so pretty standard for an authority of that size

One can only imagine if every single little back-to-back street in the city was designated as a Class III... I think I'd give the whole thing up

[ravenbluemoon]

A quick one - Rotherham have supplied me with a spreadsheet with numbered C roads, so that's all areas of Yorkshire (plus ex Cleveland) now covered.

Only had a quick peek as I'm out in Sweden for midsommar, but the numbering is as I expected.

[ravenbluemoon]

A bit of a general update now I've completed West Yorkshire:
- Leeds: A lot of unused numbers can be attributed to Leeds Council declassifying a whole bunch of C Roads in the main built up area of the city. All the C roads seem to be out in rural/village areas with nothing much inside the Ring Roads. Not sure what numbers they would be.
- Bradford: There's a whole bunch of roads labelled as the "C111", but don't form one logical route, rather several. Could be an error in the data, their code for "we don't know this number" or something else. I've organised them into a motley group of local routes (in my mind at least!).
- Rotherham, Sheffield, Hull. Traces added to maps, working through adding pages next.

I've tried to create a speadsheet of what numbers have been used where in the old West Riding - I'll report back when/if I make sense of it. Elsewhere:

- North Lincs: The council gave me a link showing me what C roads they had, but no numbers. However, there were some numbers in a list, some spotted on road signs (as seen on Roads.org.uk), and some actually appeared on FindMyStreet/NSG. A few more roads crossed from Lincolnshire, keeping their numbers. Finally, in the original FoI there was a table listing all the A B and C roads, and their distances. From all of this I was able to gradually piece things together, and matched all the roads up to a number... I'm 99% sure of what I've done being correct!
- Lincolnshire - Their network is HUGE, but I've traced everything west of the A46 and A15 in order to match up stuff on the border. It'll be a gradual project.
- Leicestershire, Warwickshire - I'll get around to them eventually! Plus I have my eyes on Nottingham, Rutland, and Derby/shire. Will do another batch of FoIs once I've got the backlog down.

Oh, and as for the former Cumbria, it seems like Cumberland and the other council with a long name have basically copied their bits of the interactive map over to their respective websites.

[Steven]

Oh, and as for the former Cumbria, it seems like Cumberland and the other council with a long name have basically copied their bits of the interactive map over to their respective websites.

That's probably really sensible for young authorities - just take what's there and look at it again later if they feel like it.

[ravenbluemoon]

Some more info on boundary changes - I'm working through the Class IIIs in Durham, and it looks like all the roads south of the River Tees (the old border with N.R. of Yorkshire) have been allocated C160-C171. Newer roads seem to be in the C180+ range, so I suspect the numbering system for both Durham and North Yorkshire were done pre-1974. Once I get the East Yorkshire numbers (still waiting) it should make more sense with our theory on some of the routes they took from the old West and East Ridings.

Darlington, as I knew, took on some of Durham's numbers when they split in the late 90s. Not sure about Sunderland and Gateshead as it looks like they did a spot of renumbering, to C5xx and C3xx respectively. Cleveland pretty much went and did their own thing too. That might explain some missing numbers in the Durham system, though I've still got a fair few to locate still.

[ravenbluemoon]

Just as a follow on from discussion elsewhere - with regards to us not having road lists from some authorities - it isn't absolutely necessary to chuck a fresh FoI request at them. I had a few minutes last night where I went through some of the missing authorities on the Great C Road Hunt Wiki page. I stuck something along the lines of "<authority name> adopted roads" into my search engine of choice, and although some came up with no useful info, I was able to update the data on some authorities (links on the Wiki page):

- Wiltshire: Original link was dead, but managed to go through the council website, and they have downloadable lists - a PDF of all streets, sorted by road number - C roads included.
- Suffolk: PDF listings by District, and full spreadsheet with C road numbers on council website
- Oxfordshire: They have one of those interactive map thingys, it shows the C road numbers (5 digit!) but as all the classified roads are highlighted in brown, it's a case of hunting them down one by one.

So it is possible to find some listings without going on the FoI route, and for these councils you'd probably wait 30 days just for them to refuse the request on the basis that the data is publicly available. It's worth doing a bit of independent research first

[Chris Bertram]

Birmingham city council has a downloadable list of its classified roads, but while they list the Class III roads, they're described as "Un-numbered classified" and indeed are listed with no number. If they do have internal numbers for them, they're not letting on.

[ravenbluemoon]

Yes, same as your neighbours in Solihull. I suspect the West Midlands authorities have a common numbering system so was curious to see if Solihull matched up with the Coventry ones I've done.

Birmingham Council does get a huge thumbs up from me though as they have an online repository of technical drawings for things like traffic islands and the like. Kept me fascinated for ages!

[Steven]

I suspect the West Midlands authorities have a common numbering system so was curious to see if Solihull matched up with the Coventry ones I've done.

The Warwickshire ones may do, but the Staffordshire ones don't - for example, Wolverhampton uses U99-121, Walsall uses C1000, C2000, C3000 etc.

[Euan]

I've noticed that the status of various authorities in Wales has recently been added to the Great C Road Hunt progress page on the wiki and I am pleased to say that Freedom of Information requests that I had previously sent to Conwy, Denbighshire and Flintshire councils have yielded some helpful information:
Conwy: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/ ... ng-2336565
Denbighshire: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/ ... ng-2306028
Flintshire: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/ ... ng-2367287

The Conwy numbers are all eight (!) digits long, however they all begin with C466_____. They seem to have used the USRNs to number each segment of class III road that they maintain and as a result there is a greater number of "separate" routes than one might expect for a medium-sized authority.

