From Penychen to Wessex – why Britain’s lost place names could soon return
Imagine a northern restaurant that specialises in regional dishes. But, in a bid to modernise, the chef serves Merseyside hotpot, Cumbrian sausage and Yorkshire & Humber puddings.
Or a seaside kiosk that sells sticks of Blackpool Unitary Authority rock and cockles from the civil parish of Morecambe in the City of Lancaster.
Ridiculous, right? But in the nomenclatural stitch-up that is the modern map of Britain, all of the above reflect what wonks in Westminster (formerly known as Middlesex) have done to the places we live during the past century or so.
My typing fingers wavered as I wrote the last four words. Because the problem with UK place names is: the planners and politicians have been at it for what feels like ever. Think of Northumbria, Hexhamshire and Wessex, or Winchcombeshire, Devonshire and Penychen, wiped off the map and, in some cases, from the collective memory long before.
Organisations like the Association of British Counties (ABC), Campaign for Historic Counties, Friends of Real Lancashire (FORL) and the British Counties Campaign (BCC) want the names of the so-called ceremonial counties to be officially restored.
They see 1974 as a watershed. In that dark year, Herefordshire, Rutland and Worcestershire fell off the map, along with Cumberland and Westmorland. New administrative entities were invented, including Avon, Cleveland, Hereford and Worcester and Humberside. Tyne and Wear became the name for the urban blob around Newcastle. New districts were coined, including Tynedale, Purbeck and West Somerset.
Ancient frontiers became dotted lines. Lancashire lost its cities, Liverpool and Manchester, as well as the Furness and Cartmel peninsulas in the south of the Lake District. Millions of Lancastrians were told that henceforth they resided in Merseyside or Greater Manchester.
The BCC’s website states: “The most common myth and probably the source of most confusion are the events of 1974, which came into effect following the Local Government Act 1972. The fact is, no changes were made whatsoever to the historic counties. There were, however, significant changes to local government.”
The irony here is that the campaigning organisations simultaneously claim the name changes weren’t official but that they want the old names officially restored. They enjoy wide support, including among politicians. The president of the FORL is Andrew Gwynne, MP (Lab) for Denton and Reddish. The BCC says 28 MPs currently support its position, with Crawley MP (Con) Henry Smith its current “Champion”.
According to the Historic Counties Trust charity, there are 92 counties in the UK (39 in England, six in Ireland, 13 in Wales and 34 in Scotland). When it comes to actual local government, in England alone there’s a confusing patchwork of 317 council areas, made up of 36 metropolitan districts, 21 county councils, 62 unitary authorities, 32 London boroughs and 164 District councils – plus the City of London and Isles of Scilly. There are also more than 10,000 parish councils; Northampton Town Council, the largest, serves 130,000 people.
Since 1996, Scotland has had 32 “Council Areas”. Wales has 22 “unitary county and county borough councils”. Northern Ireland has 11 “local government districts”.
Running a country is difficult, and multi-tiered, devolved local governance is probably a necessity, as is routine tweaking to reflect changing populations, community needs and taxation. But does it have to be such a dog’s dinner when it comes to confirming where people come from?
“In truth, it’s really not complicated at all,” says Peter Boyce, chairman of the ABC. “To the extent that ABC has a campaigning aim, it is to see an end to the use of the word ‘county’ and the phrase ‘county council’ as they relate to administrative areas, and an end to the misuse of historic county names for administrative areas which are radically different from the historic county whose name they bear – as in, for example, Lancashire County Council.
“We want to see administrative areas clearly separated from the historic counties in the minds of the public and the media.”
As it stands, each new generation becomes accustomed to a new name for their home. The aforementioned 1974 county coinings were abolished in the 1990s. Tyne & Wear only lasted till 1986. Tynedale was killed off in 2009. Purbeck and West Somerset have gone too. But the names will linger on in the memories of those raised there.
I was born in a village called Burtonwood in Lancashire. When I was eight years old, it was nudged into Warrington, which was simultaneously elbowed into Cheshire. My birth certificate says “County of Lancaster”. A mile from my house, post-1974, was a fiction known as Merseyside – which also hoovered up nearby St Helens, a mining town far more closely tied to the likes of Wigan and Leigh (which were dumped into Greater Manchester). Apparently, for a time, a civil servant decided I should live in a place called Selnec – an ugly acronym for south east Lancashire and north east Cheshire. Mercifully I can’t remember.
Bizarrely, Merseyside and Greater Manchester are now ceremonial counties as their county councils were dismantled just 11 years later.