I have also had a look at the Denbighshire and Flintshire numbers which appear to conform well with the historic boundaries of Denbighshire and Flintshire. If you look at the Wrexham list that is already on the wiki you may notice that C145-C164 are all within The Maelor area which is the detached component of historic Flintshire. These numbers fit in neatly with those within the modern Flintshire authority which appear to number no higher than C142. Meanwhile the rest of the Wrexham numbers (within historic Denbighshire) are all C201+ and fit in reasonably well with the numbers in the modern Denbighshire authority. The apparent duplication of some C2xx numbers in the Corwen area could be explained by the fact that these numbers are within what used to be Merionethshire, so the iterations found in the Wrexham area are likely to be the "genuine" Denbighshire numbers. Note as well that parts of historic Denbighshire are now within Conwy and Powys which have established road numbering schemes of their own, so there will still be considerable gaps found in the combined numbering of Denbighshire CC and Wrexham CBC.

I have managed to find some further information from other authorities in Wales which could be of some use. It turns out that as well as James Carter's round of FoI requests for public road lists from 2015 a few more were sent to some Welsh authorities more recently with a bit more success in a couple of cases from our perspective:
Gwynedd: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/ ... ng-1591494 - I know the status of the request is "long overdue", but it seems to be down to the requester not updating the status of the request rather than the council not responding to it. Accessing and decompressing the three folders will reveal a grand total of 64 PDF documents for each of the communities within Gwynedd which contain C roads, numbers and grid references for start/end points. It would be a big task to go through each and every file, but the information is there.
Pembrokeshire: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/ ... ng-1596997 - the previous FoI request brought back a list with numbers without descriptions, however this one does contain descriptions. Note also that Pembrokeshire has an interactive map with road numbers on their website: https://www.pembrokeshire.gov.uk/map-da ... brokeshire
I have also come across this document: https://www.torfaen.gov.uk/en/Related-D ... 9-2025.pdf - published by Torfaen CBC regarding management of highway assets. Although not a conventional list of roads, about halfway through the document are tables which refer to "R" roads which appear to be the way class III routes are identified within historic Monmouthshire as can be seen elsewhere with the Newport numbers and the few that we already know about in the Monmouthshire CC area. There are quite a lot of "R" numbers referred to in the document, so it is likely that most if not all of the class III routes are referenced somewhere.

[ravenbluemoon]

Nice work! It was me that updated it, as I was curious as to why our coverage of Wales was looking a little sparse - I thought it might have been different legislation for FoIs or something. I went through James's old requests to see what we had already.

It's always fascinating trying to work out the origins of the numbering, a knowledge of old county boundaries is useful but I know very little about the old counties that way. I've been doing similar for old Yorkshire Ridings, Cleveland and H*mberside etc. I might try and create a page on the numbering system there as it's quite interesting.

I have also come across this document: https://www.torfaen.gov.uk/en/Related-D ... 9-2025.pdf - published by Torfaen CBC regarding management of highway assets. Although not a conventional list of roads, about halfway through the document are tables which refer to "R" roads which appear to be the way class III routes are identified within historic Monmouthshire as can be seen elsewhere with the Newport numbers and the few that we already know about in the Monmouthshire CC area. There are quite a lot of "R" numbers referred to in the document, so it is likely that most if not all of the class III routes are referenced somewhere.

Yes, that seems to be a Monmouthshire thing. I was stupidly racking my brains trying to work out if an "R" road stood for something in Welsh(!), but Monmouthshire seems the least likely to do that being one of the more Anglophone areas.

[Steven]

It's always fascinating trying to work out the origins of the numbering, a knowledge of old county boundaries is useful but I know very little about the old counties that way. I've been doing similar for old Yorkshire Ridings, Cleveland and H*mberside etc. I might try and create a page on the numbering system there as it's quite interesting.

The difficulty is that here you're all talking about the old LGA1888 Administrative Counties (aka council areas) - which as with those of today were very much not static and moved quite dramatically over time.

The Historic Counties layer on SABRE Maps is useful as the County Councils as created in 1888 were closer to the historic counties than the current set of top-tier authorities, but the obvious demonstration of difference is the 1888-1965 London County Council which did not relate to any historic county.

Then the classic error is not realising that the 1888-1974 County Councils did not cover County Boroughs, so the large towns and cities administered their own road networks and would have had their own numbering anyway - though that doesn't mean they didn't co-operate with neighbouring authorities. And the constant boundary changes between County Councils and County Borough Councils also make this sort of thing incredibly challenging.

For example, the West Riding had an 1888-1974 County Council, but it didn't cover the entire Riding - so any numbering scheme set up by the former West Riding County Council would not have covered Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield etc. - but then on top of that lot the old County Borough (and County Council...) boundaries changed over time too, so somewhere that in 1973 was in, say, Sheffield CB might well have been administered by West Riding CC in 1946. For example, in 1957 Leeds CB took over the administration of places like Whinmoor and Manston from West Yorkshire CC, and may or may not have re-numbered any Class III roads in their "new" area.

Then on top of that all the LGA1888 local authorities were abolished in 1974, and replaced with brand new LGA1974 local authorities, that may or may not have had similar names, but IIRC only two like-named authorities had the same boundaries on 31 March 1974 and 1 April 1974 - Liverpool CB/MB and Wolverhampton CB/MB. Received wisdom has that there was a whole collection of boundary changes, but that's unfortunately completely false.

And then there's all the changes since then - some minor, some major.