The fiddling continues: Cumbria County Council was abolished on April Fool’s Day of this year, replaced by Cumberland Council and Westmorland and Furness Council. Are the traditionalists happy?
“It is a mix of good and bad news from [our] perspective,” says the Association of British Counties. “Cumbria County Council has consistently fostered the identity of Cumbria as a county, strongly to the detriment of the identities of the historic counties in its area, which it has made no effort to acknowledge or promote. So long. We won’t miss you.
“Less positive are the proposed names chosen for the new councils. The area of the new Cumberland Council does at least lie entirely within the real Cumberland and it does contain 90 per cent of the population of the historic county. However, 23 per cent of the historic county, including Penrith and Alston, does not lie in the Cumberland Council area. ‘West Cumberland Council’ would be more appropriate.”
And so Cumbria becomes yet another ceremonial county. It’s also a police constabulary and a fire and rescue service, and the name of a 71-mile footpath, the Cumbria Way. There’s talk of a future combined authority to be headed by an elected Mayor of Cumbria. So Cumberlanders and Westmorlanders won’t be blowing out the candles on celebratory Kendal mint cakes just yet.
Place names matter to people. From AE Housman’s A Shropshire Lad (1919) to Frank Muir’s A Kentish Lad (1997) to ITV’s The Real Housewives of Cheshire (2015), location is integral to the stories being told. Old names freight romance and tell stories. Brecknockshire, for example (subsumed into Powys in 1972), evokes the old kingdom of Brycheiniog.
More than nostalgia is at stake. Old place names preserve vocabulary and languages all but disappeared, from Latin to Norman to Old English. They allude to wildlife and birds, including forgotten and missing species. They provide clues as to who or what once stood in a place, through suffixes like ‘ton’ (farm or hamlet) and ‘ham’ (village or estate), and county names like Essex (East Saxons) and Rutland (“Rota’s land” or “place of cattle”).
Above all they lock in a deep sense of community and belonging. It’s not about whether one prefers to live in London or Middlesex, Merseyside or Lancashire, Cumberland or Cumbria. But if the name keeps changing and if the thing the names refer to keeps changing, we lose a connection with our ancestors and with one another.
Five places with the strongest regional identity
Lancashire
Formerly the UK’s most populous county after London, Lancashire was humiliated by the redrawing of borders. Older Mancunians will still say they are from Lancashire, while Liverpudlians rarely admit to any connection with “woollybacks”. The Ribble Valley, being agricultural and beyond the reaches of urbanisation, still feels like Old Lancs. For pies and hotpots as well as Nouveaux Lancashire cuisine, you could do a lot worse than head to Clitheroe – the UK’s gastropub capital.
Rutland
Despite attempts to draw this ancient county into Leicestershire and make it subservient to pork pie-making Melton, Rutland is very much its own place. Locals are proud to inform visitors that it is the smallest ceremonial county outside the City of London (which, anyway, is an altogether different beast). The county town, Oakham, has a village-sized population of around 12,000, but Rutland’s reservoir is the largest in England. As declared on local tea-towels and souvenir mugs, “Multum in parvo”: “Much in little”.
Essex
Caricatured, derided, wilfully misunderstood and assailed by north-east London’s suburban sprawl, Essex is nonetheless very sure of itself. It has a distinctive accent. It has a superb forest at Epping. It contains, at Colchester, Roman Camulodunum – arguably the first “capital” in the British Isles and even the first city. Southend, Essex’s legendary seaside resort, has the third longest pier in the world. St Andrews in Greenstead is possibly the oldest wooden church in the world. But, above all, Essex, with its village greens, timber-framed houses and gentle undulations, has a settled old-country feeling not found anywhere else.
Northumbria
The Earldom of Northumberland, established in the 14th century, marked the end of Northumbria as a political entity. But the name is fondly commemorated in the local university and police force. Any mention of the Lindisfarne Gospels or the Venerable Bede immediately prompts lyrical flights back to the region’s golden age. At its peak, Northumbria (meaning North of the Humber) was all of northern England; today it is a useful umbrella term for all those parts of the north-east that are technically metropolitan boroughs and unitary authorities, but where locals like the idea of belonging to something grander.
Cornwall
Amazingly, given the overtourism and second-home onslaught, Cornwall (or Kernow) has retained a clear regional identity. Its location on a sea-fringed limb, distance from London, lack of neighbours and topographical and human-geographical differences with Devon all help Cornish people to think of themselves as a little bit special. Long may it continue.